Republics of Reality: 1975–1995, All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Pitch of Poetry, Attack of the Difficult Poems, Recalculating, Near/Miss, Content's Dream, Topsy Turvy
From 1990 to 2003, Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bovê was published by Duke University Press and boundary 2 in 2021.
Early life and work
Bernstein was born in Manhattan, New York, to a Jewish family and attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1968. His mother was Sherry Bernstein (born Shirley Jacqueline Kegel, February 2, 1921, to October 27, 2018) and his father was Herman Bernstein (1901–1977). Charles then matriculated at Harvard College, where he majored in philosophy and studied the work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein[5] under Stanley Cavell, a seminal figure in ordinary language philosophy, as well as Rogers Albritton.[6] Cavell would oversee Bernstein's thesis, a study that pursued the aesthetic and poetic possibilities of the amalgamation of analytical philosophy and avant-garde literature, focussing on Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein.
After Bernstein graduated from Harvard in 1972, his first book, Asylums, was published in 1975. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which ran to 13 issues (three volumes) between 1978 and 1981 (plus three supplements and a fourth volume in 1981.[7] This is routinely considered to be the starting point of Language Poetry and was the most significant outlet for both the progressive poetry and progressive poetic theory taking place in New York City and Berkeley. He has said about the creation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:
"We tried to trace a history of radical poetics, taking up the model presented in Jerome Rothenberg's Revolution of the Word, and later by Rothenberg and Pierre Joris in Poems for the Millennium and Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment. When you go back 30 years, you see that poetics that now are widely accepted as foundational for contemporary poetry were harshly rejected then."[8]
Bernstein and Andrews published selected pieces from these 13 issues in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. In 2019 and 2020, the University of New Mexico Press, under editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, published three related books: The Language Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein; a new edition of Legend by Andrews, Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman; and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Facsimile Edition.[9]
During this period, Bernstein also published three more books of his own poetry, Parsing (1976), Shade (1978) and Poetic Justice (1979), earning a living working for the Cultural Council Foundation's CETA Artist Project and as a freelance medical writer.[10] He also co-founded the Ear Inn reading series with Ted Greenwald in 1978.
From 1989 to 2003, Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo, where he was a SUNY Distinguished Professor and co-founder and Director of the Poetics Program.[11] He is also, with Loss Pequeño Glazier, co-founder of The Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo. From 2003 to 2019, he was Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-founded the poetry audio archive PennSound.[12] He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego. With his translators, Bernstein won the 2015 Münster Prize for International Poetry for two German translations.[13] In the same year, he won the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry.[14] In 2019, Bernstein was the recipient of the Bollingen Prize for American poetry, for lifetime achievement and for Near/Miss.[15] Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.[16]
Since 1980, he has published a further eighteen books of poetry, as well as editing a number of anthologies of prose and verse, including The Politics of Poetic Form,Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word,S/N: NewWorldPoetics, with Eduard Espina, and Best American Experimental Writing, with Tracie Morris. Working with the composers Ben Yarmolinsky, Dean Drummond, and Brian Ferneyhough, he has written the libretti for five operas and has collaborated with a number of visual artists, including his wife, Susan Bee, Richard Tuttle, Amy Sillman, and Mimi Gross. In 1984, he organized"New York Talk" and in 1985–86, "St Marks Talks," the first lecture series at the Poetry Project in New York. In 2001, he co-curated "Poetry Plastique" with Jay Sanders.[17] Bernstein's work has appeared frequently in The Best American Poetry series, Harper's Magazine, Poetry Magazine, boundary 2, and Critical Inquiry. While Bernstein has supported small presses throughout his career, he has also published on such mainstream academic presses as Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Northwestern University Press, and, most recently, The University of Chicago Press, which has published his last major works. The publication of All the Whiskey in Heaven by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2010 was his most commercial endeavor to date. He has said about his work, "It's true that, on the one hand, I mock and destabilize the foundation of a commitment to lyric poetry as an address toward truth or toward sincerity. But, on the other hand, if you're interested in theory as a stable expository mode of knowledge production or critique moving toward truth, again, I should be banned from your republic. (I've already been banned from mine.) My vacillating poetics of poems and essays is a serial practice, a play of voices."[18]
There have been three collections of essays focussed on Bernstein's work: a 1985 issue of The Difficulties, ed. Tom Beckett, The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein, ed. William Allegrezza (2012), and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, ed. Paul Bovē, a special issue of boundary 2 (2021). Hundreds of individual essays, chapters, and reviews are listed and often linked at the Electronic Poetry Center.
In 2020, Bernstein published a poetry collection, with artist Davide Balula, titled Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End: Poems of Artificial Intelligence. The poems were generated by an artificial intelligence model trained on Bernstein's own body of work, creating outputs that the poet edited, omitting select poems and verses without adding new language.[21] Bernstein said, "this project demanded more work – mine and Davide's – than if I had written the poems alone." He highlighted that the project predated tools like ChatGPT.[22]
Personal life
Charles Bernstein is married to artist Susan Bee.[23] They have had two children, Emma Bee Bernstein[24] (May 16, 1985 – December 20, 2008) and Felix Bernstein[25] (born May 20, 1992).
