Charles Bernstein

From the archive (1990): Mike Freakman on the culture wars, with special reference to Dick Cheney

Like Big Dick "Don't-Pull-My" Cheney said in a briefing a few days ago: "Either they play ball or we cut off their balls -- or find someone who will."

I could not  find a publisher for this piece in 1990; it is published here for the first time. With Cheney in the news this week, the work came to mind –– anyway for the last line. In 1990, Cheney was the Secretary of War under Bush I. 

Report from Washington

by Mike Freakman

Washington, D.C., Sept. 15, 1990 – Senator Laughton O'Buoy (R-GA) charged today that there were twenty "pipe-smoking" drug addicts in the State Department.
            "Drug users and sympathizers have infiltrated the news media, education, and the arts," Sen. O'Buoy told Stifled Yawn in an exclusive interview.  "We are beginning to see a close connection between drugs, pornography, and flag burning."

Muenster Prize for two books by Charles Bernstein in German translation

The 2015 Prize of the State of Münster for International Poetry, the leading translation prize in Germany, has gone to two new translations:

 Gedichte und Übersetzen 
 tr. Versatorium and Peter Waterhouse
Vienna: Edition Korrespondenzen
&

Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte 
tr. Tobias Amslinger , Norbert Lange, Léonce W. Lupette and Mathias Traxler
(based on All the Whiskey in Heaven, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Wiesbaden, Germany: Lux Books

MUENSTER INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE CEREMONY AND READINGS

The jury commented [rough translation]:
In his formally avant-garde, difficult and lucid poetic lyrics, Bernstein proposes a kind of poetry where experiment with literary form and genres is sovereign as well as risky and where there is strong emphasis on sound. His poetry includes intertextual assemblies, Dada-like sound poems, aleatoric works, songs, works of social criticism and verses that make a polemical intervention on the literary. The jury selected two volumes, both of which avoided a conventional approach to translation as an exact reproduction of the original poem. The two books put forward a different approach, for example, understanding translation as a creating poems in their own right.  
Since 1993, the city of Münster has awarded the poetry prize for a book of poetry and its translation. Prizewinners 2013 were the Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and his German translator Werner von Koppenfels. 

Munster Prize web site 
pdf of Munster poetry festival 2015 and prize ceremony 

Chinese / American Association of Poetry and Poetics (CAAP) 2014 Conference Program, Shanghai

PDF of the 2014 program.

American scholars featured at the conference this year: Marjorie Perloff, Daniel Albright, Tan Lin, Brian Reed, Yunte Huang, Charles Bernstein.

This is the third CAAP, following the inaugural conference on American poetry in Wuhan in 2007.

CAAP web page

New Edition of Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal

Clairvoyant Journal 1974
is the first edition of the Clairvoyant Journal that follows the page design and format of Weiner's manuscript. For the first time, Weiner's spatial organization is kept intact. (In this work of "concrete prose," line breaks are retained). 

Clairvoyant Journal 1974 is based on the typescripts Early and Clairvoyant Journals and includes the entries dated February 23 to June 10.

Patrick Durgin provides an overview of the edition here.

Dean Drummond's Café Buffé, libretto by Charles Bernstein: sound recording and libretto now available

a microtonal opera scored for the instruments of Harry Partch and Dean Drummond

Drummond on the set for Daphne of the Dunes by Harry Partch, playing a harmonic canon, La Mama Experimental Theater, 1994. Hat by Alice Farley. Photo by Jeffrey Starin.

Sound file of  live performance  (52:29): MP3
Libretto:  summer stock (December, 2014)