Charles Bernstein Web Log

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:02:25 -0700

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"Web Log" is moving to Jacket2: Update RSS feed

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:20:36 -0700

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Emma Bee Bernstein, NY Times review by Holland Cotter

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 05:36:45 -0700

EMMA BEE BERNSTEIN

by Holland Cotter

‘An Imagined Space’
Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
205 Norman Avenue
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Through April 23

The New York Times
April 8, 2011, posted April 7

The artist and writer Emma Bee Bernstein died in 2008 at 23, an age when most people have barely started their life’s work. But she had already gone some distance with hers, judging by this show of two dozen color photographs she made from 2005 to 2007, when she was an art student at the University of Chicago.

All the photographs are of young women, either Ms. Bernstein herself or friends. In the earliest, taken outdoors, a ghostly white-dressed figure lies, like a Victorian Ophelia, in a dank woodland setting: the image is like Julia Margaret Cameron channeled through the gothic-surrealist eye of the contemporary artist Anna Gaskell.

More often Ms. Bernstein shot her subjects in cramped domestic settings: a bathroom with floral-print wallpaper, a packed closet, the corner of a room. A woman stands against a closed door as if being interrogated. The artist herself, in a loudly patterned dress, seems to be trapped in an angle formed by two bright yellow walls.

As her art suggests, she looked at a lot of photography, old and new, by and about women, and readily acknowledged her influences. But she came up with something of her own. The show, organized by Phong Bui and Linnea Kniaz, feels cohesive in visual theme, with its repeated images of women dressed either in nightwear, like shut-ins, or in awkwardly tailored dresses that don’t quite fit (too large, too small, too garish). And it’s consistent in tone, with an atmosphere of tension, verging on discomfort though interlaced with humor, and a guardedness that never relaxes.

In 2007, with a journalist-friend Nona Willis Aronowitz, Ms. Bernstein drove across country, interviewing dozens of women. The resulting book, “Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism” (Seal Press, 2009), gives a sampling of her intelligent and personable writing style. And her avid personality comes through in a second book from the same year, this one published by Belladonna Press. Titled “A Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein,” it has contributions by her mother, the artist Susan Bee (her father is the poet Charles Bernstein), and from the scholars Johanna Drucker and Marjorie Perloff, who remember her with admiration and love.

link | 04-07-11

Attack of the Difficult Poems: Now Out (30% discount)

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:11:18 -0700

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the poetry waters ...

Attack of the Difficult Poems
Essays and Inventions
University of Chicago Press

April only
30% off ($18.20)
if you order direct from University of Chicago
order here
(note: Amazon does not offer a discount on this title)

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

“This is a smart and invigorating book that triumphantly demonstrates Charles Bernstein’s goals and values. Those who want satire, those who want earnest discussion, those who want information, those who want to get a sense of personality, those who want theory, those who want entertainment, even those who wish to be confirmed in their beliefs and those who wish to nurse their resentments, will all find something here.”—Daisy Fried

“I regret to inform you that Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems is highly unsuitable (not suitable) for National Poetry Month. Not suitable for acceptance by the publications of the Modern Language Association or its affiliate, the Annual Convention. Not suitable for readers under the age of five. Not suitable for endorsement by the Paris Review. Not suitable for your average television sitcom. Not suitable for tenure. Not suitable for free distribution. Not suitable for variations in the ontological condition. Not suitable for readers of generic poetry. Not suitable for the MFA. For everyone else: priceless.”—Tan Lin

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal parts surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has provoked us with writing that is unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art.

Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner.

