Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein in 2008. Photo by Andrei Romanenko. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, theorist, editor, and academic.

Life

Overview

Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). Educated at Harvard College, he has been visiting Professor of Poetry, Poetics, and Creative Writing at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, "All the Whiskey in Heaven," was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Bernstein's continued commitment to small presses remains strong - In the same year that FSG released his major collection, Chax Press released "Umbra," a collection of Berstein's latest translations of poems from multiple languages.

Youth and education

Bernstein was born in New York City to a Jewish family and attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1968. Bernstein then matriculated at Harvard College, majoring in Philosophy, studying the work of Austin and Wittgenstein under Stanley Cavell, a seminal figure in the philosophy of language and ordinary language philosophy. Bernstein graduated Harvard College in 1972, and during his time there worked closely with Stanley Cavell, who oversaw his thesis, a study that pursued the aesthetic and poetic possibilities of the amalgamation of analytical philosophy and avant-garde literature.

Early career

His first book, Asylums, was published in 1975. Together with Bruce Andrews he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which ran to 13 issues between 1978 and 1981. This is routinely considered to be the starting point of Language Poetry and was the most significant outlet for both the progressive poetry and progressive poetic theory taking place in New York City and Berkeley. He has said about the creation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, "We tried to trace a history of radical poetics, taking up the model presented in Jerome Rothenberg’s Revolution of the Word, and later by Rothenberg and Pierre Joris in Poems for the Millennium and Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment. When you go back 30 years, you see that poetics that now are widely accepted as foundational for contemporary poetry were harshly rejected then." Bernstein and Andrews published selected pieces from these 13 issues in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. During this period, Bernstein also published three more books of his own poetry, Parsing (1976), Shade (1978) and Poetic Justice (1979), while earning a living as a freelance medical writer.

Later life and work

From 1989 to 2003, Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo, where he was co-founder and Director of the Poetics Program. He is also co-founder of The Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo. He is currently the Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-founder of the poetry audio archive PennSound. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego. Since 1980, he has published a further eighteen books of poetry, as well as editing a number of anthologies of prose and verse. Working with composers Ben Yarmolinsky, Dean Drummond, and Brian Ferneyhough, he has written the libretti for 5 operas and has collaborated with a number of visual artists, including his wife, Susan Bee, Richard Tuttle, and Mimi Gross. Bernstein's poetry has appeared in 4 editions of David Lehman's Best American Poetry series, most recently in the 2008 edition. His work has also regularly appeared in Harper's Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and Critical Inquiry. While Bernstein has supported small presses throughout his career, he has also published on such mainstream academic presses as Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Northwestern University Press, and, most recently, The University of Chicago Press, which has published his last 3 major works. The publication of All the Whiskey in Heaven by Farrar, Straus, &Giroux in 2010 was his most commercial endeavor to date. He has said about his work, "It’s true that, on the one hand, I mock and destabilize the foundation of a commitment to lyric poetry as an address toward truth or toward sincerity. But, on the other hand, if you’re interested in theory as a stable expository mode of knowledge production or critique moving toward truth, again, I should be banned from your republic. (I’ve already been banned from mine.) My vacillating poetics of poems and essays is a serial practice, a play of voices."

Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He appeared in the 2000 movie Finding Forrester, as Dr. Simon and in a series of 1999 TV commercials, with Jon Lovitz, for the Yellow Pages.

Recognition

In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. Other awards and honors include The 1999 Roy Harvy Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

Publications

Poetry

• Asylums. New York: Asylum's Press, 1975.
• Parsing. New York: Asylum's Press, 1976.
• Shade. College Park, MD: Sun & Moon Press, 1978.
• Poetic Justice. Baltimore: Pod Books, 1979.
• L E G E N D (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma). New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980.
• Controlling Interests. New York: Roof Books, 1980.
• The Nude Formalism (with Susan Bee). Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989.
  • reprinted Charlottesville, VA: Outside Voices, 2006.
• Islets/Irritations. New York: Jordan Davies, 1983.
  • reprinted New York: Roof Books, 1992.
• The Sophist. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987
  • reprinted. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2004.
• Rough Trades. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991.
• Dark City. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994.
• Republics of Reality: 1975-1995. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000.
• With Strings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Green Integer, 2005.
• Shadowtime (libretto for an opera with music by Brian Ferneyhough). Los Angeles:
• Girly Man. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• All the Whiskey in Heaven. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010.

Non-fiction

• Content's Dream: Essays, 1975-1984. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.
  • reprinted Northwestern University Press, 2001.
• Artifice of Absorption: An essay. Singing Horse Press, 1987; Potes & Poets Press, 1988.
• A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• A Conversation with David Antin. New York: Granary Books, 2002.
• Attack of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Collected editions

• My Way: Speeches and poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Translated

• Claude Royet-Journoud, The Maternal Drape. Windsor, VT: Awede Press, 1984.
• Olivier Cadiot, Red, Green, and Black. Hartford: Potes & Poets, 1990.

Edited

• Patterns/Contexts/Time: A Forum: 1989, with Phillip Foss in Tyuonyi. Santa Fe, 1990.
• The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. New York: Roof, 1990.
• "13 North American Poets" (with Susan Howe) in TXT #31. Le Mans, France and Brussels: 1993.
• Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), Editor, with Loss Pequeno Glazier. 1995 —
• LINEbreak: poetry interviews, host/co-producer. Twenty-six 30-minute programs, dist. Public Radio Satellite Program and on the Internet at the EPC. 1995–96.
• Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Modern and Contemporary Poetics (Editor, with Hank Lazer, of a book series from the University of Alabama Press). 1998 —

  

  Charles Bernstein reads two poems for Emma Bernstein

• 99 Poets/1999: A Special Issue of boundary 2 (Vol.26, No.1). Duke University Press, 1999.
• Louis Zukofksy: Selected Poems. New York: Library of America (American Poets Project), 2006.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Charles Bernstein profile and 7 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• Charles Bernstein b. 1950 at the Poetry Foundation

Prose

• "Against National Poetry Month As Such" - a short essay by Charles Bernstein.

Audio

• Charles Bernstein on PennSound

Books

• Asylums (e-reprint)
• Disfrutes (e-reprint)
• Parsing (e-reprint)
• Rough Trades (e-reprint)
• Charles Bernstein at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Charles Bernstein in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Charles Bernstein's CV
• UCSD Registrer of Charles Bernstein papers 1962-2000
• Charles Bernstein Official website at EPC.
• Poet and Anti-Poet Review from the New York Times by Daisy Fried, published April 7, 2010
• Of Time and Charles Bernstein’s Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statements by Susan M. Schultz, in Jacket, July 2001
• Interview with Romina Freschi, June 2005
• Interview with Jay Sanders in BOMB, Spring 2010

Etc.

• L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine (complete archive)