‘On Curiosity’ extols the ‘chain of Varga is good with small details, / Help me, words – / you always have.’ connections’ that might lead to ‘a life- summing up people and situations, Reading Varga raised for this lis- time interest’, while warning against settling in with the diagnosis. Her free- tener the dilemma of how we hear the ‘its dubious relative, obsessive interest’. verse thought patterns, when they work, voice in poetry. Poets with a tale to tell Sant here is a great observer. Geared up give the reader enhanced insight into want transferred the effect of their in- with five hypersensitive senses, his mind the daily individuality of existence. Like dividual voice, something the page can filled with the minutiae of perpetual self- Nicholas and Sant, Varga has crossed flatten out. With Sant and Nicholas, it education, he observes the world with sixty, able to speak more forgivingly of is the chosen forms that aid in hearing precision and delight. In the title essay, others and of herself. She may track a their voice. With Varga, the shifts in Sant opens with the view that it is best difficult emotion, as in ‘Enemy’ (‘Em- her attention, the exclamation marks, to trust your own instincts rather than bedded in folds of skin / sunk deep in red the small ironies that might be sincerit- what you are told, to give ‘himself per- tissue / imprinted in bones/ my enemy ies, rely for their impact on knowing mission to think freely for himself, to go lies’) or renew affirmations (‘Like a dog her own speech. Some of the poems are it alone’, only then to conclude with that dozing / waiting for night to / swallow obviously best done in performance, but most amusing and confusing long day’s the hours. / Survival.’) how to learn her timing was sometimes journey into night, asking for directions ‘First Poem’, dated December 30, a difficult ask. There is time yet for her in rural Ireland. 2011, outside the time frame of the col- to notice more ‘small shoots of thought’, How to proceed is a quandary un- lection, explains the compulsion: ‘An old perhaps by trying new forms. g derstood by poets. The creative act is not garden seat, / a new bed of plants / flower- like baggage handling at Essendon ing into the New Year. / Old fears, new fears. Philip Harvey is the Poetry Editor of Airport (Sant has done this). It goes in // Small shoots of thought / sustain me. Eureka Street. fits and starts, usually a start followed by a fit, or nothing at all. Not surprisingly perhaps, he goes on literary pilgrimages; his charmingly haphazard accounts of finding the holy sites in the lives of he- roes like D.H. Lawrence and Elizabeth Making strange Bishop is another reward of this poet’s self-analysis. An instructive introduction to Bernstein’s energetic advocacy Sant comes across as sane and solitary. He escapes total solipsism, being always too much in the world. He is a novice John Hawke phenomenologist. He knows how to be PITCH OF POETRY the observer observed. As with Louise by Charles Bernstein Nicholas, this collection slowly reveals University of Chicago Press (Footprint), $49.95 pb, 352 pp, 9780226332086 secrets in his life that enlarge our appreciation. His mother’s suicide, his restless search for a sense of place, his hen Viktor Shklovsky, in his critic Charles Bernstein, along with philosophical reflection on a broken mar- famous 1917 essay ‘Art as Wittgenstein’s similar explorations of riage, come as illuminating surprises, al- Technique’, asserts that the the manner in which our perception tering how we hear him and understand fundamentalW task of the poetic function of the world is shaped by language. both his predicaments, and our own. is one of ‘making strange’ the reader’s (Bernstein’s undergraduate dissertation, customary perceptions, he is arguing later published as Three Compositions oetry as therapy, poetry as a day- for more than just the avoidance of on Philosophy and Literature [1972], book of recovery, has uses. Susan linguistic cliché. Through the medium linked Wittgenstein’s ‘linguistic turn’ Varga suffered a stroke, which is of poetic form, the accepted conventions to the textual experiments of Gertrude Pwhere her collection Rupture: Poems of our habitualised view of the world Stein.) Yet the political claims made 2012–2015, (UWA Publishing, $22.99 can be defamiliarised: the political for their often wilfully ‘difficult’ poems pb, 95 pp, 9781742589091) starts, in the implications of this approach directly by Bernstein and his associates in the ward. (‘Sounds, words, sentences / influenced Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, burgeoning international field of ‘Lan- disappear like tumbleweed.’) Recon- and in turn underwrite Roland Barthes’s guage’ practitioners have often been structing memory is shared by poets structuralist unmasking of societal contested: as a somewhat perplexed and stroke victims; she pieces together ‘mythologies’. Chinese interviewer puts the question to those parts of the past she knows into The Russian Formalist critics – and Bernstein here, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E verses of varying effect. Like most writ- their counterparts in practice, the avant- is generally regarded as a renegade ers arriving late at poetry, there are hits garde Futurist poets – are frequently cited brand, but in what way is it rebellious?’ and misses. as precursors by the American poet and Or, as the poet Jackson Mac Low once 60 OCTOBER 2016 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW asked: ‘What could be more of a fetish Stein, for her cubistic emphasis on the spokesperson. Answering a 2011 in- or more alienated than slices of language materiality of language (‘for itself, in it- terviewer’s question regarding Rogelio stripped of reference?’ self, and as itself ’): poetry is necessarily, López Cuenca’s slogan ‘Poetry makes These issues are consistently ad- in Shklovsky’s terms, ‘a difficult, rough- nothing happen’, Bernstein argues that: dressed across the essays and interviews ened, impeded language’, and Bernstein ‘There is a direct relation between OWS collected in Pitch of Poetry, a summa- several times approvingly quotes Robert and a poetics that sees the representa- tional critical work that also serves as an Creeley as stating that ‘content is always tion of reality as always at stake when instructive introduction to Bernstein’s an extension of form’. Bernstein also we use poetry’. But where and how energetic advocacy of experimental champions a second-wave of American exactly can this relation be located? poetries over several decades. Unlike modernists who emerged in the 1930s, Bernstein’s essay on the foundation Stein, who, as Bernstein puts it, ‘refused especially the ‘Objectivist’ poet, Louis to explain the inventiveness of uncon- Zukofsky, whose extreme emphasis on Bernstein’s critical ventional art in conventional prose’, ‘sound sense’ led him to homophonic Bernstein’s critical approach – honed translations which challenge referential approach – honed through through years of pedagogy – is a model comprehension. The postwar poets of years of pedagogy – is of compositional clarity. An informative Donald M. Allen’s New American Poetry a model of compositional survey essay, ‘The Expanded Field of 1945–1960 (1960) are re-evaluated, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’, describes the mainly for the degree to which they clarity ‘constellation of activity’ that Bernstein break from Poundian compositional and Bruce Andrews initiated through principles based on ‘montage’ (which of ‘Language’ poetries describes how their establishment of editorial and Pound called the ‘ideogramic method’). many of these poets emerged from the organisational poetry networks from the Bernstein instead favours ‘a more open- political movements of the 1960s (Ab- late 1970s. A group of poets, roughly ended collage’, which is first identified bie Hoffmann and the Yippies are cited corresponding in age to Australia’s in Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’, in the Occupy interview), with ‘a strong ‘Generation of ‘68’ – including Bern- and in the ‘non-linear’ compositions of desire to connect oppositional political stein, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, New York School poets such as John and cultural views with linguistically Michael Palmer, and Lyn Hejinian Ashbery and Barbara Guest. inventive writing’, based on the belief – were joined by younger figures such Bernstein is equally adamant in de- that ‘language is never neutral but rather as Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Steve fining the ‘official verse culture’ to which always betrays an ideological interest McCaffery; the movement incorporated he opposes these figures, especially the and unstated messages’. Shklovsky’s important overlooked experimentalists ‘reification of lyric poetry’ evident in claim that poetry can ‘lay bare the de- from the postwar period like Clark ‘the personally expressive poem’. His vice’ is therefore pertinent to this goal. Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, and Jackson remarks on Ashbery’s evocation of As Bernstein sums up the implications Mac Low, and established connections ‘the temporal sensation of meandering of the Russian Formalist’s argument: with such innovative British poets as thought’ are particularly interesting in ‘poems can make the metaphoricity of Maggie O’Sullivan and J.H. Prynne. this regard: Ashbery, he argues, creates our perception in and through language These associations have since become ‘a “third way” between the hypotaxis of more palpable’. g more fully internationalised – in part conventional lyric and the parataxis of because of their dissemination through Pound and Olson’, one which ‘averts such vital online resources as Buffalo’s both exposition and disjunction’. Bar- Electronic Poetry Center and Penn- bara Guest is similarly viewed in terms Sound (both initiated by Bernstein), of a ‘lyric negation’, ‘at all times close and through the significant role played to, yet out of sync with, the rites of lyric by John Tranter’s Jacket magazine; their voicing’. Bernstein expands on this idea often controversial effect on Australian to present what is perhaps his ideal for poetry has been in particular evidence poetic representation: ‘No ideas only over the past decade.