SOURCE: “Powetry,” in Sulfur, Vol. 36, Spring, 1995, pp. 209-12.

In the following excerpted review, DuPlessis comments on Bernstein's linguistic technique in Dark City.

Three political stances in poetry—this is what the combination of Charles Bernstein, Kamau Brathwaite, and Norma Cole offers (whom I shall briefly and alphabetically consider). All would be discussable as examples of a concern, which I very much favor, taken from Adorno. “Poetry is now possible only if language is thoroughly plowed up and turned over …” (Adorno, Notes to Literature, volume 2, Columbia University Press, 1992, 195; the essay called “Charmed Language,” 1967.) In the context of Adorno’s discussion, this is a rejection of the purely subjective, the neoromantic. The desire of the poet under his scrutiny (Rudolf Borchardt) was “to force the transsubjective, objectively binding quality of language” into a new sound, not archaic, not romantic, not laden with the museum of the poetic. In part, this...