Robert Bertholf

Robert J. Bertholf has retired after a twenty-five-year run as curator of the Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, and now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography, and Remembering Joel Oppenheimer; he is editor with Albert Gelpi of The Complete Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, as well as the editor of Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer. He is currently writing on the serial poem in modern American poetry.

By this author

On Kenneth Irby's 'The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962–2006'

On John Taggart's 'There Are Birds'

The Jargon Society and contemporary literary history

An introduction to Robert Bertholf’s Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan: A biographical sketch

Robert Duncan’s 'The Venice Poem' and Symphonic Form

The Robert Duncan / Denise Levertov correspondence: Duncan’s View

From Robert Duncan’s notebooks: On Denise Levertov

Preliminary checklist of Robert Duncan’s reference library

The poetry collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo: a sketch

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook
(audibook available from the press and soon to be avaialbe from Amazon/Audible)

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (archive video coming soon)
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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.

Hilton Als on Gertrude Stein & Wallace Stevens

Al Filreis

During a recent one-hour interview/conversation with Hilton Als conducted by me, I had occasion to ask Hilton about a reference to Gertrude Stein in one of his essays. Here is a 4-minute excerpt from the video recording of the discussion. In another essay, collected in White Girls, Hilton does a close reading, here and there, of Wallace Stevens's poem about the muse, "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch." I asked him about Stevens, too, and that excerpt is presented below as well. The discussion was a program hosted by the Kelly Writers House for the annual Kelly Writers House Fellows program. Hilton Als was the second of the three spring 2021 Fellows to engage with the Writers House community, and many others, in three sessions. This was the third of those events.

Russell Atkins on PennSound

Charles Bernstein

World'd Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough, was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Foreword by Janice Lowe.

Russell Arkins reading "Night and a Distant Church," "Train Yard at Night," and "It's Here in The" for TV 20 Cleveland, c. 2017:.Click on photo for video file: