Going 'Glocal

The second series of poems in Charles Bernstein's 2006 collection, Girly Man, “Some of These Daze,” collates the poet's responses to the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. This epistolary series of poems (each originating as a letter or email sent in the immediate aftermath of this event) demonstrates the complexity of a New Yorker trying to represent this moment of radical political significance, a moment that is cinematically so easy to “imagine” but politically so difficult to “conceive” of. The skill of these poems, in which Bernstein seems both unusually fluid and unusually faltering, lies in their ability to lay bare the difficulty of comprehending an “image” that “is greater than the reality // the image can't approach reality / the reality has no image / our eyes are burning.” Yet the impossibility of representation is the beginning rather than the end of this political moment. For Bernstein, the question “isn't is art up to this but what else is art for?” (Bernstein: 30). The final sequence in the collection, the eponymous “Girly Man,” begins with the poem “War Stories,” first published as war broke out in Iraq in spring 2003. The poem presents an anaphoric listing of what “War is” in a mocking inversion of the “Love cartoons” of the seventies — “War is never having to say you’re sorry” (149). This contradictory and satirical list of clichés, truisms, and scathing critiques is able to both mockingly penetrate the totalizing ability of the “Global War on Terror” to define everything in its purview whilst also acknowledging that “War is here. / War is this. / War is now. / War is us” (154)

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