Charles Bernstein [USA]

 

Before the Promise
 
I drew a blank on a torn door
Drew another, then no more
Got stung, pedaled frowns
Knew things was bust
(No way outta town)
 
Sometimes it done it its way
Then again, harder to say ––
What’s looking up
Decides to knock you down
 
Before the promise of tomorrow
Tomorrow came
 
Morning on this pole
Midnight at the other
Slipping, slapping, sliding
On a cockamamie roll
 
Yesterday’s dreams dissolve
Into today’s goodbyes
I set out on a camel’s hump
Came back with just the eyes
 
Before the promise of tomorrow
Tomorrow came
 
A farther distance that we go
Within each moment spent
Then ever’s sent by Heaven
Or scaled by human ken
 
Before the promise of tomorrow
Tomorrow came
 
We twist, we turn
Undo ourselves in tripled throws
My goodness, how the time has passed! ––
Let’s get our stuff and beat a path
 
To what we never knew
Nor will, nor who, nor say
 
Before the promise of tomorrow
Tomorrow came
 
                                             for the 2020 class
                                            Phi Beta Kappa of Eta
                                           (Ohio Wesleyan University)

(from “Topsy-Turvy”, 2021)

 
 
The Darkness He Called Night
 
Virtue’s a kind
of despair,
masquerading as care.
A bitter
current is for
virtue sweet.
Sublime wine sours
its mouth.
Snakes eat from
its hands.
Jackasses obey its
whim. Self-
nomination papers its
path. Method
is its M.O.,
holding tight to
a higher
love and fervently
displayed empathies.
Virtue’s sword
is truth, in
love with
itself, at odds
with others.
Celebrating standards it
fashions, virtue
jams miscreants, shams
malcontents, shaming
those abjure improvement.
The passion
of virtue is
reprimand. Nothing
is more beautiful
to virtue
than compelling justice
and shattering
dissent: slashes in
a pan
that will never
absolve aesthetics.

(from “Topsy-Turvy”, 2021)
 
 
Freudian Slap
 
An old man’s best friend
is the past. Aggrievement’s
 
not the end of politics
 
but a point of contact.
Solidarity of sleights
 
slips into crystal nights
 
as compulsory illiberalism’s
hypnopompous ardour sours
 
in the mind’s preternatural
 
larder. Everyday can’t be
yesterday since tomorrow is
 
over before today is done.
 
You can decide what you
will do but not what you’
 
ll want. Fade out
 
to the sounds of Shak
Shuka and his Israel/Palestine
 
Arkestra, coming to you
 
from the Cosmogonic Ballroom
in midtown Manhattan. 
 
(from “Topsy-Turvy”, 2021)
 
 

Author’s Bionote:
  
*Charles Bernstein (New York, 1950) is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets and  cofounded the influential journal “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E”. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of “Near/Miss”. From 1990 to 2003, Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo), where he co-founded the Poetics Program. He is the author, most recently, of “The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies” (University of Chicago Press, 2024), “Topsy-Turvy” (Chicago, 2021), and “Pitch of Poetry” (Chicago, 2016). Read more at https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/