Hart Crane

Hart Crane celebration (2007)

On the occasion of the publication by the Library of America of Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters (edited by Langdon Hammer), Samuel R. Delany, Brian Reed and Charles Bernstein gathered at the Kelly Writers House to talk about Crane's life and poetry.

April 25, 2013

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press
176 pages, paper, ebook, and audiobook

Upcoming: boundary 2 launch, moderated by Paul Bové, with Yunte Huang (US), Abigal Lang (France), and Runa Bandyopadhyay (India). 4pm EST, June 15: registration here.

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, orignally broadcast May 18: YouTube
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray’d Yo, WQXC, radio, archive of April 22 broadcast (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
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••Jeremy Sigler, “The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein,” Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, “Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy,” Altered States
••Paul Bove on “Echologs” at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: “Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in.”

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

This unwitting monument (PoemTalk #161)

Sarah Dowling, 'Entering Sappho'

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Larissa Lai, Maxe Crandall, and Julia Bloch to discuss Sarah Dowling’s book Entering Sappho (Coach House, 2020), in which an abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to vexing questions of history, settlement, translation, violence, “impossible geographies,”* the idea of the “unwitting monument,” and the abusive economics of the s0-called company town. The group focuses on two passages from the book. First there’s “Clip,” the opening poem, a kind of verse preface or prelude to the recurring themes. Then there are the first three paragraphs of a prose statement (or prose poem?) at the end of the book, “White Columns.” The texts of these passages can be found HERE and HERE.

June 14, 2021

Vladimir Feschenko: Charles Bernstein’s Experimental Semiotics

Language Poetry between Russian and American Traditions

Charles Bernstein

The new issue of NLO (New Literary Review, Russia, 168:2, 2021) feature 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.