The Darkness He Called Night

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was born in 1950. He is a poet, critic, educator and advocate of experimental and innovative poetry, one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement which came into prominence in the 1970s and influenced the development of American poetry at the turn of the century. He has published numerous collections of poetry, most recent of which is “Near/Miss” (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and several collections of essays, including “Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions” (University of Chicago Press, 2011). From 1990 to 2003, he was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Director of the Poetics Program. At SUNY Buffalo, he co-founded the Electronic Poetry Center with Loss Glazier (epc.buffalo.edu), and in 2002, he was appointed SUNY Distinguished Professor – the university’s highest rank.

Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. Other awards and honors include The 1999 Roy Harvy Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; the University of Pennsylvania Dean’s Award for Innovative Teaching; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; and the Bollingen Prize (2019).

Virtue’s a kind
of despair,
masquerading as care.
A bitter
current is for
virtue sweet.
Sublime wine sours
its mouth.
Snakes eat from
its hands.
Jackasses obey its
whim. Self-
nomination papers its
path. Method
is its M.O.,
holding tight to
a higher
love and fervently
displayed empathies.
Virtue’s sword
is truth, in
love with
itself, at odds
with others.
Celebrating standards it
fashions, virtue
jams miscreants, shams
malcontents, shaming
those abjure improvement.
The passion
of virtue is
reprimand. Nothing
is more beautiful
to virtue
than compelling justice
and shattering
dissent: slashes in
a pan
that will never
absolve aesthetics.

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Read an introduction to this poem.

Charles Bernstein:

was born in 1950. He is a poet, critic, educator and advocate of experimental and innovative poetry, one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement which came into prominence in the 1970s and influenced the development of American poetry at the turn of the century. He has published numerous collections of poetry, most recent of which is “Near/Miss” (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and several collections of essays, including “Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions” (University of Chicago Press, 2011). From 1990 to 2003, he was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Director of the Poetics Program. At SUNY Buffalo, he co-founded the Electronic Poetry Center with Loss Glazier (epc.buffalo.edu), and in 2002, he was appointed SUNY Distinguished Professor – the university’s highest rank.

Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. Other awards and honors include The 1999 Roy Harvy Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; the University of Pennsylvania Dean’s Award for Innovative Teaching; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; and the Bollingen Prize (2019).

Publish date: 11.07.2019

Also read:

Julia Fiedorczuk:

a poet, writer, translator and lecturer at the University of Warsaw, Institute of English Studies.

Charles Bernstein’s poetry is relentlessly experimental, playful, eclectic, irreverent, often humorous and sometimes uncomfortable when it is at odds with the readers’ expectations or convictions. As one of the founders of the so-called ‘Language school’ of poetry (usually spelled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), Bernstein explores the uses of language within diverse social contexts. His work focuses on the ways we rely on words, expressions, metaphors, and on the meanings our culture attaches to its own verbal productions. Bernstein’s poetic work often mocks the jargon of politics, popular culture, advertising, corporate culture or academia. By foregrounding the hidden workings of ideology in language, Bernstein’s work defamiliarizes our deeply held beliefs and values. As Bernstein says in an interview with Bradford Senning: “I want to engage the materials of the culture, derange them as they have deranged me, sound them out, as they sound me out.”

“The Darkness He Called Night” is, of course, a reference to the Biblical act of creation – more precisely, the moment when God divided light from darkness, creating the first dichotomy. Possibly no other pair of concepts generates as many metaphors as these two, light being associated not just with daytime but also with wisdom, virtue, happiness and hope. Darkness, on the other hand, connotes evil, ignorance and danger. These associations have become so commonplace that we are hardly aware of their metaphorical character, as of the fact that both literal and metaphorical meanings of darkness and light are mutually constructive and therefore interdependent.

The Darkness He Called Night

Also read:

An Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s “The Darkness He Called Night”

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