The Sophist is a jumble, a jungle, a jangle of – dare I say? – overdetermined elements hodged-podged together. If it has an antecedent – there are in fact a few – perhaps the most direct is the conservatory at Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, an interior shot for which the ever-resourceful director Orson Welles (a man with more than a little of the Bernstein in him, or verse visa) matted in footage from an old RKO pre-historic adventure. Thus in the background of this too-lush garden one sees a pterodactyl in flight. Work after work in this book proceeds likewise, the obvious & the impossible in a constant, slightly frenetic mambo, not by virtue of reinforcing & building upon the unwritten law of self-sameness, as books of poems are supposed to but rather just its opposite – as if each text were antithetical, pushing as hard as could be to establish a new space not announced or even fathomable from what’s come before.

Bernstein himself says as much at the outset of the opening poem, coyly titled “The Simply”:

Nothing can contain the empty stare that ricochets
haphazardly against any purpose. My hands
are cold but I see nonetheless with an infrared
charm.

Sentence after sentence in “The Simply” skates always in different directions – ricochets is very literal here, as is the claim that Nothing can contain this – until, seven pages downstream, one arrives at an equally straightforward denouement:

“You have such a horrible sense of equity which
is inequitable because there’s no such
thing as equity.” The text, the beloved?
Can I stop living when the pain gets too
great? Nothing interrupts this moment.
False.

As is always the case in Bernstein’s work, that which appears as if written “haphazardly” is in fact obsessively scripted – equity in that first sentence in all of its conceivable meanings, including in that last instance real estate. Similarly Nothing interrupts is not the denial of action, but rather the naming of its actor. It’s a dizzying performance, intended I think to connect the reader with the Bernstein of his earlier books, familiar in his lushness, dazzling in the constant display of jaw-dropping devices, drenching us in the humidity of these tropes.