It took me more than one reading of The Sophist to understand why, at the conclusion of “The Simply,” Bernstein takes a step back rather than going forward. I think it is to lure readers in, particularly those who have not yet sipped from the langpo Kool-Aid. On the surface, at least, “The Voyage of Life” is a simpler, more traditional poem than “The Simply,” whereas the works that immediately follow thereafter:

• A dense prose piece bordering on a story entitled ”Fear and Trespass”
  
• The daft one-act play entitled ”Entitlement” (it might have been called “Seven Scenes in Seven Pages”) whose characters consist of Liubov Popova, Jenny Lind and John Milton
  
• A poem titled “Outrigger,” whose text comes across as carefully bonkers, its lineation – its key relationship to the principle of self-sameness – extra leaded, literally, lines spaced more or less at “one-and-one-half spaces"
  
• “The Years As Swatches,” a long single stanza composed of very short lines – only one line runs four words longs, only six run three
  
• Another story, “The Only Utopia Is in a Now (Another Side of Gagenga . . . frent)
  
• A 16-line two-stanza poem entitled, “From Lines of Swinburne"
  
• Another poem, “Special Pleading,” that opens up its lineation
  
• A poem entirely composed of short bits divided by asterisks in the manner of Ted Berrigan
  
• “Dysraphism,” one of Bernstein’s signature poems, roughly in the manner of “The Simply,” whose title Bernstein explains in a rather chatty footnote
  
• “By Cuff,” a poem of just five lines:

Flew, then flew
through the hall
then flew
a wasted monument
recalled to perfidy

• “Hitch World,” a three-page poem of dense, but not necessarily deep, stanza
• “Like DeCLAraTionS in a HymIE CEMetArY,” which begins

WheTHer oriented or RETurned tO
sTAndiNg posture
ACCUMULAteD
advicement and bASicALly

Try sneaking that one through spell-check. The purpose of this list, which characterizes the first 50 of over 170 pages, is to give a sense of how like a gyroscope The Sophist proceeds, perpetually off-balance, lunging, lurching from text to text, its only “center” something that each of this works conceivably points to but which proves impossible to nail. It is somewhere in between all of the above.