The Sophist (Salt Modern Classics) (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Bernstein, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710009 ISBN 13: 9781844710003

Publisher: Salt, 2004

Synopsis

The Sophist was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, The Sophist demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including My Way and With Strings. If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric, then The Sophist is model for a rhetorical poetry that interrogates truth in the name of reason.

About this title

About the Authors

Charles Bernstein was born in Manhattan in 1950. He has published 27 collections of poetry including With Strings, Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1984 and Controlling Interests. His essays are included in My Way: Speeches and Poems and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Bernstein is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ron Silliman has written and edited 24 books of poetry and criticism to date, including the anthology In the American Tree. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, ®, Toner, What and Xing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why I Am Not a Christian

One holds these promises (holds

to them) amidst the make-believe

mayhem of another day

each farther from

that resolution in renouncing

aspired to as cat its

pawn. You always throw it down

but you never pick it up. Everything

everywhere circumscribed by its

physical, which is to say habitual

array, the necessity to order what

is otherwise always possible. The frequent

opportunities I have possessed of

observing the thousand acts of amiability

and kindness, feeling by conduct turned

to expectation and ripened to

remorse. You cannot suppose

and cannot not to. The

freight is slumberous friend

to a commoded journey ― nearly

a smile or only a poor

bred thing. Profits will

never displace the value of

this self-made masquerade.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844710009
• ISBN 13: 9781844710003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200