This text explores the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Addressing many interrelated issues, Charles Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on "LANGUAGE," the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing. Bernstein offers essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech and speeches veering into song, illuminating the developments in the late 1990s in contemporary poetry with his own contributions to them.