Aesthetic Theory
the purposelessness
of no
purpose doesn’t
have a
purpose just
like the
sublime’s got
no punch
line but
spiked with
absinthe
and twists
of lime
the punch
‘ll get
you every
time
For Régis and Pierre
they say
a door
slams closed
& another
opens, but
isn’t it
a door
shuts &
then another
Deictic [Deistic]
What do you mean by that?
This?
Charles Bernstein is the author, most recently, of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). His work was the subject of The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bové, the Fall 2021 issue of boundary 2. With Davide Balula, he wrote a series of AI-generated poems published as Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End (2023).