Since I was having trouble thinking about what to write for this blog post I decided to Google some of Charles Bernstein poems. I couldn’t think of anything else so why not right? After looking up a few of his works Its pretty amazing to me how his writing of poetry completely goes against any ideas of what I thought poetry was. Some have no rhyming or “flow” and are more like short stories with really short sentences (like “Dear Mr. Fanelli”).

One poem that caught my eye was “Questionnaire” (you can see it here). It’s very similar to something we did in class a few weeks back (I don’t remember that exercise fully, I just remember us reading lines, so they may actually be the same), but again, you would never think of this as a poem. I mean, if answering a questionnaire is considered poetry then I read poetry every time I go to the dentist. Of course those questionnaires aren’t poetry, yet somehow this is. This got me to thinking why.

After answering the questions posed and thinking for a few minutes “what in the world is this” it dawned on me why this might be poetry. The goal of this is to make us think, something I found to be expressed in the very last question: “14.a) Art is at heart political in that it can change our perception of reality.  b) Art is at heart not political because it can change only consciousness and not events.”

That is what I think Charles Bernstein is trying to say. That there is no definition of art. Art, and poetry is a form of art, can be anything, something that changes our lives or how we live them. It gets us to think about how we see the world and what we really want.

Of course, I may be completely crazy here and completely off base and all he did was write a simple questionnaire. Any thoughts?