Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984

Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies

by Charles Bernstein

Content's Essays 1975-1984 is the celebrated introduction to language poetry by one of its leading practitioners. First published in 1986 and now a classic study of poetry and poetics in late twentieth-century America, this collection offers thirty-seven of Bernstein's essays, including the influential works "Thought's Measure" and "Semblance." Bernstein ranges over poets and visual artists as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Olsen, and Robert Creeley. At once irreverent and deeply serious, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Karl Marx, Content's Dream stakes out a clear cultural and aesthetic position for one extraordinary poet, for language poetry, and for our time.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Language, Essays

465 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Bernstein's highly anticipated new work, All the Whisky in Heaven, will be published in Spring 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also to be released in the upcoming year is a Companion to Charles Bernstein, which will be published by Salt Publishing, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Nielsen Innovation of the Year award.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

sick if you like reading modernist theory

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that introduced me to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry way back in the eighties....