Runa Bandyopadhyay Interviews Charles Bernstein

At Kitaab, poet, critic, and translator Runa Bandyopadhyay interviews Charles Bernstein, who explains the term pataquericalism, "taken during the creation of the anthology, Bridgeable Lines: an Anthology of Borderless World Poetry in Bengali." The idea "is similar to the 'Notun Kobita (New Poetry)' movement of Bengal, which was started in the ’70s by a group of Kaurab poets," says Bandyopadhyay.

An excerpt:

Runa: Is Poetry more than resonance of ideas in the mind? If so, if more, what is it? Is poetry to be understood?

Charles: Understanding is to stand under whereas I want to be inside. Clarity, coherence, and expression are often shibboleths that stand in the way of the poetic transformation of those values: clarity as a means of imposing a rationalized order and standing in the way of a (let’s call it) pluriversity. Coherence, then, is a form of repressing what David Antin calls “radical coherence” by imposing plot lines in place of transformative narrative. Expression doesn’t have to mean rejecting anything other than conventional literary styles as significant. Blake speaks of “Mental Fight” and this fight is aesthetic, to not accept that conventional poetry styles have a monopoly on meaning of emotion. I was going to title my forthcoming collection (which I called Near/Miss) Against Feeling, in the sense of up against, touching.

Runa: Untraditional poetry or the poetry outside the heritage – what, in your view, will be the mark of new poetic language?

Charles: The history of poetry is pockmarked by innovation and invention, by the struggle for the new not as novelty but as necessity. Over the past two centuries, this pataquerical imperative has become Western poetry’s activist center (my word for the combination of inquiry and querulousness and Alfred Jarry’s pataphyics, the poetics of exception). We never know what the new is until we encounter it in a “now” where it seems as strange, yet intensely familiar, as the dawn.

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