Taking note Book

I enjoyed this book thoroughly as it gives an overview of Language Poetry-- its strong social and intellectual tradition and also its roots as response to the contemporary critical theory of Derrida, Adorno and Barthes. The three language poets, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Susan Howe each receive a chapter with an excellent discussion of specific poems which point to their poetic vision. The first chapter after the introduction allows the reader to explore "aporia" -
(state of puzzlement) and see where Wittgenstein comes in: "Writing is rescue from nothing we can name... delivers us from the transparent logic of language to language of texture and uncertainty."

I admit, I usually feel distress when I encounter a language we think is our own, represented to us as not our own, but something that is at one and the same time intimately familiar and unaccountably strange. To loosely quote discussion of the poem by Bernstein, "Standing Target" -- my notes read:
an undefined garden and set of language games...
to be moved by this poem, “all that is required is the experience of uncertainty or the memory of having been, even briefly, abandoned. Here is a demonstration of syntax in a state of slippage, permitting the novice reader to move ‘at just about’ the ‘verge’ of understanding—or as if at the edge of a presumably ‘polite society’ by which the wandering word is characterized.
As play of word, or word of play, truth is nomadic—a matter of omission, not emission.

if “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden,” the garden may be no more than a mirage."

Reinfeld is a scholar with a personable style.