Readers of this blog probably need no introduction to Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein. Both are major, award-winning American poets usually seen as experimental, innovative, or avant-garde, whose contributions include important books on poetics as well as their own groundbreaking poetry. (For the record, their most recent books of poetry, Double Trio and Topsy-Turvy, have been discussed here by a number of critics). Thus, the appearance of Breath and Precarity and Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime within the last few months was bound to catch my attention. And as it happens, these two small books have a great deal in common. Both began as lectures. Both address issues which have their roots, like the two poets themselves, in American and international modernism. Both move fluidly, and with dazzling erudition, between high and popular culture, and in doing so, put paid to the notion that there is an aesthetic rather than merely a sociological distinction between them. Both are decidedly cross-cultural in their artistic visions, and in this respect, offer strong critiques of any forms of tribalism or identity politics. Both are centrally concerned with matters of breath, sound, voice, music, and performance. And both, I believe, are crucial statements, not only for Mackey and Bernstein themselves, but for poetry now.

Breath and Precarity concisely presents many of Mackey’s longstanding literary and cultural sources and themes, but also connects them to some of our most current, and urgent, political concerns. His argument takes us back to his origins in “the confluence of black music and experimental poetics,” a time when “breath was in the air” (3). He accepts but also challenges the breath poetics of the New Americanists such as Olson and Ginsberg, arguing that a “poetics of breath, offering no consistent or comprehensive practicum, was primarily a figurative, theoretical discourse, a symbolically and symptomatically telling discourse” (7). He attends to Creeley’s unquestionably symptomatic reading style, noting its “alternate breathing pattern fraught with apprehension, insecurity and duress” (9), a pattern influenced by the bop rhythms of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. From there, drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of black music and literature, he traces the development of what he calls “radical pneumaticism” (pneumatics = the workings of the breath, the spirit), gradually moving toward the violent, death-dealing racism that led to Eric Garner’s final words, now a crucial slogan for Black Lives Matter: “I can’t breathe.” For Mackey, “Transmutation or alchemization, the digestion and sublimation of anti-black violence, harassment and predation, has been one of the jobs of black music, black art, black cultural and social life in general” (17).

But by no means does Mackey’s argument end there. Simply enough, Mackey draws his definition of precarity from Wikipedia; it is “a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material and/or psychological welfare. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of intermittent or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence” (19-20). Precarity is a universal condition: marginalized groups and individuals, wherever they may be, are most susceptible, and the violence of “othering” increases the probability of risk. We think of the long history of the racist violence directed against African-Americans as one sustained instance of precarity, and its “alchemization” by black culture. Thus, “A certain universality resides in these black particulars, precarity being a widely human condition. That none of us is guaranteed our next breath is a truth that has to sit alongside another, equally obvious, which is that precarity has been and continues to be unequally distributed, some groups serving, for others, as a sacrifice to it or a shield against it” (22).

These are powerfully convincing words, but what readers of Mackey know is that it is his own “alchemization,” his own stunning verbal artistry, that truly brings the argument home. Breath and Precarity includes two passages from his multi-volume prose narrative, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, in which the narrator, N., describes the playing of his bandmates. Mackey’s unique style is such that he brilliantly describes (invented) jazz music, and in doing so, his writing becomes that music. Drennette, the drummer, approaches “some occult articulation” of “post-expectant futurity,” toward which she leads her fellow musicians, and toward which Mackey leads his readers. What does it mean to imagine a world that has freed itself of the risks of precarity? Music helps us in that task; music performs that task. The last half of Breath and Precarity consists of “The Overghost’s Ourkestra’s Next” (“mu” one hundred fortieth part), one of the high points of Double Trio, a poem written in response to the killing of Eric Garner: “New / Tears for Eric new tunes for another Eric, commis- / erative, our posthumous release…Live in the Land / of the Dead we might’ve called it, notwithstanding / we / couldn’t breathe, we blew” (28-29). Just as Mackey’s writing always hovers between lyric and story, it likewise hovers between elegy and anthem, a musical writing that is perpetually blowing live in the Land of the Dead.

