The Course: Acoustic Trampoline Makes Possibility Spreading
Charles Bernstein once wrote that the conversation between Ted Greenwald and him is always like “doing cha-cha on the point of a fountain pen.” Now this rhythmic and dynamic dance takes its form in their latest book, The Course. The Course collects poems by Greenwald and Bernstein written from 2015 to 2016, just six days before Greenwald’s death. As Bernstein later writes about their collaboration in his memorial for Greenwald, they “exchanged lines back and forth over email” and could not stop it “as if it were a trampoline, tripping out into the eternity of the company, from dark to delight.” Early in 2016, some of their collaborative poems were published in Short Course by Chax Press, and now in 2020 the whole collection of their collaboration comes in print by Roof Books. Reading The Course, I discover that, as the title suggests, the book shows the route of their poetic inquiry melding Greenwald’s swan song into Bernstein’s poetics. The aesthetics and poetics in The Course are largely sound-based, conceptual and minimal, abounding with profound philosophical wisdom and secular helplessness. The vernacular language, the metamorphosis of words, and the amorphous form of the poems stretch the tension between written language and the vernacular. The book is a byword of hilarious and contemplative language writing, which resonates with Taoism in its deconstruction of written language and the use of negativity, and endeavors to break the limitation of dominant society by provoking freedom and possibility in both writing and reading.
I find the sound-based poetics in The Course sublime, which shows modernist characteristics. In Pitch of Poetry, Bernstein states: “Textuality, sounded, evokes orality” (32).[1] By this, Bernstein points out the importance of sound in textuality as well as the inseparability of textuality and performance in poetry. Greenwald once claimed that the repetition of sound is an echo, a chord, and a sublime in poetry. The repetition of sound in poetry seems to be meaningless; however, it shows the stubbornness of the orality of textuality. I believe that repetition can be regarded as a blank, which shows a form of utterance or musicality endeavoring to express what cannot be spoken or told; sound repetitions, or echoes, actually estrange the meanings or connotations of words, and multiply them. It doesn’t follow the traditional rules of sense-making, but evokes new rules and senses. What is endured or sustained in repetition is not important, but what is interrupted or varied in repetition is important. In this sense, the repetition of sound in poetry is simultaneously sublime and modernist. The Course is a chord of the sublime repetition of sounds bounding off each other to evoke orality. The poem “Sen Sen Cha Cha” is a poem on sound. It starts with water sound: “Water sound / Jumps in / Mid sandals”, and then conjures up wind sound “Rippling under the hood / As a slipcase rewards / Looking elsewise.” Human sound follows nature sound and is juxtaposed with it:
Relax throat
Around sound
A word means
Just about nothing
As if on a stroll
So many as ifs
(57)[2]
In its fragmentation and unique spacing between stanzas, the poem presents the sounds which both give meanings and demolish meanings. Sound makes meanings in word, but paradoxically meanings also multiply and obscure in sound, since there are “so many as ifs.” “A stroll” can be regarded as a “textuality.” I recall Bernstein pointing out that textuality “is a palimpsest” with layers of speech and language underneath, and further, that “the alphabet is frozen sound” (32).[3] Obviously, Greenwald and Bernstein intend to break the frozen sound of the alphabet. The poem continues later: “A new word a day / A new day / Word for word / Inebriate of sound / Debauching dawn / In search of night” (59).[4] John Cage’s “Every Day is a Beautiful Day” in Silence is present here in the quest for a new sound writing. The ending of this poem is “Stuff, stuff, stuff / Stuff, stuff, stuff / Stuff, stuff, stuff” (60),[5] which drastically evokes the orality of readers by emphasizing the acoustic material of language. “Stuff” can be understood as “things” or “materiality.” The poem takes me back to the 1950s when Sen Sen breath candy and cha cha dance were either popular or developed, but it also draws me back to the present at the same time, somehow. It is as if there were a Sen Sen mint on my throat and with its refreshment, in the musicality of sound, and between the unique, refreshing line break, I discover that the textuality seems to do a cha cha dance performance. This poem can be regarded as the estrangement of a commercial, but more importantly, it demonstrates the malleability of sound and the multi-layers of language, evoking my epiphany of the sound materiality in poetry. In many poems within this book, my orality as a reader is evoked in both blunt and oblique vernacular language and the estrangement of commercials, junk mails, memos, and cliché etc., which abounds with witty, humorous, provocative and airy interrogations of mindset or rules.
