All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems by Charles Bernstein
Since emerging some thirty years ago as a protagonist and central thinker of Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has been many poets to many people—or so he would have us believe. As he proclaims in the 1999 poem “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold”:
I am a Buffalo poet in Providence, a London
poet in Cambridge, a Kootenay School
of Writing poet in Montreal….
I am an experimental poet
to those who value craft over interrogation, an
avant-garde poet to those who see the future
in the present.
Of course, Bernstein is at once all and none of these things, or, more properly,