York School–based poetics of Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, and the fu-
sion of “nation language” and “video style” in the work of a proto–Language
poet like Kamau Brathwaite.^44
Movement ethos, itself the stepchild of the post-structuralist critique of
authorship, has for too long now occluded the critical need to discriminate
difference, to de¤ne the signature of the individual lyric subject in its com-
plex negotiations with its larger cultural and historical ¤eld of operation. In
the words of Charles Bernstein’s satiric little poem (My Way 3–4) on the lim-
its of structuralism, “Don’t Be So Sure (Don’t Be Saussure)”:
My cup is my cap
& my cap is my cup
When the coffee is hot
It ruins my hat
We clap and we slap
Have sup with our pap
But won’t someone please
Get me a drink154 Chapter 7