Worth finding.
It's his Selected.
So many Charles Bernsteins.
The strange parodies of the didactic verse tradition he does so well. Rhyming his way through nightmares of the actual. His lick-splickety plasticity in the early poems--almost Vorticist. But a funny Vorticist. Don't think Vorticism had that many funny ones. He is. One.
And the left is right political jabs.
Everywhere in his poems.
He's funny. Even when he's grim.
"Nothing is absurd when people are being killed
around you like flies"
And of course he knows manifestos are schtick and does them that way.
Gotta love the longer poems in which cultural diatribes reveal themselves to be only highly medicated ballrooms at sea, and unmoor and float away from their vessels.
The political landscape is seascape.
He undoes rhetoric so beautifully.
Language in deshabille.
The pretend modesty of the real gets mocked.
The irreal's at the wheel.
Rough trades, indeed.
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