Charles Bernstein | Biography

Charles Bernstein is mostly widely known for his early influence in Language poetry. A loose constellation of experimental writers in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto, Language poetry emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and promoted new forms of experimental writing that paid attention to language itself. Much as, in the art world, movements such as Abstract Expressionism called attention to the materiality of their artistic medium, Language poetry engaged a similar task for writing. Exploring some of the overlooked breakthroughs of literary and philosophical predecessors such as Gertrude Stein, the Objectivist poets, and Wittgenstein, Language poetry at times is seen as developing and extending some of the experimentalism of the earlier Black Mountain and New York Schools, particularly as those schools had begun to explore the place of the "I" in the poem. At the center of the emerging school was L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, edited by Bernstein and...
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