Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Satire on the Poetic Enterprise
Charles Bernstein has gotten a bad rap as a language poet impossible to understand, but that is not the truth. Most of his poems are quite easy to understand. We've had comic poets before, like Swift and Pope, but never a comic poet to so lovingly make fun of the whole serious poetic enterprise. If you want serious, read Heterosexual: a Love Story. Heterosexual: A Love Story. The closest in spirit to Bertsein might be O'Hara. Berstein's poem written as a complaint letter by a rider to the chief of the subway system is worth the price of the book alone. ... Read more

Product Description
Cultural Studies. THE POLITICS OF POETIC FORM: POETRY AND PUBLIC POLICY is a series of essays from a discussion that occurred at the New School for Social Research in New York. The discussion mines the relationship between poetic composition and political expression. Poetry's relationship to public policy typically has a questionable margin of relation. Not only does this volume posit that poetry is a dynamic medium for the consideration of political ideas, it focuses on the ideological weight specific formal innovations bring to poetry. Some of the writers include Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Bernstein for President
I have to admit that I feel a bit depressed when reading Girly Man.Why?Because I know it's going to be awhile before I find another book of poetry this good, this funny, this original. Not all the poems work, but the best are far better than what anyone else is producing these days.The rest of this review is intentionally left blank.

Anything can inspire a good poem
Charles Bernstein's writing combines a scholar's discipline, an advocate's passion, a theorist's breadth, and a readiness to deflate everything with a good joke. In Girly Man, anything can serve as inspiration for a poem or essay: paintings in an exhibition, highway signs, and even war. Bernstein is among those rare writers who can perform their works effectively, and you can hear recordings of his reading online at Penn Sound and at the Electronic Poetry Center.

Fundamental
Bernstein is in top form.The influence of revolutionary poetics is apparent now across the internet, film, television and literature.Bernstein is without a doubt a fundamental contributor to these evolutions, and this book should not be missed. ... Read more

Product Description
Content's Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 is the celebrated introduction to language poetry by one of its leading practitioners, Charles Bernstein. First published in 1986, and now a classic study of the poetry and poetics of late-twentieth-century America, this collection of essays conducts us with wit, intelligence, and consummate style through the elaborate relations between language and culture. Bernstein considers verbal, pictorial, and filmic language to understand why writing is never the unmediated expression of personal feeling but always charged with latent meaning.
Addressing a wide range of arts, Bernstein's essays move gracefully from discussions of Mad Max, Stan Brakhage, and Arakawa, to William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky and Jackson Mac Low. Rather than propose grand theories, Bernstein synthesizes the many sets of ideas that are necessary for a practical understanding of contemporary culture. Reading a variety of texts and expanding on his own thinking and method, Bernstein provides a brilliant introduction not only to language writing but to all avant-garde literary ambitions of the last two decades of the century.
At once irreverent and deeply serious, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Stanley Cavell, Content's Dream stakes out a clear cultural and aesthetic position for one extraordinary poet, for language poetry, and for our time.

... Read more

Product Description

This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. "Artifice of Absorption," a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means," he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.

Insisting on the vital need for radical innovation, Bernstein traces the traditions of modern poetry back to Stein and Wilde, taking issue with those critics who see in the "postmodern" a loss of political and aesthetic relevance. Sometimes playful, often hortatory, always intense, he joins in the debate on cultural diversity and the definition of modernism. We encounter Swinburne and Morris as surprising precursors, along with considerations of Wittgenstein, Khlebnikov, Adorno, Jameson, and Pac-Man. A Poetics is both criticism and poetry, both tract and song, with no dull moments.

Customer Reviews (2)

I AGREE: GREAT FIRST ESSAY
Responding to what the previous poster wrote: The first chapter in the book, "Artifice as Absorption" is a captivating and provocative essay on what makes so-called "difficult" literature valuable. As if to prove his point about how "anti-absorptive" works (such as the writing of Beckett, Gertrude Stein, LANGUAGE poets like Bernstein) are sometimes more engaging than your typical potboiler, Bernstein has produced an unlikely page-turner here. Among the chapter's "artificial" effects: it's written in verse, and it has footnotes. And one warning: it probably will be difficult to decipher if you're not somewhat conversant with literary theory. But if you're interested in literature, especially poetry, Bernstein's is an invaluable take on some of the debates currently raging over what makes verse, especially difficult or avant-garde verse, worth worrying over. I particularly like his point that "common-voice" poetry (like Gary Snyder's or Robert Bly's), though the accepted model for "honest" poetry, is really doubly artificial, because it's hiding its artifice behind a masquerade of plainspokenness.

Full disclousre: I'm a grad student and a poet (though not as avant- as Bernstein) and I really loved this essay. I'm still working through the rest of the book, which I checked out from the library.

chuck amok
READ THE FIRST ESSAY IN THIS BOOK REPEAT ... Read more

Product Description
Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer brilliant and wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors--including Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe--cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Listen to this book
What do poetry slams have in common with traditional poetry readings?
More than one may think.

