SOURCE: A review of A Poetics, in American Literature, Vol. 65, No. 1, March, 1993, pp. 173-74.

In the following review, Golding offers a positive assessment of A Poetics.

I can imagine Language poet Charles Bernstein’s appearance with a prestigious scholarly press being greeted with a certain darkly gleeful skepticism (“See, they all sell out in the end”), especially by those readers who like their avant-gardes pure and useless or by those eager to see Language writing rendered harmless by its perceived assimilation into mainstream academic discourse. As Bernstein argues, however, “conventions … can best be understood institutionally” (225). It seems perversely appropriate, then, that one forum for maintaining the conventions governing discourse on poetics should also become, in Bernstein’s hands, a forum for their attempted dissolution. Questioning the implications of Bernstein’s move from small presses to Harvard should not be used as a strategy for ignoring or reminorizing the...