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401 Charles Bernstein Ø Violet pouring from the eggshell tinge of the plate. 1993 The title “Red Beans” may be a pun on “red beings,” suggesting the contribution of indigenous peoples to Latina/o and world cultures. CHARLES BERNSTEIN b. 1950 Charles bernstein writes what he calls “impermeable” texts. That is, as a founder and practitioner of Language poetry, he writes poems that highlight the density of language and invite the reader to collaborate in the construction of the text’s meanings. If his language were made of glass, it would be stained glass, not a transparent pane. One notices the patterns in the words, the stains in the glass, while the things that the words refer to—the sights to be seen beyond the glass—remain obscure. Bernstein’s style is discontinuous, distracted, and self-aware. His poems are often collages of parodied discourses, and they are frequently hilarious. It is difficult to locate a stable, autobiographical “I” anchoring the perspective. The poems thus pose a challenge but always a fascinating, and often amusing, one. Bernstein’s language aims at “a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has,” as he writes in Content’s Dream. In Bernstein’s work, the referential aspect of language, deprived of its automatic reflex reaction, roams freely over the range of associations suggested by each word, becoming an energy field. Writing becomes “maximally open in vocabulary, forms, shapes.” Whereas standard grammatical patterns narrow possibilities, Bernstein uses quick cuts, gaps, and jumps to widen possibilities and to let the reader experience the poem individually, without needing to find a single, author-determined meaning. The poems, therefore, are part of a libratory, empowering project. They aim, as Bernstein writes in A Poetics, to “wake / us from the hypnosis” of more realistic and authoritarian forms of writing. Typical Bernstein poems, such as “Ballet Russe” or “Social Pork,” are, as the poet writes in My Way, “aversive to cultural and linguistic norms” but nevertheless “committed to exchange, interaction, communication, and community.” Ø Charles Bernstein 402 Bernstein uses discontinuity as a new way of producing meaning. In “Of Time and the Line,” he assumes the role of comedian-philosopher, using jokes and puns to make serious points. In “every lake . . . ,” a verbal substitution game generates the text. Bernstein’s poems also have a critical social perspective. In My Way he asserts, “Poetry can interrogate how language constitutes, rather than simply reflects, social meaning and values. You can’t fully critique the dominant culture if you are confined to the forms through which it reproduces itself.” He believes that by writing idiosyncratically, “we confer political value on the odd, eccentric, different, opaque, maladjusted—the non-conforming. We also insist that politics demands complex thinking and that poetry is an arena for such thinking.” Bernstein was born and raised in New York City, and his poetry retains a patina of urban wit and sophistication. The youngest of three children, he was the son of a self-made businessman and his wife. He studied philosophy at Harvard, where he wrote his senior thesis on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He married the visual artist Susan Bee (Laufer), with whom he had gone to high school, and together they had a daughter, Emma, and a son, Felix. His choice of a life in the arts seemed to his father an exercise in “downward mobility .” In the late 1970s Bernstein cofounded a small, innovative literary journal called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which helped revolutionize poetry by rejecting received notions of voice, self, and poetic form. The title of the journal supplied the name for what subsequently became known as the Language poetry movement , which includes among its members Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Rae Armantrout (all included in this anthology). Bernstein has continued to live in New York, even while holding professorships at the University at Buffalo and now at the University of Pennsylvania. In A Poetics, Bernstein registered his passion “for poetry that insists on running its own course, finding its own measures, charting worlds otherwise hidden or denied or, perhaps best of all, never before existing.” His poetry has run its own course with serious purpose and great good humor. further reading Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Charles Bernstein. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010. — — — —. Content’s Dream...

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