Charles Bernstein
The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies
The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies
With a Foreword by Paul Auster
A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein.
For five decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of aversive poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration of invention and includes essays and poetry on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more
At once a dialogic novel, long poem, and grand opera, The Kinds of Poetry I Want arrives amid renewed attacks on humanistic expression. In his polemical, comic style, Bernstein faces these challenges head-on and affirms the enduring vitality and attraction of poetry, poetics, and literary criticism.
424 pages | 13 halftones, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2024
“The book is an aesthetic event, an art-object in a way analogous to a book of poems’ existence as an art object, a poem, in toto. Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal or Yeats’s Tower come to mind.” --Paul Bové
"Charles Bernstein is a poet. Charles Bernstein is a critic. Charles Bernstein is a man who talks. And whether he is writing or talking, Charles Bernstein is a trouble-maker. Being found of trouble-makers myself, I am particularly fond of the trouble-maker designated by the words Charles Bernstein. Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. In the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country. Whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to listen to what he is saying." – Paul Auster from his Foreword
"A tireless provocateur, Bernstein may be as known for his critical writing as for his poetry. His innovative, genre-bending essays … offer an inspired blend of contrarian polemic, acute analysis, and ironic humor as they confront the stifling rules and protocols of poetry and the institutions that underlie it.” – Andrew Epstein, The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry since 1945 (2022)
“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
