Sherry Chandler

A Challenge

“Poetry should be at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television.”

—Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard, 1992)

By which Bernstein was not saying that poetry should compete to be as entertaining as “American Idol.” To use “entertaining” and “American Idol” in the same sentence galls me, but there will always be an audience for schmaltz.

And there will always be an audience that will call schmaltz poetry.

But Bernstein was speaking of the skewed “reality” that television conveys to us, to the extent that

our images of each other, and of other cultures, seem to go from ignorance to sinsterly deluded fabrication, almost without any middle ground. Poetry can, even if it often doesn’t, throw a wedge into this engineered process of social derealization: find a middle ground of care in particulars, in the truth of details… But to achieve this end, poets would have to be as alert to the presents of their cultures as the designers of TV ads; which means a willingness to engage in guerrilla warfare with the official images of the world that are being shoved down our throats…

To this end, said Bernstein in 1992, we must invent new tools and forms for poetry, not as “progress” but as a reflection of changing reality.

Much has changed since 1992 but much has remained the same. As for the relationship between reality and television, I refer you to our (relatively) recent decision to invade Iraq. The internet has risen. Has it actually changed anything?

I don’t know.

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Charles Bernstein

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