Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984

Content’s Essays 1975-1984 is the celebrated introduction to language poetry by one of its leading practitioners. First published in 1986 and now a classic study of poetry and poetics in late twentieth-century America, this collection offers thirty-seven of Bernstein’s essays, including the influential works “Thought’s Measure” and “Semblance.” Bernstein ranges over poets and visual artists as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Olsen, and Robert Creeley. At once irreverent and deeply serious, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Karl Marx, Content’s Dream stakes out a clear cultural and aesthetic position for one extraordinary poet, for language poetry, and for our time.