“tipped / lobes”
Corona was the first book by Bruce Andrews that I read, circa 1976. I was drawn to it for its strict, if oblique, economies, but also because its exclusions reveal as much as its manifest content. I suppose my primary “rubric” for poetry is that it not assume a place for itself, but rather that it construct such a place in fidelity to the contingent logic that requires it to be as it is and not otherwise. For better and worse, as they say.
No less intriguing, however, was the sense that Andrews was building — that is, batching and sorting “mouth signatures” via “all kinds / of robbery” — a scalable vocabulary for the work to come, albeit I had no idea of how capacious that scale would soon become. Was the magisterial mayhem of The Millennium Project already present in nuces in the “tipped / lobes” of Corona?
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E interview
Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (2015)
Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston interview Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein for The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters (2019). This interview was part of the University of New Mexico book and is made available here with permission of the press. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters is one of three volume edited by Hofer and Golston and published by University of New Mexico Press. The other two volumes are the complete facsimile edition of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (2020) and the collaborative poem LEGEND (2020) by Andrews, Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, and Steve McCaffery. Each of these editions including extensive notes and commentaries by the editors.