Notes from Charles Bernstein's A Poetics

Notes from Charles Bernstein's A Poetics (1992)

One of our greatest polemicist-poets comes out swinging in defense of a formally active poetry, a poetry of "particularity and peculiarity," of complexity and "communicative refractoriness." Published in 1992 but still brimming with urgency and vitality. [at bluesky]

OK, some pieces in here seem dated — 1989's "Play It Again, Pac-Man" is a woefully shallow take on arcade games, lacking what could have been an insightful engagement with games as texts—but others remain all too apt. The piece on Pound's fascism deserves special note here [at bluesky]

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Notes [oldest to newest]

1. Veronica Forrest-Thomson's "Poetic Artifice"

2. Bernstein on the "experiential" analysis of poetry

3. Total image-complex / total meaning complex

4. How meaning occurs

5. Poe and "absorptive fiction"

6. Bernstein on "the addressee"

7. "If only the plot would leave people alone"

8. Perelman and "coherence"

9. Nicole Brossard's "A Book"

10. David Antin's talk poems

11. Is "meter" absorptive?

12. Rae Armantrout's "Mainstream Marginality"

13. Harry Lanz on language's "transparency effect"

14. Sigrid Burckhardt on words and their meanings

15. Poems as recognitions, or not

16. Official verse culture

17. "Song melos" vs "charm melos"

18. Folk speech, pagan spells, and "beyonsense" language

19. Anti-absorptive traditions within twentieth-century poetry

20. Basil Bunting's "Briggflats"

21. "Imploded sentence" works

22. Peter Seaton

23. Steve McCaffery's "Panopticon"

24. The performance of nonabsorbable texts

25. Brecht's doubling of attention

26. "Distanced" theater

27. Eroticism and identity

28. Poetry and eroticism

29. Things that won't resolve

30. The utopian ecstatic

31. Inside ideology, but with a different perspective

32. Consciousness, experience, and poetry

33. Piombino's "combinatorials"

34. Nick Piombino and poetry's functions

35. Nick Piombino's "Boundary of Blur"

36. Stein, Creeley, and attention

37. Grenier's "Phantom Anthems"

38. Bernstein on Scalapino

39. "A social value of poetry"

40. Language's "thickness"

41. Kinds of fragments

42. Bernstein on the visual arts

44. The language of America 1880-1900

45. Language and the "perceptual and conceptual unconscious"

46. Poetry and the changing nineteenth-century language base

47. "Anything shut in with you can sing"

48. The artificialness of language

49. American poetry in the 1880s and 1890s

50. Lafcadio Hearn

51. Henry James and the end of English

52. "Be as artificial as possible"

53. Bernstein's appreciation of William Morris

54. Pound, order, and polyvocality

55. Pound and fascism

56. Politically evasive work

57. Stein's "wordness"

58. Twentieth century language

59. Bernstein's "Content's Dream"

60. Combinatorial poetry

61. Bruce Andrews' "counterhegemonic project"

62. The test of a poetics

63. Are artists becoming philosophers?

64. On categories

65. A poem as a "network of details"

66. What is tribal work?

67. Comprehending the contemporary

68. "Radical modernism"

69. Particularity and partiality in New American Poetry

70. The social dimension of language

71. The "psychic imperatives" of post-war poetry

72. "Newer" American Poets

73. Bernstein on political polling

74. Formal dynamics and their context

75. Erica Hunt's "The Politics of Poetic Form"

76. Against exposure

77. Susan Howe and the recorded voice

78. Bernstein on Goffman

79. Losing approaches to Pound's politics

> all notes from Charles Bernstein's A Poetics (1992)

> created January-April 2025

> part of unfinished everything

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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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