Charles Bernstein

Espians #4: pdf

free pdf
Contents:

 Li Zeng, Cui Dan
The Shaping of Chinese Modern Poetry by English Romantic Poetry: A Case Study of Xiang Zhu’s Poetry / 1

 Liu Chun
“Undo Thin Hearte”: The Treatment of the Ubi Sunt Theme in Medieval Penitential Lyrics / 23

 Zhang Pinggong
Literary Work vs. Cultural Assumption: Illustrating Some Caribbean and English Writers and Texts / 35

 J.H. Prynne
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:Study Note /49

 Wang Zuyou
The English Language Haiku Poet and Mentor: An Interview with Lenard D. Moore / 87

 Li Zhimin
Editorial Memoir: A Life Choice /101

 Ou Hong
Some Notes on EPSIANS /109

State of the Art: Video of 1990 lecture

from ThinAir video and Mitch Corber

"State of the Art" was presented at the 1990 Poetry Project Symposium, as a keynote along with lectures by Amiri Baraka and others.  The essay was collected in A Poetics, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1992.

 


 

YouTube direct link

This is the opening of the essay:

Miles Champion on Close Listening

Photo by Alan Bernheimer.
Photo by Alan Bernheimer.

Miles Champion grew up in England and moved to the U.S. in his early 30s. His books include Compositional Bonbons PlacateSore Models, Three Bell Zero, and, just out from Pressed Wafer, How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. On this show, Miles reads his new book, How to Laugh, which is forthcoming from Adventures in Poetry.

Program One: Champiom reads How To Laugh: (24:16): MP3
Program Two: Conversation with Charles Bernstein:(28:52): MP3

Michael Golston: Improbable history — Jennifer Ashton's misrepresentations

Jennifer Ashton,  From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). [Michael Golston's review was originally published in the William Carlos Williams Review, Volume 28, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.]

I once had the good fortune to take a course with U.C. Berkeley’s Julian Boyd on the history of the English language. Occasionally, as a student in the class struggled with the finer points of deontic modality or the differences between “shall” and “will,” Boyd would suddenly glare at whomever was speaking and announce with mock sternness, “You are exactly wrong.” 

 

 That’s how I feel about Jennifer Ashton’s book.

Calling a Koons a Koons

Little Mermaid Koons {poetics lab simulation]

 Allegorical micturition has swept
the guest halls of the art galleries
and the undermasses
wail in the background to iambic
beat. Sludge is proclaimed sludge,
hairdos hors d’oeuvres, as the soiled
face of inverted cardioerasty—a.k.a.
genital fetish—rears its mushy brow.
––from “Ambliopia” in The Sophist (1987)

 The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is to big art shows what The Little Mermaid is to big Broadway musicals: bright, breezy, and tuneless. Koons's art is a product of the Disnification of Warhol (and decidedly not the other way around). The show is worthwhile seeing as a monument to the most commercially successful aspects of the New York art market. As with the proverbial  restaurant, with food shot up with MSG, you leave the show aesthetically hungry.