[In the following review, Tuma offers a positive assessment of Rough Trades, which he considers Bernstein's “most readable,” “most personalized,” and “best” book.]

Does anyone else think it a little weird that Bernstein is now a Sun & Moon Classic, that his most recent collection of poems includes a two-page biography at its end? One thing historians of the avant-garde have not always recognized is the entrepreneurial skill of oppositional poets. Another thing they have sometimes neglected is the speed with which poets associated with “movements” or “groups” move away from these once they have become established. Though it seems odd to say, Rough Trades is partly a retrospective book, one that includes two long poems called “Reading the Tree” (Silliman’s anthology) together with—immediately after—a poem offering sardonic remarks on poetics to The Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. Just as in Ron Silliman’s most recent book, What, where Silliman writes “To say / this has become a cliche. I HATE SPEECH,” Bernstein in his “Reading the Tree: 1” skewers the phrase that once served as a manifesto for a community of writers: “‘I hate / speech’ & speech don’t like me none too good / either.” While Bernstein recognizes that “I / could never have done it alone” and remains as interested in the social body as ever, I’m tempted to say that Rough Trades is Bernstein’s most “personalized” book. It is certainly his most readable book. And, I might add, for me it is his best. It’s only partly ironic when Bernstein writes “they used to be / the leaders of the avant-garde, but now / they just want to be understood.” Consider, for example, this passage from the same poem:

                                                                      These
are not my words but those that summer
gives me, with a tenderness quite
unknown in the real world, where
there is little to remember but
stormy days. I would have a house
of my own, with a bay of pastel
miasma, reality leaking
from its edges, as the context
conditions. Therefore, my style
seems to have fallen to
pieces, deteriorated
in the three-year interim
between books; others
may write better-made poems
but those poems with their elegant
turns of phrase, their vivid
excellence, often add up to nothing.
Either poetry is real as, or realer than,
life, or it is nothing, a stupid
& stupefying occupation for zombies.
For my poetry is informed by
something inside that doesn’t
flinch & won’t budge.

Though the first few lines of this read like Duncan or some other romantic poet, I am most reminded of Williams’ “The Pink Locust,” where the old man defended his idiosyncrasy in a propositional mode that represented something of a retreat from the more materialist poetics of his earlier experimental phase. There is much of the old Bernstein in Rough Trades—“fissures, breaks, and other disjunctive devices” (to quote the giant blurb)—but much of the book seems as interested in re-constructing lyric and discursive sense out of the fragmented social body (of which Byron, Stevens, Williams, Campion and other poetries are a part) as it is in disrupting or de-constructing the discursive and lyric conventions that have reinforced dominant ideologies. In other words, this book contains not just acid but also a little stone. One poem even begins “We share these sediments, sentiments,” though this does continue on to reject “the father’s lore.” But rejecting the old stories does not entail abandoning the pursuit of some new ones, just as (to quote Bunting) abstinence does not cure desire. Maybe I’m way off base here, but this explains for me the relative discursive continuity of the passage quoted above, and the re-writing of Stevens’ imaginary in the volume’s first poem, “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree,” and the appropriation of the beginning of Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty” for what is in effect a conventional “compleynt” in “Verdi and Postmodernism.” This last poem especially pleases me, as I am of the once familiar opinion that poetry atrophies when it moves too far from song:

She walks in beauty like the swans
that on a summer day do swarm
& crawls as deftly as a spoon
& spills & sprawls & booms.

Bring me Campion’s lute! Now that Bernstein has demonstrated that he can outdo the mostly flaccid New Formalists at creating textures of sound (speech?), will the next move be to give over parody and comedy for lyrical effusion? Probably not.