One of the most tragic implications of Freudian psychoanalysis is that the meaning of dreams is basically selfish, self-originating. But I’m not sure I buy this part of Freud, since the verbal or visual languages with which I think and dream are constituted from the desire, suffering, striving, imagination, need and love of those who have lived inside of language, too. So no, the statue isn’t mine, and imagination isn’t invention as much as it’s a tool for discovering what’s here—reality an activity of the most august imagination. I believe less in my own genius than I do our genius, yours Kemel and that of my students and friends and teacher; so rather genii, the flickering spirits that are, somehow, more than human: the system of thinking in and by language become, through feedback loop after feedback loop, alive, and able to remind us of the world-remaking powers of the imagination. It takes a lot of bodies and bodies of thought to make a Gertrude Stein or Kafka or Celan. And we have to keep remaking these poets every day. That’s the enormous task of reading and writing and living well.

Nevertheless, I’m sure there’s some self-concern here. I was thinking of the word statute, skating along the chain of associations—stasis, The State, metastasis, that girl Stacy, ecstacy—it gives rise to. The law: born and maintained and remade in violence. Beautiful as the statue is, the fucking thing won’t move, and as such represents my frustration that I can’t bring it out of the dream and into the clearer airs of general being. Like a Giacometti, it steps forward perpetually without getting anywhere, a burn victim, a Bernes victim. I’m its shepherd, but I’m not doing such a good job, it appears. We are beautiful; we are brilliant; we are deeply incapable.

So what does it mean to “live inside of language?”  What is the relation of the morpheme to the molecule?

On good days, it’s like being a houseguest in a pleasant, comfy house with variable decor, talking until the early hours of the morning with a person much smarter, more sensitive and knowledgeable than I am and whom, despite being an old friend, I never quite “get.” On bad days, it’s a whale’s belly type of situation, where digestive rumblings produce deadening campaign speeches. As for molecules, I live inside them too, but it’s difficult to have an immediate experience of the molecular, something not defined to a certain extent by language, or at the very least some residue of human thinking, be it mathematical, visual, musical, scientific, rhetorical, affective or whatnot. I put all that stuff under the umbrella of language, since it often depends upon and coexists with language. There might be a more basic biological level of the experience, but Madison Avenue’s already covered that with a palimpsest of catchphrases and visual clichés.

Be fair: you’re not an easy poet.  The context of each of your works is turbulent, as when a story skews away from its own plot and then skews away from the skew.  Yet your poems seem to be subtended by imperceptible unities; they have the feel of having structure, of being governed by structure.  Am I right and if so, what is it that holds a Bernes poem together?

I hope that the complexity of my poems has less to do with a desire to impress than “the act of finding what suffices,” as Stevens writes. Many of my favorite poets are maddeningly difficult, but they make you want to learn to read them; and you get the sense that their poetry is as easy as it could possibly be without diminishing the complexity of experience. If I feel confounded, I also feel that such an experience is the only way to enter into the understanding that the poem offers. To avoid difficulty, as some do, by an appeal to the concept of audience, is to condescend to your readers, to prejudge and underestimate their intelligence. By offering sufficient pleasures along the way, great poetry convinces you of the virtue and reward of withstanding difficulty, exhaustion, headache.

I want to say that you hold my poems together but that’s not really the question. Each poem, of course, has its own structure, its own way of collapsing in place and maintaining some form of cohesion despite all its disparateness. Often, I suppose, my poems orbit around a thought that they never disclose, the impetus for the poem which is sometimes banal or uninteresting in its own right. In the last few years, I’ve been moving away from the more essayistic or thesis-driven poetry I used to write, but I think that those arguments and concerns might subtend the recent poetry and perhaps give it that aura of unity which you notice.

