SOURCE: “Charles Bernstein's ‘The Simply,’” in Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory, edited by Antony Easthope and John O. Thompson, University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 34-9.

In the following essay, McGann offers a close reading of “The Simply,” by which he examines the linguistic relationships, structure, and underlying technique of Bernstein's verse.

being less interested in representing than enacting. 

(Charles Bernstein, ‘State of the Art/1990’)

Charles Bernstein’s poetry is (in)famous for its difficulty. Yet the work is difficult, it seems to me, only if read within an informational or communicative or representational framework—only if you assume that the poetry is there to be explicated for some allegorically or symbolically coded meaning. The poetry of course deploys representational forms—no language can dispense altogether with its communicative function—but those forms are subordinated in Bernstein’s work to other kinds of intention.

For Bernstein, poetic ‘meaning’ is...