Reception
Jerome Rothenberg has called Bernstein “A major poet for our time — & then some. He has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions."[26]
Robert Creeley has written: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material."[27]
According to Marjorie Perloff: “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.”[28]
Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, and Ange Mlinko, in the Bollingen Prize citation: "As poet, editor, critic, translator, and educator, Charles Bernstein's decades-long commitment to the community of arts and letters reflects a profound understanding of the importance of language in the business of culture-making. His extraordinary new collection of poems, Near/Miss, finds Bernstein deploying his characteristically incisive satire and sharp wit to dismantle the clichés driving public speech. Yet, in moments treading close to heartbreak, the work sounds the depths where the public poet must find the words for private grief. Bernstein’s work interrogates, restlessly, seemingly word by word, language and its performative nature. Throughout his career Bernstein has facilitated a vibrant dialogue between lyric and anti-lyric tendencies in the poetic traditions we have inherited; in so doing, he has shaped and questioned, defined and dismantled ideas and assumptions in order to reveal poetry’s widest and most profound capabilities.[29]
All the Whiskey in Heaven (Farrar, and Giroux, 2010)
Recalculating (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Topsy-Turvy (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Essays
Pitch of Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)
Attack of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)
Content's Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986; rpt Northwestern University Press, 2001)
A Conversation with David Antin (New York: Granary Books, 2002)
Artifice of Absorption (Singing Horse Press, 1987)
Editor
Modern and Contemporary Poetics, Editor, with Hank Lazer, of a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998– )
Electronic Poetry Center, Editor, with Loss Pequeno Glazier (1995– )
PennSound, Director, with Al Filries (2003– ) and Chris Mustazza
Best American Experimental Poetry 2016, with Tracie Morris and series eds. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017)
S/N: NewWorldPoetics, with Eduardo Espina (2010)[31]
American Poetry after 1975 (Duke University Press, 2009) (Special Issue of boundary 2, 36:3) (JSTOR)
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, with introduction (New York: Library of America, 2006)
Sibila (São Paulo), Sybil, under founder Régis Bonvicino (2006– )[32]
Poetry Plastique, ed. with Jay Sanders, exhibition catalog (New York: Granary Books / Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2001)
99 Poets/1999: A Special Issue of boundary 2 (Vol. 26, No. 1: Duke University Press, 1999)
Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
LINEbreak: poetry interviews, host/co-producer. Twenty-six 30-minute programs, dist. Public Radio Satellite Program and on the Internet at the EPC (1995–96)
Live at the Ear: A CD anthology of Ear Inn readings (Pittsburg: Elemenope Productions, 1994)
"13 North American Poets", with Susan Howe, in TXT No. 31 (Le Mans, France and Bussels: 1993)
The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (NY: Roof, 1990)
Patterns/Contexts/Time: A Forum: 1989, with Phillip Foss in Tyuonyi (Santa Fe, 1990).
"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Lines" in The Line in Postmodern Poetry, ed. Frank/Sayre (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988)
"43 Poets (1984)" in Boundary 2 (Binghamton, 1987)
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, with Bruce Andrews (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984)
"Language Sampler" in Paris Review, No. 86 (New York: 1982)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, with Bruce Andrews (New York: 1978–1981); Vol. 4 co-published as Open Letter 5:1 (Toronto: 1982)
Translation
Red, Green, and Black by Olivier Cadiot (Hartford: Potes & Poets, 1990)
↑ According to the publisher's website (here)Archived December 5, 2006, at the Wayback Machine: "Shadowtime is a thought opera based on the work and life of the German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. The libretto was written by Charles Bernstein for composer Brian Ferneyhough and had its premiere in May 2004 at the Munich Biennale, with subsequent productions at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York."
Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Bruce Andrews is an American poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets.
Trevor Joyce is an Irish poet, born in Dublin.
Jerome Rothenberg was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. Rothenberg co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Dennis Tedlock in the late 1960s.
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet. Every two years, the award recognizes a poet for best new volume of work or lifetime achievement. It is awarded without nominations or submissions by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
Jay Wright is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination", inasmuch as it incorporates elements of African, European, Native American and Latin American cultures. Following his receiving the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 2005, Wright is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century. Dante Micheaux has called Wright "unequivocally, the greatest living American poet"."
Ray DiPalma (1943-2016) was an American poet and visual artist who published more than 40 collections of poetry, graphic work, and translations with various presses in the US and Europe. He was educated at Duquesne University and University of Iowa.
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He was the founding editor of UbuWeb and an artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught. He was also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He published 32 books including ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008), 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2011), and 'Capital: New York Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015). He also was the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.
Larry Eigner, also known as Laurence Joel Eigner, was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an avant-garde poetry magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews that ran thirteen issues from February 1978 to October 1981. Along with This, it is the magazine most often referenced as the breeding ground for the group of writers who became known as the Language poets.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Allen R. Grossman was a noted American poet, critic and professor.
Sean Noel Bonney was an English poet born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He lived in London and, from 2015 up until the time of his death, in Berlin. He was married to the poet Frances Kruk. Charles Bernstein published poet William Rowe's obituary for Bonney in US online magazine Jacket2, as well as releasing his own poem The Death of Sean Bonney. Detailed notes to Bonney's poetics by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg are featured on the Poetry Foundation website. The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry has published a special edition on Bonney.
Nick Piombino is an American poet, essayist, artist and psychotherapist. He has been associated with poets from both the New York School of the 1960s and the Language Poets of the 1970s, though his work is not easily classified.
Richard Deming is the Director of Creative Writing and a Senior Lecturer in English at Yale University, where he has taught since 2002.
Peter Seaton was an American poet associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s. During the opening and middle years of Language poetry many of his long prose poems were published, widely read and influential. Seaton was also a frequent contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the influential magazines and theoretical venues for Language poetry, co-edited by Charles Bernstein. In 1978, Bernstein published Seaton's first book of poetry, Agreement, the same year that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine made its first appearance. Some of Seaton's work from this time has been reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984).
PennSound is a poetry website and online archive that hosts free and downloadable recordings of poets reading their own work. The website offers over 1500 full-length and single-poem recordings, the largest collection of poetry sound-files on the internet, all of which are available free for download. PennSound is codirected by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein. It is a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
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