MARCH 1997		T H E RAVEN C H R O N I C L E S
Links to Jesse Bernstein Land		I Am Secretly an Important Man Edited by Deran Ludd & Jim Jones Zero Hour Press P.O. Box 766, Seattle, WA 98111 1996, $12.95, 132 pp.  More Noise, Please! Edited by Leslie A. Fried Designed by Sue Ann Harkey Left Bank Books Collective 1404 18th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122 1996, $8.00, 184 pp. Reviewed by Alison Slow Loris Steven Jay Bernstein, known as Jesse, was on intimate terms with horrors for most of his forty-one years: as street-kid, junkie, alcoholic; as inhabitant of jails, hospitals and poor people's hotels; as friend of Holocaust survivors and Viet Nam veterans. He died by his own hand in 1991, the victxim of a neurological disorder and the cumulative damage of the drugs­­prescription and self-medication­­he'd used to deal with it. Most who suffer his experiences are inarticulate, due to such effects of poverty as prenatal malnutrition and substandard education, or stunned into silence, craving only forgetfulness, while those who can escape rarely choose to look behind them. But Jesse Bernstein, with an IQ off the charts and a lifelong ability to win powerful friends, would not be silenced. Voice for the voiceless: it was his job, and he knew it, never shirked it. He called himself a war correspondent, and sent his dispatches from Hell to shake up the souls of the over- comfortable. His best-known work is full of ugliness and violence and pain, both physical and psychic. The desperate throwaway children who decorate their bodies with scars and piercings to mirror the state of their psyches, find another mirror in his work; in it they see their own experience ­­depicted honestly-­and then transformed. To read much of Bernstein's work, or to hear it (still possible on the Sub Pop album PRISON), is to come face to face at the same time with the bloody filthy underside of human life and with the strength and compassion that somehow still survive there, the flickers of beauty that illuminate the poisonous darkness he knew so well. That he also was able to love, to laugh, to enjoy life as often as he did, for as long as he did, is the best testimony to the healing power of his art. Beyond the inimitable bizarre brilliance of his language is simplicity, the voice of a curious child whose unwinking gaze misses nothing of the world that presents itself to his eyes: "Oh, so this is how it is." During his lifetime, comparatively little of his work was printed. Individual stories and poems appeared in various local publications (including this Raven's ancestor, Swale). Two early novels, The Wraith and Hermione, were published by Patio Table Press (created just to publish those books by Deran Ludd), and a later, more abstract work, Personal Effects, from Péterade, a Vancouver, B.C press. Now, nearly five years after his death, there are two new and very different volumes of his work in the bookstores. Neither is a definitive collection of his work, but together they present a fair sample of his strongest work in both prose and poetry. The first, I Am Secretly an Important Man, released in May, is from Zero Hour, publisher of Good To Go, a collection of alternative West Coast short stories. Edited by Deran Ludd [who has since left Zero Hour] and Jim Jones, with art direction by Heather Werner and Alice Wheeler, I Am Secretly an Important Man brings together thirty-eight short prose works dated from 1979 to 1991, and does, as the editors hope in their preface, present the full range of Bernstein's prose style, from "How I Met My Present Wife", with its graphic description of performing obscenities on the corpse of Richard Nixon, to the tenderness and delicacy of "Letting the Horses Go." Short stories alternate with less classifiable works, such as the cut-and-paste "Crying and Shitting at the Same Time":
THE MAN IS WEARING SUNGLASSES FOR THE BLOODY SUPPRESSION OF RIOTS IN MARCH AND JUNE MIST HANGING OFF THE END OF THE SEA UNDERNEATH THE WRONG POLITICS A GIRL CHOKING ON DRY CLOUDS OF HISTORY
		"The In Out", written as part of a public art project in which Bernstein was on display in a shop window as a working poet, proposes that his audience should be paid for doing such a good job of watching him. It gives us a glimpse of his delightful sense of anarchy, while "The Tour" expresses a nightmarish vision of ordinary modern life:
People tumbling, scrambling over each other to get there first, to get at the food...being drilled, driven along, pelted with contradictory instructions.... There is one compulsory gala event after the other.
		Every piece in Important Man, no matter what the reader's taste, contains at least a few words that are quite simply perfect, such as "The sun comes up like a spent penny." Visually, Important Man is fairly straightforward, beyond the shrieking chartreuse and red of the cover. The editors made a point of preserving Bernstein's punctuation choices, noting that he used them as a system of notation for performance delivery. Pieces typed with the caps lock on were usually intended to be loud; printed that way, they are a little hard on the reader's eye, but certainly emphatic. A biographical foreword by Grant Alden is enclosed by two sizable groups of Alice Wheeler's photos, many by now at least locally famous. It's good to see them again, especially all together. The second posthumous book, More Noise, Please!, the long-awaited collection of poems from Left Bank Press, is in every sense a lovely book. Some of Bernstein's most beautiful work is here made public for the first time to balance the better known poems of despair or gritty endurance, including all those recorded on the album PRISON. For this volume, Leslie Fried, Bernstein's widow and literary executor, has released love poems which she had long desired to keep as her private property. Her courage and generosity in this regard are exemplary. Her brief introduction, a painfully honest account of her struggle to set aside grief and possessiveness to fulfill her duty as executor, should be required reading for anyone in her position. Because of the inclusion of the love poems, tender hopeful poems like "She Comes and Goes" now take their rightful place beside the songs of isolation or suicide, such as "The Man Upstairs" and "Mr. Charlie." The poem "More Noise, Please!" is so well-known locally that the title has gone into the vernacular, even being used as a name for a new music event a year or two ago. An ode to urban sonic pollution, it proposes that "Maybe we are the kind of people/ who need to have/ what we don't want/ just to get along,/ to do the basic things." Bernstein's hatred of war, most often expressed in outrage or biting satire, becomes in "Poem for Executive Toy (Scrap Junky)" a lament for all of us, its litany of "will we ever" a cry of longing for peace. It ends:
will we get to be born into a tranquil powder keg of black dirt and carnations into the fragrant oven of the yard ropes of the children swinging?
		Sue Ann Harkey's design work is beyond praise. Harkey took charge of the book after it had been nearly two years in the works, and it is questionable whether it would ever have been finished without her professionalism­­the collective publishing process generally functioning better with a living author to push things along. Going beyond the ordinary scope of book design, she has combined photographs, Bernstein's drawings and scraps of handwritten work into collages which, interwoven with the printed poems, create a whole that is virtually a dual-language book: one language being Jesse's writings, and the other a graphic presentation, both lively and sensitive, of the man himself. This book is not simply a collection of some of Bernstein's best work; it is also a memorial to him as man and artist, illuminating to those who never knew him, and certain to be cherished by all who did.
		© The Raven Chronicles 1997

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