Charles Bernstein

Matthew Hofer

Bruce Andrews

Ray DiPalma

Michael Golston

The Complete Facsimile in Context

Legend

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. 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.

Poetry and Public Policy

The Politics of Poetic Form

The Sophist

In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the poetry scene and addresses hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, in both argument and form--a poetic language that resists being absorbed into the conventions of our culture.

A Poetics

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly 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.

Essays and Inventions

Attack of the Difficult Poems

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry—proudly declaring itself “a totally inaccessible poem”—and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism—full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” These poems engage with works by contemporary painters—including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan—and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky. Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

Near/Miss

"99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium presents the work of ninety-nine poets in dialogue with one another across the divides of language, nation, and temperament. Grounded in resonances and affiliations among the contributing poets, this issue is as striking for its interwoven themes, concerns, and forms as for its immediacy and intimicy. Indeed, this issue is the result of years of informal exchange through translations, readings, and visits. ... Starting in 1997, with the help of several coeditors, I asked poets from around the world to respond to a series of interrelated questions concerning national, multinational, international, global, regional, or local contexts for their work as poets or for the poety they most value."--Introduction

An International Poetics Symposium : a Special Issue

99 Poets/1999

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years. As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy. The collection’s title, the now–familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, “The pen is tinier than the sword.” In these poems, Bernstein makes good on his claim that “the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.” In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein’s work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick. Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange—and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.

Recalculating

Rough Trades

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics. Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake. Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

Pitch of Poetry

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This “cognitive dissidence,” as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Rückert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein didn’t set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must “Continue / on, as / before, as / after.” The audio version of Topsy-Turvy is performed by the author.

Topsy-Turvy

The poems in Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.

At once the most paradoxically controversial and popular, accessible and most difficult of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Bernstein is also the writer of that group who strove early on to experiment with the extremes of its newly minted methods. Whether highlighting the synaesthesis of the word in its isolation or in the plain phrase as it operates in daily life to convey our most banal thoughts, this collection of long out-of-print chapbooks -- none of these poems have appeared in ally of Bernstein's many breakthrough volumes, such as Islets/Irritations (1983) or Dark City (1994) -- provides a unique overview of his career, and adds to the range of his impressive canon of major and minor works. The first poem from the 1976 volume Parsing titled "Sentences", will surprise anyone expecting text-over-speech, as it is practically a litany of anxieties, attitudes and stuttering intensities. This attention to spoken language makes such dense works as "Poem" (from 1978's Shade) both welcoming and discomforting, expressionistically cinematic but not without its moments of eye-wink satiric narrative. In the short poems collected in The Absent Father in "Dumbo" and Residual Rubbernecking, Bernstein takes the project far from the austere fragments of the early works and deep into a purposely "purple" and unbeautiful lyricism: "Such mortal slurp to strain this sprawl went droopy/Gadzooks it seems would bend these slopes in girth/None trailing failed to hear the ship looks loopey/Who's seen it nailed uptight right at its berth". Bernstein always manages to find the furthest reaches of any norms of "good taste" (be it mainstream or avant-garde), creating a poetics that reveals the social codes hidingbehind all of poetry's tropes and forms. Though many of the later poems here seem unfocused and minor compared to the fabulous and ambitious early chapbooks, the volume as a whole presents as many promises as it does relevant problems, as many beauties as it does strange new imaginings.

1975-1995

Republics of Reality

Poetic Justice

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound 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 surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. 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 to new imaginations of prosody, the entries gathered here investigate a compelling range of topics for anyone interested in poetry. Taken together, these essays 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 and visualized word. The time is right for such a volume: with readings, spoken word events, and the Web gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening opens a number of new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry.

Poetry and the Performed Word

Close Listening

Seth Abramson

Jesse Damiani

Tracie Morris

BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing is the third volume of this annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest-edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Sina Queyras, Tan Lin, Christian Bök, Myung Mi Kim, Juliana Spahr, Samuel R. Delany, and even Barack Obama—as well as emerging voices. Intended to provoke lively conversation and debate, Best American Experimental Writing is an ideal literary anthology for contemporary classroom settings.

Best American Experimental Writing

BAX 2016

""Topsy-Turvy" is Charles Bernstein's most capaciously unruly collection to date, gathering disparate poems, both tiny and grand, that speak directly to our time of "covidity," as he calls it one of the book's most poignantly disarming works. He charts in equal measure the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; homophonic translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. There is even an ode to the New York subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. "Topsy-Turvy" is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Rückert, and Rimbaud; and Drummond, Virgil, Ferneyhough, and Caudio Amberian; and even an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein's "cognitive dissidence" is a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Bernstein didn't set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance"--

Only a Fraction of the Action : the Inside Story of a Restaurant Empire's Rise and Fall

Sambo's

Ron Paul

Winning the Chain Restaurant Game Are you ready for success?... Find out what it takes in this insider's guide to making it in today's most exciting growth industry. In this instructive and inspiring book, award-winning authors and foodservice industry experts Charles Bernstein and Ron Paul tell how the most successful restaurant companies win with bottom-up management, putting the customer on top. Based on interviews with more than a hundred industry executives and packed with enlightening examples as well as a few historic failures, this unique book teaches important lessons for restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs: * Presents the first authoritative, in-depth look at the restaurant chain industry as a whole * Tells how successful chain CEOs produce results with varied winning styles * Isolates and clearly describes the eight crucial factors, or strategic "links," vital to restaurant chain success * Tells how chains can capitalize on bulk purchasing, brand identity, consistent execution, an individual sense of style and--most of all--finding unique ways to please the customer Few success stories so thoroughly embody the twentieth-century American dream as those of restaurant chains such as McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Little Caesar's, and Taco Bell. But besides the "true grit" demonstrated by entrepreneurial heros like McDonald's Ray Kroc and Wendy's Dave Thomas, what does it take to build and maintain a successful restaurant or retail chain? Find out in this first book to give a broad, long-term perspective on one of the nation's leading growth industries and to offer crucial lessons for all entrepreneurs, no matter what the business. Winning the Chain Restaurant Game, by award-winning authors and noted foodservice industry experts Charles Bernstein and Ron Paul, documents the critical success factors required for one of the toughest, most competitive industries. Highlighting the winning styles of more than a hundred chain executives, their triumphs, trials, disappointments, and turnarounds, this fascinating and instructive book identifies the eight strategic "links" that lead to victory in the chain restaurant business. With surgical precision, Bernstein and Paul explore such key factors as leadership, motivation, bulk purchasing, marketing, identity, consistency, and expansion. But they place focus ahead of everything and conclude that the entrepreneurial passion of an executive who deeply believes in his concept is the ultimate catalyst for success. Small- to medium-size chains are going public at a dizzying pace and there are enormous financial opportunities for savvy restaurant owners. Winning the Chain Restaurant Game arms operators with the vital know-how needed to win the game.

Charles Bernstein

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