SOURCE: “Charles Bernstein's Dark City: Polis, Policy, and the Policing of Poetry,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 24, No. 5, September-October, 1995, pp. 35-44.

In the following review of Dark City, Lazer examines the distinguishing characteristics and recurring thematic preoccupations of Bernstein's poetry. Lazer argues that Bernstein's experimental verse successfully challenges accepted notions about poetry, language, and society, and that the exclusion of his work from mainstream literary journals and anthologies is an egregious oversight.

                              Of course, what many have regarded as a liberating permission to write in otherwise unsanctioned ways will provoke professional sanction-takers to see only red.(1) 

(Dark City, 74)

Charles Bernstein’s writing, particularly his poetry, tends to generate two kinds of response. First, the mere mention of his name occasions a metonymic substitution: “Bernstein” becomes the means for an evaluation (or attack on, summary, or advocacy) of Language poetry, and his poetry recedes into a more general discussion...