I delivered this introduction for one of my favorite poets, Bernadette Mayer on February 2nd, 2017.
"Tonight I would like to begin by talking about pleasure and bliss.
Since its publication over forty years ago, the true meaning behind Roland Barthes’s ‘The Pleasure of the Text’ has been softly perverted, misapplied more often than not by the supposition used to sentimentally describe the reader’s soporific delight - their ‘pleasure’, like slipping into a warm tub, when integrating into a textual experience. While Barthes text doesn’t deny the actuality of such an experience, The Pleasure of the Text’s actual aim is to provoke a differentiation between ‘pleasure’ and ‘bliss’ and the types of textualities that arouse these different responses in the experiencing subject.
Barthes writes, “Texts of Pleasure: they are texts that content, that pacify, that come from culture and do not break with it, and are thus linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of Bliss, on the other hand, are texts that imposes a state of loss, texts that discomfort (perhaps to the point of certain boredom), unsettle the readers historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions; they unsettle the consistency of her tastes, values, memories, and brings to a crisis a relation of language” (14). This bliss as crisis aims to break with all cultural and institutional meta-language, it destroys utterly its own discursive category or genre, and, if it wants, attacks canonical structures of the language itself.
More than just a post-structural attempt to gain a new meridian, Barthes advocates for an antinomian form – or better: formlessness - to destabilize monological authority for a new consciousness of possibility. And while he asserts such bliss will be found between paradigms, he brings to bear no example of how this bliss is actualized or where it lives in representation.
It has always been curious to me, strange even, that Barthes never included poetryas part of his thought or criticism. Had he done so, he would have been hard pressed to find a better perpetrator of the bliss he sought than in the work of our celebrated speaker tonight, Bernadette Mayer - for to read Bernadette Mayer is to understand this meaning of bliss.
For more than 50 years Bernadette has injected American poetry with a radical ethic of transgressive curiosity. One of the things I admire most about Bernadette, other than her laugh, is her flexible self-reflexivity, her interminable questioning. Whether it’s in her new collection, Works and Days, where she asks “is this shoelessness mine?”, or in her landmark, Midwinter’s Day, where a refrain of “can I say that?” anticipates the projected umbra of domesticated life and motherhood - her personal, perceptive catechization reminds the reader that the honest work of art is to provide peddles for the question, and not that of the answer.
Given her disobedient self-reflexivity, it may not surprise one then that Bernadette has sometimes been known to be an anarchist. How Americans have educated ourselves about anarchism is too often informed and distorted by an anachronistic, occidental anxiety. We must now understand it as it comes to us in these two words: no borders. Bernadtette’s poetic thinking is a no-border-thinking, a doubled consciousness prepared by a radicalized subjectivity in confrontation with the hegemony of language.
In this way Bernadette’s body of work inhabits something alongside what Gloria Anzaldua called “the mestiza”, the mixed body caught between cultural identities. Anzaldua writes “the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new – that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we perceive ourselves, the ways we behave – la mestiza creates a new consciousness.”
It is here in this language where her perception becomes a state of perpetual transition, a shifting movement between meanings attached to codifications, and where we as readers experience the state of bliss in the work. She says “Private Property is criminal.” She says, "It would be great for all the people on earth, each to have what she or he needs to live, be healthy and do something as part or all of everything instead of some people's greed fitting in to old systems done when there was not any chance of knowing, everything now cheating, and doing worse to those who are not them."
No borders to take everything in. No borders to keep anything out. The importance of this point of view cannot be emphasized enough or underestimated. And tonight we continue to not underestimate the bliss of Bernadette."
The next night I met Emma and got to experience love again.
"Tonight I would like to begin by talking about pleasure and bliss.
Since its publication over forty years ago, the true meaning behind Roland Barthes’s ‘The Pleasure of the Text’ has been softly perverted, misapplied more often than not by the supposition used to sentimentally describe the reader’s soporific delight - their ‘pleasure’, like slipping into a warm tub, when integrating into a textual experience. While Barthes text doesn’t deny the actuality of such an experience, The Pleasure of the Text’s actual aim is to provoke a differentiation between ‘pleasure’ and ‘bliss’ and the types of textualities that arouse these different responses in the experiencing subject.
Barthes writes, “Texts of Pleasure: they are texts that content, that pacify, that come from culture and do not break with it, and are thus linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of Bliss, on the other hand, are texts that imposes a state of loss, texts that discomfort (perhaps to the point of certain boredom), unsettle the readers historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions; they unsettle the consistency of her tastes, values, memories, and brings to a crisis a relation of language” (14). This bliss as crisis aims to break with all cultural and institutional meta-language, it destroys utterly its own discursive category or genre, and, if it wants, attacks canonical structures of the language itself.
More than just a post-structural attempt to gain a new meridian, Barthes advocates for an antinomian form – or better: formlessness - to destabilize monological authority for a new consciousness of possibility. And while he asserts such bliss will be found between paradigms, he brings to bear no example of how this bliss is actualized or where it lives in representation.
It has always been curious to me, strange even, that Barthes never included poetryas part of his thought or criticism. Had he done so, he would have been hard pressed to find a better perpetrator of the bliss he sought than in the work of our celebrated speaker tonight, Bernadette Mayer - for to read Bernadette Mayer is to understand this meaning of bliss.
For more than 50 years Bernadette has injected American poetry with a radical ethic of transgressive curiosity. One of the things I admire most about Bernadette, other than her laugh, is her flexible self-reflexivity, her interminable questioning. Whether it’s in her new collection, Works and Days, where she asks “is this shoelessness mine?”, or in her landmark, Midwinter’s Day, where a refrain of “can I say that?” anticipates the projected umbra of domesticated life and motherhood - her personal, perceptive catechization reminds the reader that the honest work of art is to provide peddles for the question, and not that of the answer.
Given her disobedient self-reflexivity, it may not surprise one then that Bernadette has sometimes been known to be an anarchist. How Americans have educated ourselves about anarchism is too often informed and distorted by an anachronistic, occidental anxiety. We must now understand it as it comes to us in these two words: no borders. Bernadtette’s poetic thinking is a no-border-thinking, a doubled consciousness prepared by a radicalized subjectivity in confrontation with the hegemony of language.
In this way Bernadette’s body of work inhabits something alongside what Gloria Anzaldua called “the mestiza”, the mixed body caught between cultural identities. Anzaldua writes “the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new – that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we perceive ourselves, the ways we behave – la mestiza creates a new consciousness.”
It is here in this language where her perception becomes a state of perpetual transition, a shifting movement between meanings attached to codifications, and where we as readers experience the state of bliss in the work. She says “Private Property is criminal.” She says, "It would be great for all the people on earth, each to have what she or he needs to live, be healthy and do something as part or all of everything instead of some people's greed fitting in to old systems done when there was not any chance of knowing, everything now cheating, and doing worse to those who are not them."
No borders to take everything in. No borders to keep anything out. The importance of this point of view cannot be emphasized enough or underestimated. And tonight we continue to not underestimate the bliss of Bernadette."
The next night I met Emma and got to experience love again.