Charles Bernstein Web Log

Oakland Reading MP3

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:14:00 -0700

While in the Bay Area this past week ...
my reading at

New Reading Series
21 Grand, Oakland
June 21, 2009 (46:16)
MP3

(recorded by Andrew Kenower)

I read with Judith Goldman, but don't yet have a recording of her reading.

& "No Hiding Place"
my statement for the program
at the series site

link | 06-24-09

Archive 2009
Earlier 2009 posts

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Notable Books (2005)

PEPC Digital Editions:

Rough Trades — complete text of 1989 Sun & Moon Book, in html version
Red, Green, and Black, by Olivier Cadiot, tr. Bernstein -- complete text of the 1990 Potes & Poets book in html version

&

Disfrutes
complete text of 1974 poem in html version

Listen at PennSound ‡ Order the book

Jewish Poetics book announced

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:13:59 -0700

Coming in January ...
this book grows our of the program I organize with Stephen Paul Martin
at the Center for Jewish Culture
video here

here is
the University of Alabama Press catalog announcement.

Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture
ed. by Stephen P. Miller, Daniel Morris

"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!" --Franz Kafka

Kafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized religion, yet forever shaped by those traditions.

This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as "secular," and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.

While there is no easy answer for these writers about what it means to be a Jew, in their responses there is a rich sense of how being Jewish reflects on their aesthetics and practices as poets, and how the tradition of the avant-garde informs their identities as Jews. Fragmented identities, irony, skepticism, a sense of self as "other" or "outsider," distrust of the literal, and belief in a tradition that questions rather than answers--these are some of the qualities these poets see as common to themselves, the poetry they make, and the tradition they work within.

Contributors
Paul Auster / Merle L. Bachman / Charles Bernstein / Charlie Bertsch / Maria Damon / Rachel Blau DuPlessis / Amy Feinstein / Thomas Fink / Norman Finkelstein / Norman Fischer / Benjamin Friedlander / Michael Heller / Kathryn Hellerstein / Bob Holman / Adeena Karasick / Hank Lazer / Stephen Paul Miller / Daniel Morris / Ranen Omer / Sherman / Alicia Ostriker / Marjorie Perloff / Bob Perelman / Jerome Rothenberg / Meg Schoerke / Joshua Schuster / Eric Murphy Selinger

link | 07-03-09

Pat Clifford & Aryanil Mukherjee, Squares pdf

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:42:04 -0700

chaturangik/SQUARES
is a delightfully inventive work of multilectical poetry: Bengali warping into English, English hopscotching into Bengali. An elegant realization of cross-cultural dialog at the level of the tongue, chaturangik/SQUARES resists linguistic stasis in the name of poetic possibility.

chaturangik/SQUARES
A chessbook of collaborative poetry
Pat Clifford & Aryanil Mukherjee

pdf here

more information here

link | 06-29-09

Myles Silent Reading event in NY

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:39:56 -0700

   The Hispanic Society of America-Dia Art Foundation
     Tuesdays on the Terrace — Summer Program 2009
             Audubon Terrace
             Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, New York City

The Collection of Silence
A project by Eileen Myles

(from Press Release)
Eileen Myles will create a baroque site-specific work around the possibilities of silence as central to the syntax and punctuation of everyday life. A diverse group of poets will present short pieces at various locations on the outdoor plaza of Audubon Terrace, where they will be joined by a group of students from PS4. Also accompanied by dancers, Buddhists, an opera singer, and a life drawing class, this mute and active gathering will demonstrate and celebrate the collective power of silence and the capacity of an unvoiced poem to serve the communal purposes of public life. Participants include poets Charles Bernstein, Stephanie Gray, Tim Liu, Monica De la Torre, and Rachel Zolf, dancer-choreographer Christine Elmo, The Village Zendo, and soprano Juliana Snapper.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 7:00 pm
Free Admission
For reservations call 212 293 5582
or email Tuesdays@diaart.org.

Eileen Myles on
Close Listening, March 24, 2009
Art International Radio

photo:© Emma Bee Bernstein

link | 06-28-09

Shofar Jewish Poetry issue

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:39:56 -0700

SHOFAR
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Vol. 27, NO. 3 (Spring 2009)

Special Issue: Jewish Poetry, ed. Daniel Morris

soon also avail. via Project Muse and Ebsco

Articles
Partisan Experiments: Communism, Poetry, and the Liberal Imagination,1934-1940
Ethan Goffman
"Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom": Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman's Pound
Alan Golding
Tracking the Word: Judaism's Exile and the Writerly Poetics of George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Finkelstein
Burt Kimmelman
Jewish Counterfactualism in Recent American Poetry [DuPlessis, Bernstein, Friedlander]
Joshua Schuster
Is There a Distinctive Jewish Poetics? Several? Many? Is There Any Question?
HankLazer