This utopianism, memorializing loss but calling forth the future, represents a kind of sublime doubleness that Charles Bernstein addresses as well. Bernstein’s vision of the “homophonic sublime” arises out of homophonic translation, which is generally understood as a verbal process involving sustained bilingual punning. To quote Wikipedia, it “renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text.” Zukofsky’s homophonic translation of Catullus is probably the most well-known instance in modern American poetry, but as Bernstein points out, there are numerous others in multiple languages. It is related to zaum, Eastern European experimental sound poetry, which Bernstein characterizes as “the most radical—and perhaps most hysterical—extension of the sublime ideal of a poem being only itself, a cry of its occasion, ‘only this’, overthrowing a subservience to representational meaning, or a parasitic relation to an original” (12). But in reading—or writing—a poem, can we ever overthrow our “subservience” to representational meaning? To what extent is such a goal even desirable? Are we not always seeking to make meaning? Bernstein understands that his “homophonic sublime is a necessary improbable of poetry, a rebuke to rationality in the name of linguistic animation” (7). It is, in short, “the dream of a pure poetry, words for their own sake” (9).

There are important social and political implications in Bernstein’s celebration of the homophonic, which is, as in the case of Mackey, both culturally specific and tending toward the universal. Bernstein argues that the language practices he analyzes take on significance “not by reversing the power dynamic but reframing it” (30). The hero of Bernstein’s book is Sid Caesar (1922-2014), one of the most popular of a generation of mid-century Jewish-American comedians, whose TV shows, Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour drew audiences in the millions. Caesar’s specialty was doubletalking in a variety of foreign languages, which can be understood as “homophonic translation of a foreign-language movie, opera scenario, or everyday speech into an improvised performance that mimics the sound of the source language with made-up, zaum-like invented vocabulary….The serial movement from language to language also suggests a nomadic display of multi-lingual code-switching” (20, 21).

Caesar’s talent was derived from a number of culturally specific sources. As the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who ran a 24-hour luncheonette in Yonkers, Caesar heard the sounds of many foreign languages from the workers who patronized his parents’ restaurant. He would imitate the sounds of these languages, and it is important to note, as Bernstein does, citing Caesar’s biography, that “such parody was viewed as welcoming, not offensive” (26). Yiddish itself is a nomadic language that often appropriates the discourse of its host; according to Bernstein, “for Caesar, doubletalk was not deceptive or artificial but a honing/homing into the language-spring of mamaloshen” (28). Caesar was also a professional musician; he played saxophone and was involved in the production of musical reviews. As Bernstein notes, “The way some musicians learn a song or a symphony by ear, Caesar learned languages, as if they were musical scores” (24). Caesar himself speaks of this many years later in one of the many videos which Bernstein cites: he says that he has only to listen to the “music” of a foreign language for a few minutes, and he is able to imitate it.

Politically, Caesar’s comedy, as well as his self-presentation as a successful, bourgeois, American entertainer (unlike his contemporary, Leonard Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce), was a largely successful attempt to assimilate while at the same time maintain a specifically Jewish, ironic world-vision. “Jewish comedians,” writes Bernstein, “walked a fine line between their antic hysteria and anti-Semitic stereotypes related to rootlessness, parasitism, vulgarity, and impurity” (34). Bernstein’s analysis of this form of comedy and the milieu from which it springs, is brilliantly insightful in and of itself, but again, as with Mackey on black music, what is especially important for modern American poetry is that the social impetus behind these arts is powerfully transformative and deeply, lastingly influential. Bernstein: “Doubletalk begins in the deliberately unintelligible and fragmented. Modernist poetry has often been tarred with this brush. It’s fast talking on theory and chock full of elisions and evasions, obscure references, logical lapses, emotional bankruptcy; in other words, the kind of poetry I want” (34). This quotation does something remarkably similar to Mackey’s writing, despite the obvious tonal differences: in describing an art, it becomes that art.

As he goes on to consider the work of Zukofsky, Rothenberg, and a host of other radical experimenters in translation, Bernstein argues that “all translations are asymmetrical, both masking and revealing the discrepant cultural, economic, and political power of the translated and the translation….What or who gives the ‘right’ to translate?” (39). Mackey called his first, groundbreaking collection of essays Discrepant Engagement (1993), and indeed, what both he and Bernstein are addressing in these most recent books are precisely the discrepancies which both invigorate contemporary poetry and produce some of its most fraught and painful debates. Performance, voice, sound, music, breath: the terms I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the terms which are so charged and energized in these books, are precisely those which arise when we argue over poetic form and, inevitably, the role that poetry plays in larger political and cultural struggles. Mackey and Bernstein have a deep historical understanding of this volatility. They thrive on it, and thus are capable of both explaining where we are now and opening new poetic possibilities. They deserve our utmost attention.