Sherry Chandler » Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein
From Charles Bernstein, “Optimism and Critical Excess” in A Poetics (Harvard, 1992):
I’m not suggesting that poetics, or poetry, is a chaotic system; though if I did, who among you would launch the first inflated balloon? We’ve flown about as high as we can and the air is thinning out. I feel descent is in the works, if you count your cards right.
Chaotic phenomena are not susceptible to rational analysis: they are unpredictable because they are nonlinear. This instability is the result of their “sensitivity to initial conditions”.
I want to suggest that poetry, insofar as it charts the turbulent phenomenon known as human being, must reflect this in the nonperiodic flow of its “chaotic” prosody: clock time (regularized metrics) will not do, nor will structures that aspire to formal or structural (rationalized) stability or geometric conceptions of shape. As the stress of the world impinges on form, the uniformity of the flow rate is disrupted by interference patterns caused by bifurcation and oscillation.
Chaos in the heart can be dangerous—yet the stressed heart beat, in which fibrillation makes rhythm unpredictable, is an image of the poetic line. Studies show that a chaotic electroencephalograph is a sign of healthy brain functioning, while a regular EEG reflects the pathological order of an epileptic fit.
Poetry in its most ecstatic manifestation is a nonlinear dynamic system. The vortex that poetics spins is a bubbling desynchronization chamber.
But poetic chaos, like the chaotic phenomena mapped by recent physics, is not absolute but constrained. It is controllable not in its flowering but in the progression toward chaos and the regression from it. We can study this progression into chaos or move backward out of it: perhaps this is the narrative of a poem that poetics can address.
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2 Comments
1. Sam L. Martin replies at 9th November 2007, 12:22 pm :
Perhaps Bernstein is simply elaborating upon the old idea that “poetry is form approaching chaos (and prose is chaos approaching form).
2. sherry replies at 13th November 2007, 5:28 pm :
If you are saying, Sam, that Bernstein is complicating, possibly even obfuscating, a simple concept, I might be inclined to agree.
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