Recalculating
In 1978, Bernstein and fellow avant-gardist Bruce Andrews founded L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine as a place to oppose the “confessional” voice and lyrical verse popular at the time. In dozens of books over the course of nearly 40 years, Bernstein has inspired and puzzled, annoyed and amused readers by rethinking what poetry is and what language can do. While difficult to define, we find a clue to Bernstein’s aesthetic in the epigraph to a new poem, which “adapts a line from Judith Malina’s 1967 translation of Brecht’s 1948 version of Hölderlin’s 1804 translation of Sophocles’s Antigone.” For Bernstein, historical works, interpretation, and adaptation all contribute to the cacophony of contemporary life. This collection contains a characteristically wide range of innovative verse, including formal stanzas with predictable end rhymes, columns of replicated phrases, essays in verse, axiomatic maxims, zen koans, and translations of Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Catullus. Throughout, Bernstein usurps expectations and even anticipates, jokingly, how skeptical readers might receive his work: “I try to get them to see it as formal, structural, historical, collaborative, and ideological. What a downer!” --Diego Báez