Charles Bernstein

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Biographical note:  Charles Bernstein was born in Manhattan in 1950. He has published 27 collections of poetry including With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 2000) and Controlling Interests (reprinted by Roof in 2004). His essays are included in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (reprinted by Northwestern University Press, 2001). Bernstein is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Author page: epc.buffalo.edu.

Biographical note:  

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710003
ISBN-10:  1844710009
ISBN-13:  9781844710003
Author:  Charles Bernstein
Title:  The Sophist
Series:  Salt Modern Classics
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-04
Extent:  200pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  300 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 18.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Sophist was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, The Sophist demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including My Way and With Strings. If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric, then The Sophist is model for a rhetorical poetry that interrogates truth in the name of reason.

Table of contents:
The Text, the Beloved? Bernstein’s Sophist by Ron Silliman
The Simply
The Voyage of Life
Fear and Trespass
Entitlement
Outrigger
The Years As Swatches
The Only Utopia Is in a Now
From Lines of Swinburne
Special Pleading
Micmac Mall (Sunset at Inverness)
Dysraphism
By Cuff
Hitch World
Like DeCLAraTionS in a HymIE CEMetArY
Romance
I and the
Pafnucio Santo and the American Friend
The order of …
Renumberation
The Rudder of Inexorability
The Last Puritan
Acquiescence
Foreign Body Sensation
Team Bias
Searchless Warrant
Amblyopia
Total Body Clearance
Prosthesis
Use No Flukes
Safe Methods of Business
Why I Am Not a Christian
A Person Is Not an Entity Symbolic but the Divine Incarnate
Rose the Click for 23
Surface Reflectance
Brain Side View
The Harbor of Illusion

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Excerpt from book:  

Why I Am Not a Christian

One holds these promises (holds
to them) amidst the make–believe
mayhem of another day
each farther from
that resolution in renouncing
aspired to as cat its
pawn. You always throw it down
but you never pick it up. Everything
everywhere circumscribed by its
physical, which is to say habitual
array, the necessity to order what
is otherwise always possible. The frequent
opportunities I have possessed of
observing the thousand acts of amiability
and kindness, feeling by conduct turned
to expectation and ripened to
remorse. You cannot suppose
and cannot not to. The
freight is slumberous friend
to a commoded journey — nearly
a smile or only a poor
bred thing. Profits will
never displace the value of
this self–made masquerade.

Review quote:  Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. In the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country.

Paul Auster
Why Write?

Review quote:  Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material.

Robert Creeley
American Book Review