The sound-based spelling of the language is accentual and performative. Some particular letters of the words are capitalized or repeated many times. In other words, the performance of the poem is revealed by the treat-sound-directly spelling. The performative forms provide the word with its particularity, and creates playful, ironic, cynical, hilarious, sarcastic, or sometimes reversal effects. For instance, “This / cat / Don’t / Mooooove” (318),[6] in “Sort of Jokingly”, indicates the stillness of the cat in a performative and dynamic way, making the cat “still” at the immediacy of dynamics. Many examples show that sound is a malleable metal or a bouncing trampoline in this book to make the immediacy, stress, intonation, and accent present. As a result, the textuality of the poem conjures the presence of performers, and both the poets and the readers involved in the chorus of poetry to make meanings alive in a communicative way. In The Sound of Poetry, Craig Dworkin states that the performances in electronic poetry reading archives make individual performers’ cultural positions audible in their accents, and their aspects of voice mark class, geography, gender and race (Perloff et al. 2009, 13).[7] The performative sound writings largely show these absent aspects in written language. James Shivers argues that in Bernstein’s poetry, “ideas are melded with the sound of their letters” and “not ideas, but sounds place Bernstein’s poetics in a non-idealist tradition” (Shivers 2019, 208).[8] The sound poetics of Bernstein and Greenwald, to a large extent, scorns its limitation of written language –– I see their poetics reducing this limitation.
The deconstruction of written language in sounds echoes with traditional Taoism. Tao Te Ching says: “The greatest skill seems like clumsiness, / The greatest eloquence like stuttering” (Lao 1997, 97).[9] These lines, I argue, both indicate the transformation between “the greatest” and “stuttering” but also indicates the deconstruction of language, which is seen as the construction of social politics in Taoism. Taoism believes that the system of language is the construction of politics, which are the two sides of one thing; the essence of Taoism is to break the hierarchy in language to achieve freedom in both mind and society (Yip Daoism Aesthetics and Western Culture 2002, 1-2).[10] The “clumsiness” and the “stuttering” of sounds in the book defy the dominant and fixed ideas in written language, which resonate with Taoism in this pivotal point. I think that the sound poetics in The Course deeply provoke new possibility and multiplicity in writing. Sound in its repetition and variation makes the differences and the possibilities of meanings spreading in a sublime way.
The radicalness of the poetry in this book also lies in the use of negativity. Negativity is endowed with a returning and reversed meaning, communicating their liberatory potential. “Perfect Air” is a great example of a poem exploring possibility and freedom:
Mustard summer sand
But said nothing
(Nothing says nothing
As good as hitting
A blank wall at light speed)
As Fi
Saying as
Fi as a(12)[11]
The break between the two stanzas displays the fragmentation of meanings of nothing in its reversed way: it is easy to understand that keeping silent can be seen as a hitting, a fighting, in “nothing says nothing / as good as hitting”, but hitting “a blank wall” seems useless and insane. However, hitting a blank wall “at light speed” is also endowed with sharp futurist defiance, which is followed by “as fi / saying as fi.” With the reverse spelling of “as if”, the meaning of nothing as nada is twisted and reversed. It ends with “Round about it / As available / No answer / On this line” to stress the reversal negativity. “Chopped Liver” is another startling example showing the transformation between nothingness and being:
Selfless itself
Soulless in soul
Soundless with soundPenniless in penury
Careless as care
Hopeless in hope
Fearless for fearPrecarious in premonition
Nothing but new born
Shoulda phone
No one home(274)[12]
The prepositions, such as “in” and “with” between the two opposites, such as the soulless and the soul, the hopeless and the hope, and the soundless and the sound demonstrate the dynamic transformation and the integration of the negativity with the positivity. It echoes with Taoism’s concept of nothingness, which is the progenitor of all things in the world. Lao Tzu says: “The Way is like an empty vessel /…It is bottomless: the very progenitor of all things in the world. / In it all sharpness is blunted, / All tangles united, / All glare tempered, / All dust smoothed.” (9).[13] The negativity also resonates with Emily Dickinson’s “Don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”, and Bernstein says that this line has long been his motto (Pitch of Poetry 2016, 278).[14] The whole poem is twisted and transformative in meanings, juxtaposing the philosophical meditations on life and poetry with the bubbles and squeaks of contemporary everyday life to challenge the limits of language. The book ends with negativity: “In the middle of the fight / Frantically punching . . ./ Not only never saw it / Never dreamed it, never spoke it / Never thought it ” in “Until the Real Thing Comes Around” (347-348).[15] The negativity here can be regarded as a philosophical interrogation, an irony, and a defiance, which challenges the literary meanings of written language to reach sublime possibilities.
