iVerse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains.i from The Revenge of the Poet-Critic p In iMy Way, i infamous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms-speeches and poems, interviews and essays-to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging. p Addressing many interrelated issues, 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, a