A maddeningly difficult poet that makes you want to learn to read him—that seems like a good description of Jasper Bernes.  Yet the more I read you, the more it seems that you are not hard at all, just different and “deep.”  Can you explain the action in one of your pieces, say, this one?:

A Moving Grove

Thank you, that’s very kind. I suppose that, in this poem, at a certain level, the action pretends to be pretty simple. There’s a basic elegiac movement here, the movement of the erotic elegy that results from so many “mismanaged . . . affairs.” The beloved is being relinquished, and with her the self to, or with, which that beloved corresponds. But if that’s all there was, it would be a dull poem, although a cleaner and more hygienic break. The clean gesture of “letting go,” as we say here in the post-Industrial States, gets snagged on the malice and humor. And while the initial analogy promises some sort of celebratory “play,” a vacation from the ungodly holiday, that never really arrives. The speaker wants to have a direction, somewhere to go, but can only really come up with the negative “not toward you.” The more I think about it, the movement is really pretty circular or cyclonic—“wend,” “bent,” the spinning action of “dial.” The speaker keeps getting sucked back into the whirlpool, despite often, at times, seeming to get away. I’m writing in a pretty textural manner here—whatever meaning or pleasure a reader gets from this poem probably comes from the connotative textures of different verbal registers and gestures. It’s this level of action too that probably keeps the speaker enmeshed. But don’t take my word for it.

What are your weaknesses as a writer?  What dogs you?

Meretriciousness. Sophistry that’s either not naive enough or too naive; a lack of humility, by turns, and a lack of self-confidence; the thousand fears that would keep me doing the same thing I did yesterday. In the end, the same problems that dog me as a human.  I’m either too dogged or not dogged enough. I also try to remind myself that the occasional flat or empty or “bad” line is sometimes the right one. My poems tend toward a manic succession of sixteenth-notes, and so I have to work to aerate them, allow for pauses, breaks.

You say the problems that dog you as a writer are also the problems that dog you as a human.  But your “artist’s statement” in the Iowa Anthology begins with the assertion, “I am less and less interested, poetry-wise, in the facts and contingencies of my own life…”  Would you get mad at me if I said you were, essentially, a confessional poet?
 

No, I wouldn’t be mad.  I used to want to be a confessional poet when I grew up but the hours really killed me. If you’re a confessional poet, you’re always on the job, always coming up with material, even if you’re just chilling in a pool of vomit at the bottom of someone’s stairs. I’m not sure how you would define “confessional,” but I might agree with your diagnosis. What I can say is that I’m not really attempting, as a primary goal, to document or record my life as it’s been lived.  Many of the older poems from A Moving Grove do perform that function, although I’d like to think they’re up to other things as well. But then again, I don’t think that the best “confessional” poets—Lowell, Plath—are really about an enshrining or embalming of lived experience either, when they’re really “on.” They have too much imagination and too much curiosity about the world around them for that.  Think about how often Lowell’s poems are concerned with history, with the lives of others, with literature and art at large. The test of the poems is never their fidelity to life as lived, or the intensity of the life behind them. The confessionality of the poems really has to do with a psychologizing and biographizing reading tendency, and with some rather unfortunate imitators in the wake of first-generation confessional poetry, which was, for its important consequences, an important corrective against the arch, staid post-Eliotian poetry that dominated the ‘fifties. For Eliot, poetry is “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” If you replaced “escape” with reinvention, you’d have something close to my aesthetic, keeping in mind that it’s the desire or wish to reinvent these terms that’s important—a failed reinvention can be just as powerful as a successful one, as in the case of Berryman’s Dream Songs or certain moments in Hejinian’s My Life.
 

What kind of material would you like to be writing twenty years from now?

If I’m not entirely occupied with task of surviving and keeping my hair looking fabulous in some Mad Max scenario—great work. I’m enormously ambitious and I write, largely, in response to the writers who have changed my life; it’s important for me to imagine writing work that powerful. There’s no other reason to do this crazy, exhausting thing that most people don’t care about. Of course, if I knew what that great work was, I’d be writing it now. I’d also be happy just to get to write for a couple of hours every morning for the rest of my life. It’s a real privilege—reading and writing as much as I do—and I have to remind myself of that continuously.