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Going ‘Glocal’: The Local and the Global in Recent Experimental Women's Poetry1
University of Southampton, UK nm8@soton.ac.uk
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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