No Clever Title Come to Mind

Well, during an initial publishing attempt, my computer froze. In light of that mishap, I apologize if this time around I’m much more scathing than I first was. I hope this does not turn into mindless bashing, but you’ve been forewarned. After reading works from Mac Low, Bernstein, and Hejinian, I had to take several hours before I could begin to make a coherent response. Perhaps this is a result of some of the incoherence and disjunction that make language poetry language poetry. Perhaps I could not respond because of my original bewilderment by the amount of works by poets that I knew very little about; it was reminiscent of my first time in a large bookstore, looking up (I was a wee little guy then) at countless books by countless people that meant absolutely nothing to me. Or, perhaps I could not stop asking myself one question: why? I read several poems which I ultimately enjoyed, but that annoying little why repeatedly snuck up and tapped me on the shoulder or, as was the case with the poems I did not enjoy, walked up in front of me and slapped me across the face. We’ve discussed the purpose of poetry in class and I’ve done so at length in other classes and with my mother, so I like to discover purpose every time I read.
Now, I read the Gelpi article which helped answer some of the surface-level whys. Language poets like to highlight the fact that a reader gives meaning to the words on the page. Some want to eliminate poet presence completely. But, at the risk of sounding truly un-academic, I want to make a brief statement of my opinion of this language poetry: at some point, poetic experimentation becomes crap. I was willing, at first, to allow Mac Low some room to play with me, but when I got to Bernstein’s disfrutes experimentation effectively transitioned to crap. About the only thing I took from the book was the title’s meaning in Spanish. If a person needs to read twenty pages of critical analysis to find any semblance of purpose in a poem, the poetry loses its potency.
As always, I don’t want to throw all language poets and their work into one metal trash bin; that would not be fair to those poets and works that I have not seen yet. Actually, I don’t even want to discard all of Mac Low, Bernstein, and Hejinian. I really enjoyed Bernstein’s “The Bricklayer’s Arms.” I think I may have actually understood what he was getting at, to the extent that a reader can ever really accomplish this. I saw how the bricklayer was responsible for the initial commands to his arms, but as the arms began cradling souls and doing other odd things, he was left with that quizzical look on his face. The bricklayer, sans arms, represents the poet while his arms represent the poem. The poet has the ability to put the words on the page, but as soon as his pen’s down and the words are published for the world, he no longer has the ability to change anything to try to shape meaning in a different way. The reader comes in and takes the poem and makes it mean something. This seems to be one of the chief aims of language poetry: when the reader gets the poem, the poet is eliminated and the reader makes the words mean something. So, as a result of recognizing at least something in “The Bricklayer’s Arms,” I can say that I enjoyed it. But, several poems later, when I dove headfirst into disfrutes, I was very disappointed to find that there was no water in the pool. “Disfrutar,” if I remember correctly, means “to enjoy” in Spanish. Therefore, I think “disfrutes” means “you enjoy.” My apologies, Charles, but I did not enjoy--please don’t be upset with me.