Abstract: In poetry, sound is closely related to meaning, but the sound of poetry has been overlooked, all along, in academic studies. Generally speaking, the sound of poetry can be divided into “text sound” and “performance sound.” Text sound includes three types of sounds: “external sound,” “internal sound,” and “pitch of poetic language.” Charles Bernstein, an American Language Poet, defines his poetry as sound writing. His echopoetics, which is sound-based, largely sets forth a kind of acoustic aesthetics. Through an analysis of the text sounds in Bernstein's poems, one may find out that the main sound modes of his poetry are “sound fragmentation,” “sound blanks,” and “sound repetition,” whereas his “homophonic translation” is literally the sound of translation, which in turn functions as an embodiment of sound repetition. Overall, the sound in Bernstein's poetry sometimes corresponds to the semantics, reinforcing its implications, but sometimes it contradicts the semantics, reconstructing its implications with pluralities and paradoxes. The acoustic aesthetics in Bernstein's poetry demonstrates the sublime of Postmodernism, embodies the “pataquerical inquiry” and the fusion of Chinese and Western thoughts that he advocated, and enriches the traditional poetics.

Key words: echopoetics, Bernstein, Language Poetry, acoustic aesthetics