From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04477-4
ISBN-10: 0-226-04477-7
$26.00
Cover design by Isaac Tobin

I. Professing Poetics
    The Difficult Poem
    A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices
    Against National Poetry Month as Such
    Invention Follies
    Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment
    Wreading, Writing, Wresponding
    Anything Goes
    Our Americas: New Worlds Still in Progress
    The Practice of Poetics

II. The Art of Immemorability
    Every Which Way but Loose
    The Art of Immemorability
    Making Audio Visible: Poetry’s Coming Digital Presence
    The Bound Listener
    Hearing Voices
    Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics

III. The Fate of the Aesthetic
    McGann Agonist
    Poetry and/or the Sacred
    The Art and Practice of the Ordinary
    Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies
    Poetry Plastique: A Verbal Explosion in the Art Factory (with Jay Sanders)
    Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren’t You the Kind That Tells
    Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime
    Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud
    Fulcrum Interview
    Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice
    Poetry Scene Investigation: A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff
    Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?
    Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

IV. Recantorium
Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

link | 04-05-11

Silliman The Alphabet Symposium

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:41:48 -0700

The Alphabet: A Symposium
Ron Silliman’s Long Poem, 25-26 March 2011
University of Windsor

link | 3-23-11-RS

Remembering the Triangle fire @ 100

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:42:55 -0700

link | 03-23-11

Race & poetry open letter for Claudia Rankine

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:08:07 -0700

open letter on race & poetry
my response to
Claudia Rankine's forum on race and poetry

" I take RACE to be the central fact for those born in the Americas. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy. ..."

link | 03-18-11

All the Whiskey ... in paper!

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:28:29 -0700

All the Whiskey in PAPER!

All the Whiskey in Heaven
Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein

Biographical Note

“Charles Bernstein’s poems resemble each other only in being unexpected. Simultaneously mad, tragic and hilarious, they seem written to illustrate the truth of his lines: ‘things are / solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine.’ All the Whiskey in Heaven is a vast department store of the imagination.” —John Ashbery

“Charles Bernstein uses words as a surgeon uses a scalpel. He strips away the skin and cuts to the bone to reveal reality and—ultimately—to heal. This essential collection from 30 years of cutting edge work will confirm Bernstein as our true poet laureate—the voice of a new generation.” —John Zorn

“For more than thirty years Charles Bernstein has been America’s most ardent literary provocateur. This long-needed selection of his poetry gives us a new perspective on his work, for it shows us that the many forms he has worked in over the years are in fact a single form, the Bernstein form, and it is unique, the product of an imagination unlike that of any other contemporary writer. His poems challenge you to think in unaccustomed ways. They address public matters, private matters, poetic matters—in other words, all that matters most. And, good Lord, can they ever make you laugh” —Paul Auster

“Charles Bernstein is our ultimate connoisseur of chaos, the chronicler, in poems of devastating satire, chilling and complex irony, exuberant wit, and, above all, profound passion, of the contradictions and absurdities of everyday life in urban America at the turn of the twenty-first century. From such early underground classics as “The Klupzy Girl,” to the mordant verbal play of “The Lives of the Toll Takers,” to the great meditation on 9/11 called “Report from Liberty Street” and the deeply personal ballads and elegies of recent years, Bernstein’s much awaited Selected Poems displays a formal range, performative urgency, and verbal dexterity unmatched by other poets of his generation.” —Marjorie Perloff

“A perfect introduction to the adventure that is Charles Bernstein’s work. But even for those of us who have known his irrepressible inventiveness and engaged humor from the individual books it is a boon to see here the full range of his exuberant ingenuity in battling sclerosis of word, mind—and poetry.” —Rosmarie Waldrop

“This wonderful book confirms Charles Bernstein’s position as the pre-eminent American poet of mental activity—delineating not simply the mind as it registers stimuli, but the more radical commitment to mind as a machine that constantly invents totally new moves and strategies in the daily battles of perception. All the Whiskey in Heaven captures 30 years of ground breaking and revelatory work.” —Richard Foreman

