Charles Bernstein – författare

Close Listening brings together 17 strikingly original essays, commissioned especially for this volume, on the reading of poetry, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, and offers an indispensable critical base for understanding language in and as performance.

Close Listening brings together 17 strikingly original essays, commissioned especially for this volume, on the reading of poetry, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, and offers an indispensable critical base for understanding language in and as performance.

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. From the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings to new imaginations of prosody, the entries gathered here investigate a compelling range of topics for anyone interested in poetry. Taken together, these essays encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded and visualized word. The time is right for such a volume: with readings, spoken word events, and the Web gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening opens a number of new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry.

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. From the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings to new imaginations of prosody, the entries gathered here investigate a compelling range of topics for anyone interested in poetry. Taken together, these essays encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded and visualized word. The time is right for such a volume: with readings, spoken word events, and the Web gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening opens a number of new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry.

Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as "Girly Man", which features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.Composed of works of very different forms and moods - etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness - the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, "Girly Man" is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America's most controversial poets.

This text explores the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Addressing many interrelated issues, Charles Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on "LANGUAGE," the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing. Bernstein offers essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech and speeches veering into song, illuminating the developments in the late 1990s in contemporary poetry with his own contributions to them.

Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as "Girly Man", which features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.Composed of works of very different forms and moods - etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness - the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, "Girly Man" is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America's most controversial poets.

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language and between everyday life and its adversaries. "Attack of the Difficult Poems", his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, "Attack of the Difficult Poems" ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail.Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature's place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to second wave modernist poets, "Attack of the Difficult Poems" sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

The poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy. Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange--and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.

Praised in recent years as a "calculating, improvisatory, essential poet" by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as "the foremost poet-critic of our time" by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein's first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance.This collection's title highlights poetry's ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry-proudly declaring itself "a totally inaccessible poem"-and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism-full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of "our united fates." These poems engage with works by contemporary painters-including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan-and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky.Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

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.Though Bernstein’s poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This “cognitive dissidence,” as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Rückert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist.Bernstein didn’t set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must “Continue / on, as / before, as / after.”

A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein.  For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental 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 not only poetry but also essays 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, humorous style, Bernstein faces these challenges head-on and affirms the enduring vitality and attraction of poetry, poetics, and literary criticism.

A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein.  For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental 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 not only poetry but also essays 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, humorous style, Bernstein faces these challenges head-on and affirms the enduring vitality and attraction of poetry, poetics, and literary criticism.

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years. As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.   The collection’s title, the now–familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, “The pen is tinier than the sword.” In these poems, Bernstein makes good on his claim that “the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.” In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein’s work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick.   Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange—and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight. 

Winning the Chain Restaurant Game Are you ready for success?...Find out what it takes in this insider's guide to making it in today's most exciting growth industry.In this instructive and inspiring book, award-winning authors and foodservice industry experts Charles Bernstein and Ron Paul tell how the most successful restaurant companies win with bottom-up management, putting the customer on top. Based on interviews with more than a hundred industry executives and packed with enlightening examples as well as a few historic failures, this unique book teaches important lessons for restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs: Presents the first authoritative, in-depth look at the restaurant chain industry as a wholeTells how successful chain CEOs produce results with varied winning stylesIsolates and clearly describes the eight crucial factors, or strategic "links," vital to restaurant chain successTells how chains can capitalize on bulk purchasing, brand identity, consistent execution, an individual sense of style and—most of all—finding unique ways to please the customerFew success stories so thoroughly embody the twentieth-century American dream as those of restaurant chains such as McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Little Caesar's, and Taco Bell. But besides the "true grit" demonstrated by entrepreneurial heros like McDonald's Ray Kroc and Wendy's Dave Thomas, what does it take to build and maintain a successful restaurant or retail chain? Find out in this first book to give a broad, long-term perspective on one of the nation's leading growth industries and to offer crucial lessons for all entrepreneurs, no matter what the business.Winning the Chain Restaurant Game, by award-winning authors and noted foodservice industry experts Charles Bernstein and Ron Paul, documents the critical success factors required for one of the toughest, most competitive industries.Highlighting the winning styles of more than a hundred chain executives, their triumphs, trials, disappointments, and turnarounds, this fascinating and instructive book identifies the eight strategic "links" that lead to victory in the chain restaurant business. With surgical precision, Bernstein and Paul explore such key factors as leadership, motivation, bulk purchasing, marketing, identity, consistency, and expansion. But they place focus ahead of everything and conclude that the entrepreneurial passion of an executive who deeply believes in his concept is the ultimate catalyst for success.Small- to medium-size chains are going public at a dizzying pace and there are enormous financial opportunities for savvy restaurant owners. Winning the Chain Restaurant Game arms operators with the vital know-how needed to win the game.

This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. "Artifice of Absorption," a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means," he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.Insisting on the vital need for radical innovation, Bernstein traces the traditions of modern poetry back to Stein and Wilde, taking issue with those critics who see in the "postmodern" a loss of political and aesthetic relevance. Sometimes playful, often hortatory, always intense, he joins in the debate on cultural diversity and the definition of modernism. We encounter Swinburne and Morris as surprising precursors, along with considerations of Wittgenstein, Khlebnikov, Adorno, Jameson, and Pac-Man. A Poetics is both criticism and poetry, both tract and song, with no dull moments.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing is the third volume of this annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year’s volume, guest-edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Sina Queyras, Tan Lin, Christian Bök, Myung Mi Kim, Juliana Spahr, Samuel R. Delany, and even Barack Obama—as well as emerging voices. Intended to provoke lively conversation and debate, Best American Experimental Writing is an ideal literary anthology for contemporary classroom settings.

