Joshua Weiner and Vaclav Paris on Attack of the Difficult Poems

photo © 2011 Lawrence Schwartzwald: Katie Couric

Václav Paris
"Poetry in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, and Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems"
Jourrnal of Modern Literature
35:3 (2012)

Joshua Weiner
"A Hazard of New Fortunes"
Los Angeles Review of Books
(Sept. 19, 2012)

Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essay and Inventions

September 23, 2012

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“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”
—George Lakoff

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. Now in paperback: "Collecting 30 years’ worth of Bernstein’s thickly layered poetry, this volume rigorously critiques the art of poetry itself, modulating the comic with the dark, structural invention with buoyant wordplay" – The New York Times Book Review, Paperback Row, April 3, 2011

Biographical Note for All the Whiskey in Heaven

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.

Susan Bee

Emma Bee Bernstein