SOURCE: “The Return of the Repressed: Language Poetry and New Formalism,” in After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America, Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 135-64.

In the following excerpt, Shetley discusses the intellectual and aesthetic aspirations of the language poets and offers analysis of Bernstein's “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree.” Shetley contends that Bernstein's verse, despite its sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, is overly easy to compose due to its lack of balance between meaning and randomness.

In the early 1980s American poetry seemed to have passed beyond the era of contentious theoretical debate initiated in the 1950s by the Beat and Projectivist movements. James Breslin, surveying the American poetry scene in 1984, proposed as a metaphor not the “peaceful public park” of the “middle fifties” or the “war zone” of the “sixties,” but “a small affluent town in Northern California,” where “there are no ideological...