Another important and striking feature of this book, I discovered, is the promotion of an audible and performative reading. Since the poetic language is highly sound-based, the spellings of words in the book don’t abide the current standard written English, but follow a performative and vernacular way, so the poems in the book are better appreciated in an audible reading rather than the traditional way of silent reading. Besides, readers also need to perform each line by filling in the blanks between lines, since the syntax is so differently ordered. It is definitely a different order, on another level, as the poem “Another Level, For Sure” suggests “spiraling in place / jumps over cube / mannerisms a must.” Readers are invited to imagine themselves as having compound eyes while appreciating a cubist painting, since both the lines and words are reversing and swirling. This revolutionary way of reading plays a part together with the political aesthetics of the poetry to achieve new possibilities in both writing and reading that traditional literary reading does not allow. The multi-facets of meanings are shown through the materiality of language in the sound, the spellings, and the metamorphosis. As the poem “Rime & Raison” says, “Rime & Reason @TheCourse 1 hour ago / Join the campaign for #CageFreePoetry” (327),[16] The Course is obviously a brilliant pun, which is a quest for new possibilities in poetry, but also a lesson, exemplifying freedom and possibility in writing and reading. Both Bernstein and Greenwald are enthusiastically engaged in poetry reading, and the audio modern poetry reading by individual poets which Bernstein refers to as “the art of immemorability.” As Bernstein wrote in his memorial for Greenwald: “The Course was not about imminent death; it was a way of making the words we exchanged leap to life” (“Ted Greenwald Memorial”).[17] Bernstein and Greenwald’s sound writing memorizes the immemorable art of language. The Course truly is an amazingly resounding collection, recording disappearing cultural memories, and enlivening the meme of language in the liberatory possibility of language games. As zero degree writing in Roland Barthes’s sense cannot be really zero, and is paradoxical and utopian, so is the freedom in the sound-based poetics of Bernstein and Greenwald. However, their radical endeavors for revolutionary rules and sense-making are indispensable and crucial to the poetry world. To a large extent, they break the frozen sound of the alphabet and offer new possibilities in a liminal space of poetry, just as “Sen Sen Cha Cha” ends in its sublime, with both tears and stubbornness:
Remains insoluble
At the door of
Instinctual abhorrence
Is how treats
Unsigned be have
Kweep offering
Stuff, stuff, stuff
Stuff, stuff, stuff
Stuff, stuff, stuff
(60)[18]
[1] Bernstein, Charles. Pitch of Poetry. (Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 32.
[2] Bernstein, Charles and Greenwald, Ted The Course. (New York: Roof Books, 2020), 57.
[3] Ibid, 32.
[4] Ibid, 59.
[5] Ibid, 60.
[6] Ibid, 318.
[7] Perloff, Marjorie. Dworkin, Craig. eds. The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound. (Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13.
[8] Shivers, James. Charles Bernstein / American Innovator — More Numerous of: A Kinetic Approach. (37 Blue Editions, 2019), Digital book. 208.
[9] Tzu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. (Beijing: Foreign Studies and Research Press, 1997), 97.
[10] Yip, Wai-Lim. Daoism Aesthetics and Western Culture. (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2002), 1-2.
[11] Bernstein, Charles and Greenwald, Ted The Course. (New York: Roof Books, 2020), 12.
[12] Ibid, 274.
[13] Tzu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. (Beijing: Foreign Studies and Research Press, 1997), 9.
[14] Bernstein, Charles. Pitch of Poetry. (Chicago & London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 278.
[15] Bernstein, Charles and Greenwald, Ted The Course. (New York: Roof Books, 2020), 347-348.
[16] Ibid, 327.
[17] Bernstein, Charles, “Ted Greenwald Memorial” Jacket 2, last modified September, 17, 2016 http://jacket2.org/commentary/ted-greenwald-memorial (accessed on March 10, 2020.)
[18] Bernstein, Charles and Greenwald, Ted The Course. (New York: Roof Books, 2020), 60.