Mary Cappello's Lecture Sees the Poet as a High-Quality Lecturer

Mary Cappello's Lecture—an extension of a lecture given in 2017, now in book form from Transit Books—"proposes the eponymous art form as a cousin to other flexible genres, such as the note, the aphorism, and, especially, the essay." Andrew Schenker reviews the work for Los Angeles Review of Books, going on to ask, "But what qualifies as a great lecture? What might a great lecture look and sound like?" Perhaps the answer can be found in Charles Bernstein:

…Although Cappello is a little stingy with specifics — at one point, she provides a tantalizing list of contemporary “essay-lecturers,” including Anna Deavere Smith, Randy Rainbow, and Tracie Morris, but then fails to discuss any of their works — she does provide a telling example late in the book that helps define more closely what she has in mind. Searching the University of Pennsylvania’s website, she comes across a series of videos called “60-Second Lectures,” where different faculty members are given one minute to profess on the topic of their expertise. As Cappello soon discovers, none of the professors make imaginative use of the time constraint, instead frantically trying to pack as much information into the 60-second limit as possible. The only exception proves to be the experimental poet Charles Bernstein, who explicitly acknowledges the framework, “occup[ying] time and discover[ing] the amplitude of one minute of utterance or one minute of life,” and offering the viewer a list poem (another close relative of the lecture properly conceived) that is filled with a vivifying negation and a final stirring affirmation. His recitation, in part, reads:

My lecture is called “What Makes a Poem a Poem.”

I’m gonna set my timer.

[He adjusts his watch.]

It’s not rhyming words at the end of a line.

It’s not form.

It’s not structure.

It’s not loneliness.

It’s not location.

It’s not the sky.

[…]

It’s not the words.

It’s not the things between the words.

It’s not the meter.

It’s not the meter —

[Here the timer on his watch goes off, and he pauses to listen for several long seconds.]

It’s the timing.

Bernstein’s poem/lecture/essay not only plays imaginatively with the form, it offers a direct rebuke to the other lecturers in the series and, by extension, to anyone who would use the form as a means of propping up their alleged expertise, reducing the listener, in Cappello’s memorable image, to “a wall of sorts to which wet strands of spaghetti, once flung, might or might not stick.” As Cappello makes clear, this dismissal of authority is particularly important in light of recent political developments…

Find the full review at LARB.