Nie Zhenzhao

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E POETICS: 2 volume Chinese translation of selected essays and poems by Charles Bernstein

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E POETICS
by Charles Bernstein
translated by Luo Lianggong, et al.
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, Feb 2013
ISBN 978-7-5446-3021-4 / I-0229
190 pages

Convolution Journal for Critical Experiment

including my 2007 interview with Nie Zhenzhao (excerpted here)

Charles Bernstein

With its disarming in medias res layout, Convolution is tyring to reinvent the print periodical. First issue includes Giorgio Agamben and Alessandro Petti, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Bruce Andrews, Alexander Barnett, Bob Brown, Tony Chakar, Sarah Crowner, Drew Daniel, Jeff Dolven, Melissa Dunn, Craig Dworkin, Jesko Fezer, Michael Golston, Robert Hardwick Weston, Christian Hawkey, Athena Kirk, Gareth Long, Rosalind Morris, Andrew Schelling, Eliza Slavet, Nancy Tewksbury, and editors Paul Stephens & Jenelle Troxell.

A 2007 interview I did with Nie Zhenzhao and published in Chinese translation in Foreign Literature Studies (Vol. 29, No. 2 April 2007) is also included. Here is an excerpt, mostly focussing on Parsing (1976, Eclipse digital edition, 2006), but also on some of the poems in Controlling Interests (1980).

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza