". . . the allure of the spontaneous and the personal is cut here by the fact of wordness”

Charles Bernstein's essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men” was written in 1976, and originally published in a Symposium entitled “Politics of the Referent” mediated by Steve McCaffery and published in Open Letter 3:1 (Toronto, 1977), It is also collected in Content's Dream, essays 1975-1984. It's a great piece of writing on form in poetry and the false use and touting of the natural and voice, as signs of true poetry. Bernstein's examples, which challenge a certain type of “false consciousness” are Ron Silliman, Bernadette Mayer and Frank O'Hara. All three of which write/wrote personal poetry, but with an important consciousness of the fact and methods of writing, and an acknowledgement of the artificiality they use. Here are some particularly good pieces from the essay, which is in 18 numbered paragraphs or “pensees”:

2. Ron Silliman has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape. His works are composed very explicitly under various conditions, presenting a variety of possible worlds, possible language formations. Such poetry emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact,---monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, willful.

12. . . . What I want to call attention to is that there is no natural writing style; that the preference for its supposed manifestations is simply a preference for a particular look to poetry & often a particular vocabulary (usually perceived as personal themes); that this preference (essentially a procedural decision to work within a certain domain sanctified into a rite of poetry) actually obscures the understanding of the work which appears to be its honored bases; & especially that the cant of “make it personal” & let it flow” are avoidances-by mystification---of some very compelling problems that swirl around truthtelling, confession, bad faith, false self, authenticity, virtue, etc.

18. . . . work like Silliman's explicitly acknowledges these conditions of poetry, language, by explicitly intending vocabulary, syntax, shape, etc.; an acknowledgement which is the actual prerequisite of authenticity, of good faith. The allure of the spontaneous & personal is cut here by the fact of wordness: reproducing not so much the look of the natural as the conditions of nature-autonomy, self-sufficiency. In this light, a work like Mayer's Memory can be seen to be significant not an account of its journal-like look alone but also on account of its completely intended, complex, artifactual style. Heavy, dense, embedded. “The essential thing is to build a world.” Energy & emotion, spontaneity, vocabulary, shape-all are elements of that building. It is natural that there are modes but there is no natural mode.