Charles Bernstein

George-Thérèse Dickenson (1951–2021)

1977, Gay Community News

1977, Gay Community News

Poet, editor, and activist George-Thérèse Dickenson died June 15, 2021 in New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to her brother, John Dickenson.

With Will Bennett, Dickenson edited the magazine Assassin in the late 1970s.
She published two books:
Striations, from Good Gay Poets (Boston, 1976)
Transducing, from Segue (New York, 1986)

George-Thérèse Dickenson was born October 23, 1951, in Napa, CA, daugher of Howard George Dickinson, a lawyer, and Joanne DePuy (maiden name Cardiff), a wine and travel entrepreneur from Altadena, CA. Dickenson was a graduate of Wellesley College. After a brief stint at UC-Berkeley, she moved to Vermont and then Boston in the early 1970s, where she became involved with the anarchist circle around Murray Bookchin. She also connected with a group of poets. In the late 1970s, she  moved to lower Manhattan, where, over the next decade, Dickenson was closely involved with Larry Estridge and Peter Seaton. During that time, she taught poetry in the prisons through Janine Pommy Vega’s Incisions Arts Project. Her poems were included in a related anthology, Candles Burn in Memory Town: Poems from Both Sides of the Wall, edited by Vega (Segue/Incisions, 1988). While in New York, she struggled with substance abuse. During Dickenson's last decades,  she was living in a mountaintop cabin in a nudist colony in Stockton, NJ. She is survived by her mother and her brothers John and Chuck (pictures above) and her longtime partner Bobby Astarita.

Poem for Henri Deluy by Douglas Messerli

Eric Giraud (left), Liliane Giraudon, Jean-Jacques Viton (May 24,1933–March 14, 2021), Susan Bee, me, Henri Deluy: Marseille, November 22, 2016.

Henry Deluy  (April 25, 1931–July 20, 2021)

Saddened to have lost the great poet, publisher, and literary organizer and friend, Henri Deluy. Here’s a poem I wrote “after” his writing in the Sun & Moon book, Carnal Love.
— Douglas Messerli

CETA artists projects v. the 'New York Times'

CETA dancers Jane Goldberg and Charles "Cookie" Cook. (photos: George Malave)

CETA dancers Jane Goldberg and Charles “Cookie” Cook. (photos: George Malave)

CETA (the Comprehensive Employment Training Act), from the 1970s, provided more jobs for artists than any government program since the WPA in the 1930s. Efforts are now underway to commemorate the program. CityLore has received an NEH grant and there is a superb new website that chronicles the programs. 

'boundary 2' webinar on 'Topsy-Turvy'

On June 15, boundary 2 editor Paul Bové convened Yunte Huang (from California), Runa Bandyopadhyay (from India), Abigail Lang (from France), and me for b2’s webinar on Topsy-Turvy,  focusing on non-U.S. perspectives, in anticipation of an issue of boundary 2 coming out in the fall. In the b2 issue, Runa gives a Vedic and Bengali spin to her reading of my poetics, Yunte writes about our ongoing mishmash of American and Chinese encounters, and Abigail continues her exploration of American/French poetry exchanges in an introduction to her translation of my work.

Vladimir Feschenko: Charles Bernstein's experimental semiotics

Language poetry between Russian and American traditions

NLO (New Literary Review, Russia), 168:2, 2021

 The new issue of NLO (New Literary Review, Russia, 168:2, 2021) features a section on American poetry edited edited by Vladimir Feschenko. Two of the essays, both machine translated, with some modification, are published here. Please consult the Russian original for accuracy.