Poetry
"Writing about writing would be poetry itself."
—Levinas, Otherwise than Being
(Swans - October 18, 2010)
I.
Poetry is the inaugural literary form.
All subsequent genres of letter are only its flourishing sub-domains.
Nothing is alien to it.
All returns to poetic thinking are revolutionary.
The root is radical.
(Heidegger and Fascism recalled this perhaps better than Lenin and Communism.)
II.
Charles Bernstein is exemplary in his fidelity to the revolutionary root of poetry.
He rubs embers against the grain of history.
Draws his poetics from the future.
Yet he is no Leninist.
His critique of all capitalist organizational forms as commodity-reifications is overwhelmingly prescient.
Charles Bernstein is poetry after Lenin.
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About the Author
Maxwell Clark is, rather paradoxically, a writer living in New Haven, CT. He has been published in the Socialist Worker (U.S.), the Socialist Review (U.K.), and the decomP literary magazine. (back)