A Portfolio of Poems
Mandelstam tr. Charles Bernstein and Kevin M. F. Platt, David Epstein, Thomas Fink, Norman Finkelstein, Benjamin Friedlander, Arielle Greenberg, Jamey Hecht, Michael Heller, Alan Holder, Burt Kimmelman, Joseph Lease, Deena Linett, Bonnie Lyons, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, Alicia Ostriker, Warren Rosenberg, Steven P. Schneider, Daniel R. Schwarz, Nikki Stiller, William Wallis, and Henry Weinfield

Review Essays
American Jewish Poetry, Familiar and Strange Alicia Ostriker
Passing Through Henry Weinfield

link | 06-26-09-xx

Liquid Perceptions by Susan Bee, PEPC Edn

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:10:36 -0700

PEPC Digital Edition
Liquid Perceptions by Susan Bee
9 plates

link | 06-27-09

Hugos's "Tomorrow, Dawn ..."

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:13:40 -0700

Reconfiguring Romanticism (30):

Victor Hugo Translated by Charles Bernstein

from Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations (1856)
at Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog
with commentary by Rothenberg

link | 06-26-09-x

Susan Bee on Emma from Belladonna book

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:13:40 -0700

from Emma's Belladonna book

Lost in Space

Susan Bee

In June 2007, Emma graduated from the University of Chicago with honors in Art and Art History. Our whole family went to Chicago to attend her graduation. In October 2007, her beloved grandfather and my father, Sigmund Laufer died and Emma spoke eloquently at his funeral. The day after his funeral she and Nona left on the their road trip for GIRLdrive. In November and December of 2007, she and Nona interviewed me for their project. An edited version of that interview is published here.

One year ago, on March 30, 2008, Emma and I appeared on a panel together: “Beyond the Waves: Feminist Artists Talk Across the Generations” at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. What a difference one year can make. Now I am trying to come to terms with the legacy of her too-short artistic life.

Emma was a person of large ambitions and big desires. Even as a baby she seemed like a huge personality—willful, demanding, charming, stubborn, outgoing, energetic, and vibrantly charismatic. She was a lively baby, so interested in the larger world, that when breastfeeding as an infant, she would attempt to turn her head away to look around. At that young age, she wasn’t even supposed to be able to turn her head by herself.

As a baby and toddler, she was noticeably sociable and loved parties. From age two weeks on, she would come with us to parties often in a little carrier and enjoy hanging out and listening to the adults’ conversation before she could even talk. On the first day of nursery school at age two and a quarter, she walked in the door and introduced herself to the teachers and students. She did not cry as the other children did and she never glanced back at me as I stood in the doorway to say good-bye.

In the playground, I would sit on a bench and, before I knew it, she would be out the door of the playground—on her way to the street or the park—without looking back. Emma was a risk taker and she scared me.

Emma had strong ambitions for her art—she was a talented painter before she seriously pursued photography in Friends Seminary high school and at the University of Chicago, where she had wonderful and dedicated teachers. She was full of restless energy and theoretical zeal. She also wrote poems and many essays and though she always worked hard, she had many natural gifts and a fierce precociousness that was obvious early on.
Emma had relationships with the poets and artists that surrounded Charles and me. At age three, she was in the south of France at a poetry festival. There she was photographed by Charles sitting in Ron Silliman’s lap and surrounded by Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, and me. She thrived on poetry readings, and she startled us once when she said at about age five, “I think I understand Alan Davies.”

She made friends easily and enjoyed talking with adults. That ability shows in Henry Hills’ interview film—Emma’s Dilemma—in which she starred. At her first filmed interview—at age twelve—she asked Jackson Mac Low, a confirmed vegetarian, why he didn’t eat at MacDonald’s. She was fearless and curious and her subjects reacted with goodwill and generosity in their answers. She tackled Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, Carolee Schneemann, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tony Oursler, Julie Patton, and many others, including her parents and brother.

Emma took her own life in Venice, Italy, on December 20, 2008, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in a tragic moment of unfathomable despair and overwhelming depression. This happened despite her being surrounded by the art that she loved, and a lovely staff, and while she was working in one of the many museum jobs that she had always previously enjoyed so very much. Emma had been in a serious car accident in late July and had suffered a concussion, which seemed to affect her whole way of thinking. Her judgment became impaired, along with ability to cope with stress, and she feared these impairments would be permanent.

Since that day, we have been inundated and flooded by incredible, beautiful, detailed letters, e-mails, blog entries, phone calls, visits, gifts of food and flowers, and tributes to Emma. We are so grateful for the outpouring of support from friends, boyfriends, neighbors, family, our students and colleagues, and even people who never met Emma, but were moved to contact us.

