“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks / in the manner of enclosure”: An Afterword to Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte

Abstract

The following text was published in German as an afterword to the bilingual poetry collection Charles Bernstein: Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte (München: luxbooks, 2014). Originally intended as a critical survey and introduction for German-language readers, it traces Bernstein's work as a radical modernist poet, distinguished scholar, and critical theorist in his own right from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. From his early poetry to L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E magazine, from his major books of poetry and collective avant-garde performances to his essays on poetics, Bernstein, I argue, consistently articulated with wit and precision why and how radical modernism affects what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.”