SOURCE: A review of A Poetics, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 4, Autumn, 1993, pp. 830-31.

In the following review, Pratt offers a negative assessment of A Poetics.

“There is of course no state of American poetry,” argues Charles Bernstein at the beginning of his highly polemical work, A Poetics, but there are instead “the poetries of this New American fin de siècle.” If one accepts Bernstein’s premise that only contemporary American poetry of the sort he writes is of any real interest, then it is easy enough to agree with him. If, on the other hand, one still holds that Modern Poetry existed and continues to exist, then his argument is at best special pleading for what passes in certain fashionable circles for poetry, a far cry from the high art of poetry practiced during the twentieth century.

Poetry as art is out: “I care most...