Charles Bernstein > Quotes

“Michael writes of sun, but all I can think of is sunsickness, too much in the sun never a daughter. As if God's light still shone on we who have shaded our eyes. A few phrases remain but the drift is vanish. No way out and no way in--a straight call to blast, Adrift on stage for all to view--the cringe, the sigh, the curveilinear clide. The scholar-trancemaker hangs from the end of a trope and asks to be cut down. An umbilical cord signifies no less. Yet despite, i can now see or is it all a mitake? & does it splatter?”
― Charles Bernstein, Dark City

“What falls on air yet's lighter
than balloon? What betrays time
yet folds into a cut? Who flutters
at the sight of song then bellows
into flight? What height is
halved by precipice, what gorge
dissolved by trill? Who telling
tales upbraids a stump when
prattle veils its want?

Stone breaks it not, nor diamonds,
yet splits with just one word: it's
used for casting devils out; still,
fools obey it first. ”
― Charles Bernstein

“This is your poetry. Join the network to discover new ways of making meaning. Do not fixate on poem, voice, other striated and arbitrary meaning formations. We offer a processual, unbounded methodology that can be applied to any language and can include all languages.”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“Certainly in most local disputes today I would side with the rights of the individual and the minority, and when I think of who is promulgating the rationalist international position today – corporations, Republicans, Western supremacist groups, Zionist Israel, South Africa, Japanese corporations”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“Length and stress are both mutated in an open area where language mobilizes a network of meaning using the open space as a kind of time divided by an unquantified movement of the eye and breath while reading.”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“The poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.”
― Charles Bernstein

“once said that the “Language Poets” take a private space on the public beach. My response to this is that it takes a private place within for the individual to find any comfort or freedom at all on the public beach – which, in fact, is the only beach for most of us.”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“subjected. In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows that alongside the maturation of the capitalist system of production the scientific location & elucidation of “the individual” (preeminently through the psy- and medical sciences) becomes an increasingly effective means of control & repression. Keeping tabs.”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“Medicine, psychology, criminology, sociology. Which treat bodies as machinery (passim Descartes, the “father” of our Western subject). Developing alongside the dirty sciences. Industrialization, Taylorization, automation.”
― Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form

“Not for all the whiskey in heaven
Not for all the flies in Vermont
Not for all the tears in the basement
Not for a million trips to Mars

Not if you paid me in diamonds
Not if you paid me in pearls
Not if you gave me your pinky ring
Not if you gave me your curls

Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind

No, never, I'll never stop loving you
Not till my heart beats its last
And even then in my words and my songs
I will love you all over again”
― Charles Bernstein

“Reality is usually a poor copy of the imitation. The original / is an echo of what is yet to be.”
― Charles Bernstein