Imitators of the world
My mother is afraid of all writers and poets. Every time I have a pen and paper she turns to me and squeezes her eyes together forming a sharp contrasting crease in her brow. “You aren’t writing about me, are you?” Always the question. To her, poets are imitators of the world in incorrect fashion. They get it wrong.
To Bernstein, we get it wrong, not necessarily the poets. I feel the way he discusses poetry is to give poetry a voice and recondition people’s mindsets beyond convention, beyond simply nodding heads when asked if you know what “poetry” is. After taking this class for example, my perception of what poetry can be defined as has been substantially altered. Our discussion at the close of class yesterday will serve as a wonderful segue into this writer.
I think in order to discuss topics such as poetry month and public readings really creates a conversation about how we treat writers in general. He seems to be contradictory at times, since the style of his work is for the most part, poetic, but he also delves into the world of criticism and finds a way to collage his ideas, quotes, and arguments into a work that feels like it has an overt purpose, yet is still ambiguous technically. How so? Well, an Anti-poetry month. Here we have a writer writing a poem if we call it that, discussing the death of the poet is in April.
I think after our discussion today I’ll have a greater understanding for how Bernstein creates his work, and could very much see this as an additional writer of commentary for a literature course.