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Quotes from Charles Bernstein

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
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
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 poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.
~ Charles Bernstein
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
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
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
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