The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

by Charles Bernstein, Paul Auster (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226836096
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/28/2024
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charles Bernstein, winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize, is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, most recently two volumes of poetry, Near/Miss and Topsy-Turvy, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He is the winner of the 2025 America Award of the Contemporary Arts Educational Project, for a lifetime contribution to international writing.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Paul Auster

Act One: Pixellation
Ocular Truth and the Irreparable [Veil]
The Body of the Poem
95 Theses
The Unreliable Lyric
A Fabric of Expectation
Offbeat
Groucho and Me
Shadows
Pesapalabra Interview
The Brink of Continuity
The Poetics List
The Swerve of Verse
“Too Philosophical for a Poet”

Act Two: Kinds
Free Thinking: Spring and All versus The Waste Land at 100
#CageFreePoetry
Forewords & Backwords
Weathermen
Three Flasks of Gin with a Flax Chaser
Stein Stein Stein
Dichtung Yammer

Act Three: Doubletalk
Summa contra Gentiles
UP against Storytelling, for David Antin
Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime

Index of Names and Titles
Coda (Echo): Index of Motifs

Editorial Reviews

"This is not so much a collection of poems, as conventionally understood, as a display of the possibilities for poetry. Each work here is not just in a different style or form but rather explores different aspects of poetry as a medium: resounding, re- vising, resonating, re- calling, re- performing, reimaginings."

Critical Inquiry

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

"A month or so ago, having my thirteenth collection of poems in the designer’s hands, I felt queasy about the possibility of writing new poems because of a fear of repeating myself and doubts about whether I could do anything different. Then I read Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies. . . . thanks to his cogent articulation of the most powerful reasons (beyond approval, for example) for writing poetry and poetic criticism as well as his comic and serious call for practitioners not to be influenced by perspectives that inhibit the flowering of inventiveness, of a vibrant exploratory poetics, I resolved to take further 'leap[s] of poetic faith' . . . The comedian with the letters CB — that’s one kind of poetry critic I want."

Jacket2 - Thomas Fink

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

"This is a funny book. Bernstein is a funny writer. . . . the ability to repeatedly raise a smile in the reader in a book of such eminently serious intent is to be admired. Go read it."

Elliptical Movements

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 A. Bové