Customer Reviews

Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Classics)

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look how angry te fool above me got that's why you should read chuck-also he's funny 'nuff said

Once again, reading Charles Bernstein is a wasted intellectual exercise. Berbstein's theories about language are old hat, too. Jackson MacLow and many others beat him out for originality long ago. It is a pity to see that people like Marjorie Perloff, coming from the "Gertrude Stein School," so to speak, can be so fooled by Berstein's nonsense. He wastes paper with his over done, old hat experiments. Stein beat him to the things he attempts, too, and in a more interesting whimsical fashion. If one really wants to read about language and its implications, one does better to read Noam Chomsky. The thing is that Chomsky at least never pretends to be a poet, and at best, tops Bernstein for true intellectual power. Charles Bernstein would do well to attempt to really communicate some experience of life on THIS planet, not just his bookish attitudes. His claim to any originality is arrogant. We poets were all doing these sort of experiments all through the 1960's and 1970's before we decided to really write in order to communicate. Gertrude Stein and Jackson MacLow were our leaders, along with the French Dadaists and Symbolists, like Rimbaud. American poetry simply does not need Bernstein's influence or theories at this juncture. He sets things back, not forward. This silly emperor really has not clothes and it doesn't take a child to see it. We grown up poets know it two. And, we must tell the truth from the rooftops to save other younger poets from this foolery with l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.