"The difference between me and most poets is I am really a spider."
-- Jesse Bernstein, The Difference
A TRIBUTE TO
STEVEN "JESSE" BERNSTEIN
ENDORSED BY HIS ESTATE
Born: December 4, 1950
Died: October 22, 1991
"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 victim of a neurological disorder and the cumulative damage of the drugs -- prescription and self-medication -- he'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 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.'"
-- Alison Slow Loris, December 4, 1999
"Despite his reputation, Bernstein seldom indulged in
shock-for- its-own-sake on stage and never in his writing. Like the best
work of his mentor William Burroughs, Bernstein sought to explore the
human condition as he found it, as realistically as possible. Yes, he
sometimes wrote about misery and emptiness. But he also wrote about love
and hope and sweetness and people's attempts, no matter how futile, to
find a point of commonality. He was not, despite his public image, a
nihilist or a cynic. He cared for the world and for people, deeply and
sometimes painfully. His pain was deepened by his poignant wishes to be
freed from it."
-- Clark Humphrey, June 19, 1996
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