Charles Bernstein

Jerome Rothenberg had just published "Our Americas" on his Poems & Poetics site. This is one of the essays from Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Invetions:

part one, part two

On October 11, 1990, Jackson Mac Low read from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons for seven minutes. You'll hear the voice of Charles Bernstein as he and others (members of Bernstein's class at Buffalo at the time) scramble to find a copy of the Stein. Then Mac Low spent a few minutes discussing the "Objects" section.

see images and full  text of poem.

 read the interview in the June Brooklyn Rail

... Poetry’s unpopularity, or anyway the unpopularity of the kind of poetry I want, is part of its cultural condition and so part of its advantage. Its unpopularity may even be popular; that’s poetic logic for you. How about saying that poetry is the research and development wing of verbal language, better understood as collaborative thinking and investigation, at least for some of the practitioners?  It doesn’t necessarily express an individual author’s biographical feelings in a conventionally lyrical manner—a great deal of poetry does that, but a great deal doesn’t. The elitism is not poetry’s, but commodity culture’s, which says that value comes exclusively from the market or audience share. Forms of culture that are not immediately accessible to a mass or popular audience also matter. Difficulty is not an obstacle, it is a material means for engagement with the social real. Yes we can.

Manuel Brito, editor of Zasterle Press (Canary Islands) interviewed me for a special issue of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses on "Small Press Publishing: Absorbing New Forms, Circulating New Ideas" (#62, April 2011). In his introduction, Brito writes: "

TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL
May 18-21, 2011 festival website
program PDF (Draft)participants

poster: Charles Bernstein / Loss Pequeño Glazier, "Two Birds with One Stone"

Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök and I will be reading in Copenhagen and Oslo in the next weeks.