Charles Bernstein's All the Whiskey in Heaven reviewed by Stephen Ross
Stephen Ross's essay, titled 'Through Fogged and Fumbling Shallows', reviews Charles Bernstein's selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven (FSG, 2010, 320 pages). It begins with Ezra Pound's 1913 warning against abstraction and the phrase he held up as a bad example, 'dim lands of peace'. Ross points out that the line came from Ford Madox Ford, and he treats Ford's much-maligned phrase as a key to Bernstein, the master of atmospheric doggerel. He shows the fog at work in 'The Measure', from Islets/Irritations (1983), and in 'Shenandoah', from Girly Man (2006), which he regrets finding left out of the selection. He reads it as a travesty of the old shanty, with help from Jerome McGann's phrase 'comical despair'.
Pound then becomes the other pole. Ross places Bernstein's nonsense pastiche 'Azoot D'Puund' beside the mesostics of John Cage and the diastics of Jackson Mac Low, which broke up the Cantos in the 1980s. He follows the medical vocabulary of Bernstein's work, tied to a stretch as a freelance medical writer, and the titles 'Dysraphism' and 'Amblyopia' from The Sophist (1987). Brian Reed's definition of dysraphism, as parts stitched together to see whether a viable poem grows, leads to Bernstein's admiration for Zukofsky's 'Poem beginning "The"' and for John Ashbery's 'contingent consecutiveness'.
From there Ross considers the book as a whole. Bernstein described it as a volume to stand beside The Sophist, and Ross likens it to a toybox, citing Mark Scroggins's label "Tinkertoy poet" and John Ashbery's phrase "vast department store of the imagination" from the back cover, and then to a richly heterodox primer of experimental poetics. It opens with 'Asylum', a 1975 cut-up of Erving Goffman, and moves through 'Standing Target', built from a camp counsellor's reports, the founding of a Language-poetry magazine with Bruce Andrews, and the later grey eminence of the Language poets. He regrets the absence of the libretti and prose, including 'Artifice of Absorption'.
The closing pages note a turn in recent work toward radical clarity, in 'This Line', 'Thank You for Saying Thank You' and 'Report from Liberty Street', whose question is what else art is for. Ross ends with 'Dark City', arguing that the book renews an openness to bad writing's pull. A list of works cited follows, which includes Scroggins's review of the book for The Rumpus.
- Work
- All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems
- Author
- Charles Bernstein
- Publisher
- FSG
Poems in this selection
- The Measure
- Shenandoah
- Azoot D'Puund
- Dysraphism
- Amblyopia
- Asylum
- Standing Target
- This Line
- Report from Liberty Street
- Dark City
Bernstein is many things to many people, and to himself
Stephen Ross, The Wolf, issue 24
Comical despair is well judged.
Stephen Ross, The Wolf, issue 24