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

The Sophist was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, The Sophist demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including My Way and With Strings. If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric, then The Sophist is model for a rhetorical poetry that interrogates truth in the name of reason.

Stationer, byggarbetsplatser, tomma punkter för radikal förvandling. Med dessa ord, hämtade ur den lista som inleder diktsamlingen With Strings , beskriver Charles Bernstein någonting som skulle kunna vara hans eget poetiska arbete såsom det har utformats under de senaste 35 åren; en varierande mångfald av essäer, dikter, förord, föreläsningar, översättningar, artiklar, bloggar, libretton Det övergående och provisoriska har alltid från sjuttiotalets disjunktiva collage och L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-texter till 2000-talets konceptuella och poetiska slapstick varit avgörande i hans verksamhet; en aktivitet som ständigt varit öppen för avvikelser och förvrängningar, störningar och avbrott (det finns ingen bestämd tröskel vid vilken brus blir akustiskt betydelsebärande), för de estetiska och politiska potentialerna hos det skeva och det komiska, det otydliga och det stapplande, det inkorrekta och det komplexa. Charles Bernstein är idag den kanske viktigaste poeten och poesiteoretikern inom det engelska språkområdet. I De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högt spel i tropik-erna dikter, essäer, samtal presenteras han för första gången i bokform på svenska, i ett omfattande urval av dikter och essäer som spänner över nästan tre decennier, från 1978 till 2006. Charles Bernstein född i New York 1950. Han debuterade 1975 med diktsamlingen Asylums och har sedan dess publicerat runt 30 diktsamlingar, senast Girly Man, 2006. Han har också publicerat tre essäsamlingar och ett antal libretton. 1978 startade han tidskriften L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E som han redigerade tillsammans med poeten Bruce Andrews. Han har även varit iniativtagare till och drivande kraft bakom flera poesiläsningsserier, radioprogram för poesi och poetiska webbresurser som Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu) och Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound). Sedan 1990 är han också verksam som professor i litteratur, mellan 1990 och 2003 som Professor of Poetry and Letters vid SUNY at Buffalo, och sedan 2003 som Professor of English vid University of Pennsylvania. Pressbild finns att ladda ned på www.oei.nu

Contra toda convención de aquello que solemos llamar comunicabilidad, la obra de Bernstein destaca por realzar su contracara, utilizando aquello que se filtra por las vías de escape: pone en jaque ese cliché de que un poema necesariamente debe decirnos algo (como si pudiéramos ponerlo en la bolsa de valores o cuantificarlo). Para Bernstein, lo que queda fuera y lo que queda dentro del texto vale por igual. Para él, se debe mostrar el material con que se trabaja, poner el ojo en qué y el cómo se hace todo un arsenal lingüístico (eso que llamamos poema). Son textos que no pretenden seducirnos (a pesar de que originalmente estén confeccionados con un cuidado notable desde su música) mas sí nos cuestionan y nos dejan incómodos. Esta antología muestra este panorama: que cuanto se transa en un lenguaje se somatiza no por aquello que se enuncia, sino por lo que está fuera, que enfrentamos día a día y que la letra apenas toca. Son los pliegues de un relieve que cuesta digerir, un montaje que devela lo que pasa tras bambalinas. O un callejón por el que transitamos saturados de sustancias, de interferencias; una especie de nonsense, una broma aguda que se traduce en un extrañamiento múltiple, donde lo que se nos dice nunca es.

Existe otra poesía estadounidense, que a falta de un padre, Walt Whitman, tiene dos madres, Emily Dickinson y Gertrude Stein. En sus obras, más que la creación de un país o de un sujeto que lo habite, está la creación de una lengua nueva, ampliada a través de aparentes errores yusos en desuso, compuesta por oído, extendiendo las posibilidades formales de la rima y el metro la primera, y de la materialidad de las palabras, a través de las reiteraciones y sus alcances filosóficos, la segunda. Los asuntos tratados por ambas las alejan del hablante hipertrofiado de la poesía del canon, que centraliza en sí la visión totalizadora del mundo, pero también del hablante confesional, que comparte exclusivamente sussentimientos acerca del reducido ámbito de la experiencia. En fin, las de Dickinson y Stein son propuestas opuestas a las de quienes llevaron la poesía a ese lugar protagonizado por nadie más que el propio poeta sufriendo con el estado del mundo.

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-four titles published for 2017 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2017 is “Ancient Enmity”. IPNHK is one of the most influential international poetry events in Asia. From 22–26 November 2017, over 20 invited poets from various countries will be in Hong Kong to read their works based on the theme “Ancient Enmity.” Included in the anthology and box set, these unique works are presented with Chinese and English translations in bilingual or trilingual formats.

A companion to the critically acclaimed "My Way", his 1999 montage of essays, conversations and poems, "With Strings" catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of 69 poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, "With Strings" is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegaic. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods and perceptions extend and reverberate. Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, "With Strings", suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, "With Strings" bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together.From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.