Brief passage from "Dysraphism" (1984)

Charles Bernstein

Did a wind come just as you got up or were you protecting me from it? I felt the abridgement of imperatives, the wave of detours, the sabre- rattling of inversion. All lit up and no place to go. Blinded by avenue and filled with adjacency. Arch or arched at. So there becomes bottles, hushed conductors, illustrated proclivities for puffed-up benchmarks. Morose or comatose. "Life is what you find, existence is what you repudiate." A good example of this is 'Dad pins puck.' Sometimes something sunders; in most cases, this is no more than a hall. No where to go but pianissimo (protection of market soaring).

OED entry on puck
For a few suppplemental readings on/in language poetry by Bob Perelman, click here.
For an essay on language poetry by Susan Schultz, click here.

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