Close Listening, edited by Charles Bernstein, offers 17 perspectives on how contemporary poetry has been practiced as a performance art. Nearly ten years after its initial publication, this book remains fresh and stimulating.

Much literary criticism has neglected the auditory and performance aspects of the poem, Bernstein writes. But a poem's sound and its meaning are aspects of each other, neither prior, neither independent.

This collection of essays argues against the assumption that a poem's text is primary, while a poet's performance of the poem is secondary, and fundamentally inconsequential to the "poem itself." Bernstein observes that, in a poetry performance, explicit value is placed almost exclusively on the acoustic production of a single unaccompanied speaking voice.

Contributors include Bruce Andrews, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, and others; some performers in their own right.

Publisher's summary of contents
*

From the publisher:

Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.

Contents: Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Sound's Measures

Susan Stewart, Letter on Sound

Nick Piombino, The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry

Bruce Andrews, Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Informalism

Marjorie Perloff, After Free-Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries

Susan Howe, Either/Ether

Performing Words

Johanna Drucker, Visual Performance of the Poetic Text Steve McCaffery, Voice in Extremis

Dennis Tedlock,Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability

Bob Perelman, Speech Effects: The Talk as Genre

Peter Quartermain, Sound Reading

Close Hearings / Historical Settings

Jed Rasula, Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding

Peter Middleton, The Contemporary Poetry Reading

Lorenzo Thomas, Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement

Maria Damon, Was that "Different," "Dissident" or "Dissonant"? Poetry (n) the Public Speak: Slams, Open Readings and Dissident Traditions

Susan Schultz,Local Vocals: Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcoloniality

Afterword

Ron Silliman, Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading ... Read more

Product Description
With an ear tuned to the most delicate musical effects, an eye for exact and heterogeneous details, and a mind bent on experiment, Louis Zukofsky was preeminent among the radical Objectivist poets of the 1930s. This is the first collection to draw on the full range of Zukofsky's poetry-containing short lyrics, versions of Catullus, and generous selections from "A", his 24-part"poem of a life"-and provides a superb introduction to a modern master of whom the critic Guy Davenport has written: "Every living American poet worth a hoot has stood aghast before the steel of his integrity."

The most formally radical poet to emerge among the second wave of American modernists, Louis Zukofsky continues to influence younger poets attracted to the rigor, inventiveness, and formal clarity of his work. Born on New York's Lower East Side in 1904 to emigrant parents, Zukofsky achieved early recognition when he edited an issue of Poetry devoted to the Objectivist poets, including George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. In addition to an abundance of short lyrics and a sound-based version of the complete poems of Catullus, he worked for most of his adult life on the long poem "A" of which he said: "In a sense the poem is an autobiography: the words are my life."

Zukofsky's work has been described as difficult although he himself said: "I try to be as simple as possible." In the words of editor Charles Bernstein, "This poetry leads with sound and you can never go wrong following the sound sense... Zukofsky loved to create patterns, some of which are apparent and some of which operate subliminally... Each word, like a stone dropped in a pond, creates a ripple around it. The intersecting ripples on the surface of the pond are the pattern of the poem." Here for the first time is a selection designed to introduce the full range of Zukofsky's extraordinary poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Worm Turns
This book came out the EXACT MONTH I happened to be reading Zukofsky: Man and Poet, a collection of appreciations and essays assembled just after his death in 1979. What's sad is that the essays all start from the assumption that Zukofsky is almost totally unknown except among poets, a fact that caused him some bitterness in his final years. He died just before his masterpiece, "A," came out in a single edition from UC Press.

Flash forward a generation to this handsome Library of America edition. The pros will quibble over the sense of excerpting Zukofsky, which Z. himself tried to prevent in his lifetime. But it's hard to see this book as anything less than a vindication of the quiet, steady devotion Zukofsky showed to poetry over his productive life. Charles Bernstein, who's about the best ambassador the avant-garde's got to the publishing mainstream, is a great choice for the project: his selections are sympathetic and smart, aware of the larger work while giving you enough tantalizing bits to satisfy a healthy curiosity. I doubt Zukofsky's work has ever reached as broad an audience as it will here: it may be just the end run around the growing Zukofsky industry his work needs to find fresh readers. The poems deserve it, and somehow I think he'd be tickled pink to know this is out there.
... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 2004. The length of the article is 4404 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A conversation with Charles Bernstein.(Prosody & poetry: a panel)(Interview)
Author: David Caplan
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2004
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 62Issue: 1Page: 131(12)

Article Type: Interview

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on September 22, 2002. The length of the article is 312 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: David Antin and Charles Bernstein. A Conversation with David Antin.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
Author: David Andrews
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2002
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 22Issue: 3Page: 172(1)