cover photo by Emma Bee Bernstein; cover design by Jeff Clark

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reviews

Bookforum Feb./March 2010: "... a rousing selection from thirty years of work ... Bernstein deftly shifts moods and tones, but a sense of urgency and a hard-won clarity are in evidence throughout this volume." --David O'Neill
Publisher's Weekly 2/20/10 starred review This gathering of 30 years worth of work by the prominent L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet and essayist offers a rigorous critique of the art of poetry itself, which means, among other things, a thorough investigation of language and the mind. Varied voices and genres are at play, from a colloquial letter of complaint to the manager of a Manhattan subway station to a fragmentary meditation on the forces that underlie the formation of knowledge. Bernstein's attention to the uncertainty surrounding the self as it purports to exist in poetry—“its virtual (or ventriloquized)/ anonymity—opens fresh pathways toward thinking through Rimbaud's dictum that “I is another.” In addition to philosophical depth—which somehow even lurks beneath statements like “There is nothing/ in this poem/ that is in any/ way difficult/ to understand”—a razor-sharp wit ties the book together: “You can't/ watch ice sports with the lights on!” These exhilarating, challenging poems raise countless essential questions about the form and function of poetry. (Mar.)
Ken Tucker Entertainment Weekly (April 16, 2010) “A solid selection of 30 years of Bernstein’s lyrical, thickly layered poetry. Bernstein has, on occasion, been criticized as “difficult.” But Whiskey does the great service of showing how consistently he has explored the true, richly emotional meanings of what we’re trying to express when we speak or write in halting phrases or with nervous repetition and hesistation. Or as Bernstein puts it: “Poetry is like a swoon, with its difference / it brings you to your senses.”
*
David Kaufman "Sensible Swoons" Tablet Magaizne (Feb.)
TimeOut New York (March)
Jake Marmer "Fussing on the Cliff, Is This What You Call the Jewish Avant-Garde?", Forward (March 26, 2010)
Yunte Huang Santa Barbara News Press (March 28. 2010)
Daisy Fried The New York Times Book Review [ .jpg clipping ] (April 11, 2010)
Jeff Simon Buffalo News (April 11, 2010)
The Devil's Accountant (April 12, 2010)
Tim Griffin Bookforum (April 14, 2010)
R.D. Pohl "Pulizer Surrpises: Small Press and Language Poetry" Buffalo News (April 17, 2010)
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice (April 18, 2010)
The Boston Review Richard Deming "Called into Being" (May/June 2010)
JBunce, Hub Pages (June 2, 2010)
The Quarterly Conversation John Herbert Cunningham “Poetry’s Ulysses: All the Whiskey in Heaven" (June 7, 2010)
The Rumpus Mark Scroggins (July 8, 2010)
Provincetown Arts Mary Maxwell Summer 2010
New Pages Larry Dean September 2010
Critical Frame Tom Lewek September 2010
Lana Turner David Lau #3, 2010
Huffington Post Best Books Cover 2010
TLS Marjorie Perloff: Best Books of 2010
American Poet (Fall 2010, issue 39) Academy of American Poets Notable 2010
Forward Fives (5 best poetry 2010)
Swans Commentary, Maxwell Clark

INTERVIEWS
Harriet (Poetry Foundation) blog interview with Thom Donovan: part one, part two (2010)
FSG blog interview with Alan Gilbert (2010)
Bomb interview with Jay Sanders (Spring 2010)
Chicago Reader interview with Dani el Benjamin (2010)

Radio
Cross-Cultural Poetiics Episode #208 with Leonard Schwartz February 4, 2010 Complete Recording (36:58): MP3

link | 03-15-11

Placard: Collective Bargaining Is a Chokehold on Unbridled Capitalism

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:36:17 -0800

Collective Bargaining

Is a Chokehold on Unbridled Capitalism

only the elimination of taxation
& the accumulation of individual wealth

leads to fiscal salvation

Dare to Think Different
Vote Republican

which side are you on?

March 10, 2011

full set of placards

link | 03-10-11-placard

Three Video portraits: Susan Howe, George Kuchar, & John Ashbery

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:31:16 -0800

Sukey's Walks

Go to web log page to see this player.

