“I’m just here”: Charles Bernstein & Authentic/Poetic Identity in “Sentences”
Norman Holland, a psychoanalytic critic who studies the ways in which readers comprehend and re-
create texts, provides three “simultaneous meanings” for identity in his book The I. Holland first
defines identity as an agency, that which “initiates the actions that…create identity” encouraging us to
consider identity as a dynamic and self-fueling system (34). His second definition, as consequence,
suggests that identity is “created as the individual brings an already existing identity…to new
experiences” (34). And finally, Holland sees identity as representation, “putting into words” the
complexities of human action and reaction (34). Such a three-fold characterization of identity, as a
dynamic and ongoing process, disallows any static conception of identity. Experience becomes the
crucial link between the articulation of identity and comprehension of that identity. By defining
identity as processual, resistant to categorical distinctions and constrictions, structured by its
perceptions in the process of perceiving, we allow the possibility that poetry can do more than
annotate existing identities. A poem can become a vehicle for identity, encompassing its formation and
expression, when all three of Holland’s definitions are simultaneously operative in the work.
A poetics of processual identity can provide the writer with the opportunity to be wildly inclusive
and not only encompass knowledge of identity but also enact the very workings of identity. The
identity in the poem becomes something other than the identity of the writer, however, something with
no easily determined make-up. It is multivalent, and as complex as any person you might meet
anywhere.
The difficulty comes from writing a first person poem of experience that isn’t limp, that doesn’t
overly rely on categorical identities, or the tired confessional revelations of the lyric “I.”
Charles Bernstein’s poem “Sentences” presents one possibility for handling the difficulties posed in
keeping the “I” pronoun responsive and invigorating by overwhelming the reader with “I” statements.
Bernstein assaults the reader with intimate confessions that never narrate a linear picture of the
speaker. But sections of the poem “Sentences” still provide a clear record of the activity of
consciousness. The identity is developed and established through an almost impressionistic
presentation. Jean Starobinski encourages a “transformation of the individual” whereby the “I”
pronoun becomes “both subject and object” in any autobiographical narrative discourse (78). By
exploiting what he calls the “multivalent referential vectors” inherent in any word, Bernstein uses and
overuses the “I” pronoun and bankrupts it, relying on other means to create identity in the poem
(Content’s Dream 34). Early in “Sentences,” the speaker says “My mind goes / but my mind comes to
me. I’m just here,” a basic statement of reality that fuels the poem (Republics of Reality 21). At the end
of the day, through whatever revisions and diversions, whatever discourse or recourse, the self exists
unified through paradox and contradiction.
Bernstein asks “What relation have we to fragments of a past from which we are disconnected,
without living root of transmission,” a question that argues for poetry that is the transmission that
makes clear the self’s relationship to earlier selves, that connects the disparate fragments (A Poetics
113). The many brief statements found in “Sentences” then are the transmission that helps the speaker
construct a self out of fragments. Statements such as “I didn’t sleep those nights,” “I had to become
what everyone wanted me to be,” “I had so much pain I couldn’t breathe,” and “I am going to sweat,”
seem disconnected, without any sort of forward narrative thread (Republics of Reality 25-30).
Bernstein creates an impressionistic picture, brushstrokes of selfhood that accumulate, employing
what he would call a “constructive mode,” where the method of presentation is “explored as content, its
possibilities of meaning are investigated and presented” (Content’s Dream 227). And though there is
occasionally obvious linkage and visible progression between the statements (“I must convey to others
that I don’t need them. // I don’t think this should be necessary. // I think they should be aware. // I’m
not trying to hide anything.” [28-29]), the fact that each statement is a discrete revelation of the “I”
voice makes us doubt any immediate connection. The text, and so our conception of the controlling
consciousness, is holistic. Consciousness is enacted in the poem as it “thinks about itself—its present,
past, and future” (Mandel 49). The “I” becomes both subject and object, the construct that reveals and
the revelation itself.
Bernstein says, in his essay “Semblance,” that by constructing proper and patterned sentences, a
writer can “allow the accumulating references to enthrall the reader by diminishing diversions” to the
“constructed representation” that is the poem (Content’s Dream 35). In the poem “Sentences,”
Bernstein diminishes diversions by creating a poem that doesn’t connect in the traditional way; each
statement is simple and complete on its own similar to the strategy employed by Stevens in “13 Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird.” Only together do the statements begin to create a picture larger than
themselves, a picture of the consciousness behind them in all its facets. He has written a poem that
problematizes the idea of identity by presenting it in all its variations. Identity can be recognized
through “the organization of words and phrases…[which] is based on the perceiving and experiencing
and remembering subject” (230).
More important than any information or material the poem may be talking about is the act of talking,
the activity of consciousness. The quest to represent a processual identity on the page is one that has
been taken up by writers of many different styles and schools. But in looking at these examples from
Charles Bernstein’s work, we are given a unique look at a poet with a drive to create an active and
dynamic identity on the page and by refusing to get bogged down in a definition of identity that regards
what has happened to the individual in the objective, shared, world as more important than what has
happened to the individual in the subjective, private world, he has blurred that distinction and created
a processual identity that is vibrant and organic, flexible and fluent enough to fully represent authentic
human identity.
Nate
Pritts
Bibliography
Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
—. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986.
—. Republics of Reality, 1975-1995. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 2000.
Holland, Norman N. The I. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.
Starobinski, Jean. “The Style of Autobiography.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical
and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 73-83.