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A contrarian and Emersonian shakeup of US poetics
"My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive,taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play,risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voiceand forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poeticdiction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk,secular conversion, and fun.Sinatra did it "my way," andCharles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers moviewhile reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues ona used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" inthe United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not forthose whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol,and sheep. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

riffs to asunder where scattered skulls don't mind being so
Bernstein's opening sonnet aptly sets the tone for this book: "I want no paradise only to be/ drenched in the downpour of words, fecund with tropicality."What the reader gets is not only a downpour but hail storms, soft flakes of snowy words and fine mists as well. And the tropical zone is exactly where this poetry reside -- a hot and colorful place where poetry grows wild.If you are looking for something typical, look no further, you might find a proverbial saying:"If I had a dime/ for every hour I've had/ peace of mind/ I'd still be a poor man."If you are looking for iambs gutted and filled with savory signifieds, take a glance at "Precisely and Moreover"(but who looks for that?)...:"I died in chance abandon, made the clearing/ tough to take, or went to meet a bleat of/ feigning belly crates..." (reader response? I died in these lines with their seeming randomness and made what is normally easy going poetry, a clearing out of these poetic acres tough to take -- difficult reading/writing... The dadaism of "a bleat of feigning belly crates" obstaclizes this particular plot. This poetry engages if you relax the ax a bit.As for this rating, it's merely a comment on the disdain of "the disdain of destination,"i.e., what was it that coherced the spittle on the spam, that jacked the spam from my ram rod ideation, that got my ideation in a bunch,and the bunch in a a hissy kit of words.This book chills the pill. ... Read more

Product Description
Details how to develop and operate a chain restaurant company, focusing on the attributes that can enable a chain to capitalize on the industry's unique challenges and excel in customer service, performance and success. The authors, both recognized restaurant industry experts, interviewed 100 chain executives to include a wide and diverse spectrum of leaders and chains. Scores of case studies demonstrate successes and failures. ... Read more

Product Description
"The Sophist" was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, "The Sophist" demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including "My Way" and "With Strings". If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric, then "The Sophist" is model for a rhetorical poetry that interrogates truth in the name of reason. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Essays/ Criticism/ Poetics. Charles Bernstein, in his introduction, argues that "FIGURING THE WORD is a work of poetics rather than criticism or theory in that these essays are the products of doing as much as thinking, of printing as much as writing, of designing as much as researching, of typography as much as composition, of autobiography as much as theory." These essays, from one of the foremost writers on artists' books and visual poetry, are diverse and vital, and cover such topics as "The Word Made Flesh," "Language in the Landscape," and "Writing as Artifact." Throughout, there is a sense of language as an object with tangible mass; as something that can be dissected and scrutinized without losing its innate vitality. Figuring the Word: Essays of Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics collects diverse writings by Johanna Drucker previously published in literary or scholarly journals.Topics include: "The Word Made Flesh," "Writing as Artifact," "Visual Poetics," "Artists Books Past and Future," "The Future of Writing," & "Personal Writing."The book also includes an anecdotal checklist of Drucker's artist's books and an informative introduction by poet Charles Bernstein. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent Resource with A Personal Edge
Drucker is undeniably THE authority on how the visual word gets displayed and used within the book form today.Thus this collection of interviews, essays, poetic reflections, etc isbroad-reaching in its reflections both on others work and her own origins as a poet and printbook-maker. It is a book which makes her reflections palpable, personable and inspires and invites the reader to participate in the process of asking "where now?" concerning our next step in Figuring the Word withing the book's frame. A great pair to her much headier, scholarly book The Visible Word.

Very Enjoyable
I really enjoyed these essays, which range from theory to personal reflection. When discussing specific projects that she has been involved with, it's fascinating they way you are drawn in to feel like you're seeing the behind-the-scenes of the creation process.The treatments of issues of theory were cogent, and well presented.I confess that I dog-eared many a page.The moments of personal reflection were at times almost too personal to bear...not what you might expect from a collection of essays, but welcome to this reader, nonetheless. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Back Cover Copy
"In With Strings, Charles Bernstein plays `Charles Bernstein' with furious comedic virtuosity, very much as Lenny Bruce played `Lenny Bruce' or Charlie Chaplin `Charlie Chaplin.' The comparison of this remarkable collection of poems with the work of such serious and defiant comedians is indicative of only one facet of Bernstein's writings, but it is apt: his work is iconoclastic and revolutionary. Bernstein's poetry, however, is driven by aesthetic as well as social passions. The poems that are With Strings are addressed to the great questions perpetually facing art: What is it? Why is it? How is it? And in this context, inevitably, the presence of artlessness is discovered close at hand, never to be subsumed. It is in poetry's encounter with what is never to be subsumed that the brilliance of Bernstein's work erupts."
-Lyn Hejinian
*
"Charles Bernstein is one of the finest poets writing today, and certainly one of our greatest satirists. His poetry presents a profound and highly individual critique of contemporary half-truths, speech forms, and modes of expression, and does it so graphically and with such great good humor that the reader is left breathless-laughing and crying at the same time as the shocks of recognition register."
-Marjorie Perloff

*

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac.

Bernstein remains one of America'sliveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together.

From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

*

Charles Bernstein is the Director of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to My Way, he is the author of two collections of essays, A Poetics and Content's Dream, and more than twenty books of poems, including Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Islets/Irritations and Rough Trades. ... Read more