The subject of feminist generations and elders, that I addressed artistically in the collages included here, created in November 2008, looks very different to me now than it looked a year ago or even a few months ago, when I was hopeful about Emma and the future.

Rather than having Emma to carry on my legacy and to help me care for my parents’ artworks—as I expected—I am now responsible for her artistic legacy. This huge responsibility is part of the sad legacy that she has behind. As a consequence, my perspective on being an elder has shifted dramatically. I now feel I carry the history of her being in my person—literally, since I bear the scar of her Caesarean birth on my body and figuratively as I deal with her death and her absence in my own family life. In addition, we are have the painful task of going through her diaries, possessions and belongings left behind her room in Chicago. We also in the process of preserving her images, writings, and the files that she left behind on her computer.

We are going to attempt to do her life’s work justice, by presenting a show of her photographic work in Chicago (February 2010 at the Dova Space at the University of Chicago), where she lived for the past five years, and hopefully also in New York.GIRLdrive will continue, Emma completed almost all the photos and some of the writing for that project and we intend to help Nona complete the book, due for publication by Seal Press in October 2009.

We have also been trying to come to grips with the burdens and disturbances of Emma’s last days in Venice. I am not alone in my quest for understanding, but am fortunate to have the support of my community of artists, poets, curators, family, and most importantly, Charles and Felix, and all the people who loved Emma.

Emma’s life will never be complete. Before she left New York, we made many plans to do things together. This Belladonna elders project was one such plan. In one of her last e-mails to me, she sent along her essay for this book for my feedback. I added the Masquerade section to it posthumously. The title of this piece “Lost in Space” refers to the cover painting of this book; it was a work that Emma loved.

Emma talked of having children and applying to graduate schools in photography and art history. We made plans to go together to plays and museum and gallery shows. She wanted to move back to New York and to be closer to her family and to work in a gallery here. She was bursting with ideas for the future. Now all that is gone, I will be always be alone and without her companionship. Over time, the pain of that situation may lessen—but the future will never seem so bright to me without Emma by my side.

January 2009

Emma Bee Bernstein

link | 06-26-09

DuPlessis edits Palgrave series

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:13:40 -0700

link | 06-25-09

War & Peace #4

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:13:40 -0700

WAR AND PEACE 4:
VISION AND TEXT

Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Eds.

Devoted to collaborations between visual works and poetry, includes collaborative works of Charles Bernstein with Susan Bee, Amy Evans McClure with Michael McClure, Kiki Smith with Leslie Scalapino, Denise Newman with Gigi Janchang, a film on paper by Lyn Hejinian, Alan Halsey's visual texts, Simone Fattal, and Petah Coyne. Judith Goldman interviews Marjorie Welish, Lauren Shufran interviews Jean Boully, Leslie Scalapino interviews Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Also included are E. Tracy Grinnell's homophonic translations of Claude Cahun's "Helene la rebelle" and poems by Fanny Howe, Thom Donovan, and others.
Cover by Susan Bee.

order from SPD

link | 06-24-09-xx

Bromige reflections

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:46:22 -0700

Ken Edwards on Bromige
Reality Street will be publishing a collected Bromige

Mike Hennessey on Bromige
from PennSound Daily

Family’s author page
(including memorial tributes)

Desire: Selected Poems 1963-1987
Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1988.
Desire is a guide for the lovelorn and love‑drenched, a devilish excursion into a psychorealism for which laughter is the exact analogue to human breath and paranoia an antidote (anecdote) for keeping your mind in view. In Desire, the bottom of everyday life drops through, as land mines are triggered by the reader's darting glances. Desire is a "blow struck for meaning"‑‑&, boy, do these poems blow. David Bromige's hour has come‑‑and it begins here.

-------

The Difference is Scale: A Short Note on D.B.

[ All quotes from the works of David Bromige. Written for the D.B. issue of The Difficulties (1990)]

“Cognition requires exaggeration,” writes David Bromige in “Indictable Sobourners”—and the converse would apply equally to explain his method: exaggeration requires cognition. In extremus luminatus ludicrus.

However, it is an ungracious task, as the oxymoron says, to try to explain a joke. You get it or better yet a) it gets you b) you don’t get it. That is, in these works it’s not “subject matter” (shopworn hangnail) but form (allopathic progenitor) that’s made intrinsically funny. “It is easier to see through my little tales than it is to see through the pernicious society we are trapped within. But the difference is merely scale.” And this may begin to account for why each poem is approached (and so apprehended) in a determinately different way. “When you start to doubt your own skepticism, look out!” Bromige has never “fixed” on any one style or mode (there are characteristic reverberations of course) but tackles (targets) new turf (segmentation sections) with each tussle (six of one, couple of half-dozen of other). “It was very dark inside the fish.” “This is among the most poignant: thoughts I know.” This is a good deal different and more humanly refreshing- in the sense that a breath is more refreshing than a cough.—than the idea of form as plastique. For Bromige, the question becomes what color plastic and why not rubber.

