Bernstein stuff...

I often mention Charles Bernstein - who in 1978 cofounded the "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" magazine, which ran until 1981 - and his activist approach to generate an immediacy of language; to carve up expectation in the devices and forms of poetry. (PDF Bio)

Today I realised that my partner has him as a friend on Facebook!

Anyway, here's a couple of quotes: "The reinvention, the making of a poetry for our time, is the only thing that makes poetry matter. And that means, literally, making poetry matter, that is making poetry that intensifies the matter or materiality of poetry—acoustic, visual, syntactic, semantic. Poetry is very much alive when it finds ways of doing things in a media-saturated environment that only poetry can do, but very much dead when it just retreads the same old same old..." from Against National Poetry Month As Such by Charles Bernstein - Author of My Way: Speeches and Poems

"Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains."

MORE: Charles Bernstein - My Way || CB's Website