Susan Howe
I was at Yale for the day and met Sukey at the Museum of Art, now fully restored to Louis Kahn's original design, though Sukey lamented that Kahn had not wanted blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows; the views of the city were to be a backdrop for the art on display. The show was hodgepodge from their entire collection, but Sukey was most interested in looking again at the installation of African art; she pointed to a wood sculptures that was stunningly spare and noted its similarity to David's work. We walked across the campus and sat on the benches across from the chapel, where, fifteen years ago, we were at David's memorial service.
Oct. 16, 2007
(mp4, 30 seconds, 30.7 mb)

George Learns a Lesson (The Hard Way)

Go to web log page to see this player.

George Kuchar
George came down the hill from Mimi's to the Race Road place, where during the past summer he filmed Susan's painting and my reading from Girly Man. Last night at dinner, George was saying how much he was influenced by Tennessee Williams, which you can see even more in his screenplays than in his films. He said he had once met Williams in a pool locker room, and that Williams had greeted him, possibly mistaking George for someone else. But George didn't realize who he was till just after he left.
August 11, 2007
(mp4, 28 seconds, 20.8 mb)

The Film of Your Life

Go to web blog page to see this player.

John Ashbery
After John's retrospective reading at the Bard 80th birthday celebration, we gathered at Finberg House. Pierre Jorris narrates with Joan Retallack close by.
September 16, 2007
(mp4, 14 seconds, 10.5 mb)

Video Portraits Galleries
Portraits page 1
Portraits page 2
Portraits page 3
Portraits page 4
Portraits page 5
Portraits page 6

link | 03-10-11

Emma Bee Bernstein exhibition press release

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:37:17 -0800

link | 03-09-11

Tucson reading 1988

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:22:24 -0800

Tucson, 1988

Poetry Center
University of Arizona
February 3, 1988 (Tucson)
(recording courtesy Poetry Center)

1. Lois Shelton Introduction (5:52): MP3
2. Island Life (from Controlling Interests) (16:04): MP3
3. Epiphanies of Suppression 3 (from Rough Trades) (1:06): MP3 ::text
4. Of Time and the Line (from Rough Trades) (2:52): MP3 ::text
5. Targets of Opportunity (from Rough Trades) (1:15): MP3 ::text
6. Hard Copy (from Residual Rubbernecking [collected in Republics of Reality] (1:20): MP3
7. [Untitled] (from Residual Rubbernecking) [collected in Republics of Reality] (:58): MP3
8. Mall at Night (from Residual Rubbernecking) [collected in Republics of Reality] (1:17): MP3
9. Foreign Body Sensation (from The Sophist) (10:05): MP3
10. Blow Me Down Etude (incomplete recording) (from Rough Trades) (7:58): MP3 ::text

link | 03-07-11

March 11 S/N: NewWorldPoetics launch in NY

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 11:38:51 -0800

S/N NewWorld Poetics

launch of our first two issues

Viernes 11 de Marzo, 7pm
(bilingual)
Friday March 11 7pm

Erica Hunt, Molly Weigel, Mónica de la Torre, Christine Jung, Ernesto Livón-Grosman, G.J. Racz, and editors Charles Bernstein y Eduardo Espin

McNally Jackson bookstore
52 Prince St, New York, NY

link | 03-02-11-SN

Antin's essays and PennSound video

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:04:19 -0800

David Antin's
Radical Coherency
Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005

And new Antin video on PennSound
"Sky Poem 1" (shown at Poetry Plastique) and "Noise of Time"

&

"Sky Poem 1," Santa Monica, May 1987

"The Noise of Time," University of Colorado, 1994

link | 03-02-11

Yunte Huang on Charle Chan in conversation with Charles Bernstein

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:09:37 -0800

Yunte Huang in conversation with Charles Bernstein
on Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
Asian American Writers Workshop, New York
October 28, 2010

Install the Flash plugin to watch this video.

link | 03-01-11