Abstract
Near / Miss, Charles Bernstein's poetry collection, is replete with poems of distinctive styles and pluralistic forms in his idiosyncratic and artistic cosmos. With poetic antics, queerness, sarcasm, irony, and humor, the book showcases the motif of loss, chaos and trauma in postmodern America and the world. The multiplicity and multi-dimensional $M{\ddot{o}}bius$ effect in Near / Miss echo earlier Bernstein's poems, as well as poems by ancient and contemporary poets, with visual artists and musicians, and rabbis and Jewish philosophers. I argue that Near / Miss offers an apotheosis of echopoetics, which has been launched in his previous book Pitch of Poetry. Poems in the book reveal the dark and thick "pitch," namely the queer, the uncanny, the invisible, the disabled, the dispossessed, and the silenced poetic Other and make it explicit. The estrangement and alienation of $clich{\acute{e}}$ through diverse malaprops, mondegreens, non-sequiturs and fragmentations in Near / Miss aim at deconstructing the fixation of language so as to display the poetic Other. The motif of "nothingness" in echopoetics significantly multiplies its meanings. Nothingness mainly refers to the loss of origin, the defiance of tyranny, and the sublimity of the universe and the poetic Other. Melding his personal loss and misfortune, the current political discontent and the postmodern chaos in America and the world, nothingness in echopoetics resonates with American literary tradition and Zen with a healing and transforming power.