As to subject (subsequent) matters, Bromige makes mincemeat of the fashions of the “contemporary” “mind” (“The era had a milky density, tepid and torpid, mildly disgusting like a one-acre homesite; this disgust had spoken of the rebuttal to its final vestige of candid spontaneity, except that the toothache of the times looped a, scarf over everybody's ears,”) and builds from there. An Englishman who came to the U.S. of A. by way of British Columbia (a.k.a. Canada’s grey sunbelt) he has made cultural distance into a prosodic measure that leans on device without being devisive. “There is an intense pleasure of experience in the juxtaposing of the two polysyllabic words with the staccato monosyllables--greift and Spuk particularly spook me. [In this passage from Threads Bromige is referring to a quote from Heidegger; for the present context, hot tub / retotalization would do as well, as in there'll be a hot tub at the totalization tonight (requiring a further introjection into our unconscious episiotomies).] Doesn't all innovation in knowing happen much as a pun: the thread of likeness enables one to articulate what is in one sense the utterly dissimilar, since new. Or what had been forgotten.” Eternity and paternity become avenues of access; the reader is left to draw the moral after Bromige has provided the tone and tonic.

“And still we hold there are times when we can bear witness to the present condition of absolute things.”

“For language
can take us there—wherever it is.”

—Charles Bernstein

link | 06-04-08

David Bromige 1933-2009

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:46:22 -0700

t

David Bromige
1933-2009
Bromige died this moring.
He was with his wife Cecelia and his children Margaret & Chris

My Poetry (5:25)
(NOTE: cut is missing about 10 seconds of the poem)
Dear Charles (1:06)

Bromige Sound Recordings at PennSound
Bromige EPC author page
Family's page

from boundary 2: 43 Poets (1984), ed. Bernstein
Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1985 - Winter, 1986)

link | 06-03-08

Dominique Fourcade Citizen Do

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:46:21 -0700

Dominique Fourcade
Citizen Do
Paris: P.O.L, 2008
In his new book, published in November, Do[minique] Fourcade is both fiercely aesthetic and irreconcilably political, moving from discursive engagements with the War on Iraq (which extends En Laisse [P.O.L., 2005] and its encounter with Abu Ghraib) to the poetics of Poussin. Citizen Do of course echoes Citizen Kane and also the French Revolution, but “do” is acutely pragmatic for a poet who imagines art as "cruel and immoral." The book opens with a postscript, a poetics. The next section is an essay on René Char, who is for Fourcade the poet of beauty and resistance; his friend (in his youth) who exemplifies an insistence on aestheticism in extreme alienation (détachement) but also in extreme engagement (attachement). Char, Foucualt writes, is both a hero (the great hero of the French Resistance) and a poet, two qualities that, Fourcade notes ruefully, typically cannot coexist. The Char essay originally appeared in an extraordinary exhibition catalog, published in 2007 by the Bibliotéque nationale de France and Gallimard for a bibliographically rich exhibition of manuscripts, books, and art related to Char.

link | 06-15-09

Brainard's I Remember on Twitter

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:46:21 -0700

from Jared McDonald
(Penn student from English 111)

thought you might find this interesting: a current trending topic on twitter is #iremember (see: http://twitter.com/#search ?q=%23iremember), after which people are putting memories.. for example, someone posted "#iremember owning an 80386 computer with a 20mb hard drive," while another person posted "#iremember When It Was Cool To Be Yourself....", etc. Seems like a big, collective version of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” --sort of like our collaborative twitter poems but open to any participant who types "#iremember" into their twitter box...

link | 06-14-09

Jane Sprague, Diane Ward, Tina Darrah at Belladonna

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:46:21 -0700

Jane Sprague, Diane Ward, Tina Darragh
at Dixon Place (NYC)
for the Elders Series Belladonna book launch
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

link | 06-12-09

Charles Bernstein Web Log

Oakland Reading MP3

Jewish Poetics book announced

Pat Clifford & Aryanil Mukherjee, Squares pdf

Myles Silent Reading event in NY

Shofar Jewish Poetry issue

Liquid Perceptions by Susan Bee, PEPC Edn

Hugos's "Tomorrow, Dawn ..."

Susan Bee on Emma from Belladonna book

DuPlessis edits Palgrave series

War & Peace #4

WAR AND PEACE 4: VISION AND TEXT

Bromige reflections

David Bromige 1933-2009

Dominique Fourcade Citizen Do

Brainard's I Remember on Twitter

Jane Sprague, Diane Ward, Tina Darrah at Belladonna

WAR AND PEACE 4:
VISION AND TEXT