bloggerettes, don't forget to post on the bernstein reading before tuesday. and please come to the reading!
the Contemporary Writers Series with
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Tuesday, November 9th
5:30 pm
Mills Hall Living Room
Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are /Republics of Reality: 1975-1995/ (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), /Dark City/ (1994) and /Rough Trades/ (1991). He is also the author of three books of essays, /My Way: Speeches and Poems/ (1999), /A Poetics/ (1992), and /Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984/ (1986).
In the 1970s, Bernstein co-founded the influential journal /L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/. Language writing, sometimes written L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E because of the journal, has been much debated, complained about, and celebrated. Basically, the term language writing tends to describe a school of experimental writing that appears in the late 1970s and 1980s mainly in the bay area and east coast. The term is more social than aesthetic; there are a wide range of poems that can be called "language poems." But if there is anything that seems to join the various forms of writing that get called language writing, it is an attention to how things are made: how language is constructed and how genres such as poetry are constructed, and then how these constructions shape--limit or expand--thinking.
Bernstein also a fine ironist and his later work in particular is distinctive for its sense of humor. He is unusually prolific (at least twenty books of poetry, probably more by now). And he also frequently takes on public issues, such as National Poetry Month.
A selection of his books are on reserve in the library.
And his website has extensive links. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein
Some suggested readings...
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/difficult-poem.html, “The Difficult Poem” (from Harper's, June 2003)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html, "Against National Poetry Month as Such" (originally for NPR)
And this in closing...
Charles Bernstein, "A Defence of Poetry"
for Brian McHale
My problem with deploying a term liek
nonelen
in these cases is acutually similar to
your
cirtique of the term ideopigical
unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce
interprestive proacdeure.
You say too musch lie a steamroller when
we need dental (I;d say jeweller's)
tools.
(I thin youy misinterpret the natuer of
some of the political claims go; not
themaic
interpretationmn of evey
evey detail in every peim
but an oeitnetation towatd a kind of
texutal practice
that you prefer to call "nknsesne" but
for /poltical/ purpses I prepfer to call
ideological!
, say Hupty Dumpty)
Taht is, nonesene see, msm to reduce a
vareity of fieefernt
prosdodic, thematic and discusrive
enactcemnts into a zeroo degree of
sense. What we have is a vareity of
valences. Nin-sene.sense is too binary
andoppostioin, too much oall or nithing
acccount with ninesense seeming by its
very meaing to equl no sense at all. We
have preshpas a blurrig of sense, whih
means not relying on convnetionally
methods of /conveying/ sense but whih may
aloow for dar greater sense-smakihn than
specisi9usforms of doinat disoucrse that
makes no sense at all by irute of thier
hyperconventionality (Bush's speeches,
calssically. Indeed you say that
nonsense sheds leds on its “antithesis”
sense making: but teally the antithsisi
of these poems you call nonselnse is not
sense-making itself but perhps, in some
cases, the simulation of sense-making:
decitfullness, manifpultaion, the
media-ization of language, etc.
I don’t agree with Stewart that “the
more exptreme the disontinuitites . . . the
more nonsisincial”: I hear sense
beginning to made in this sinstances.
Te problem though is the definaitonof
sense. What you mean by nomsense is
soething like a-rational, but ration (and
this does back to Blake not to meanion
the pre-Socaratics) DOES NOT EQUAL
sense! This realtioes to the sort of
oscillation udnertood as rhythmic or
prosidci, that I disusccio in Artiofice.
Crucialy, the duck/rabitt exmaple is one
of the ambiguity of /aspects/ and clearly
not a bprobelm of noneselnse: tjere are
two competing, completely sensible,
readings, not even any blurring; the
issue is context-depednece )otr
apsrevcyt blindness as Witegenstein
Nonesesen is too static. Deosnt’t
Prdunne even say int e eoem “sense occurs
“at the contre-coup:: in the process of
oscillatio itself.
b6y the waylines 9-10 are based on an
aphorism by Karl Kraus: /the closer we
look at a word the greater the distance
from which it stares back./
the Contemporary Writers Series with
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Tuesday, November 9th
5:30 pm
Mills Hall Living Room
Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are /Republics of Reality: 1975-1995/ (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), /Dark City/ (1994) and /Rough Trades/ (1991). He is also the author of three books of essays, /My Way: Speeches and Poems/ (1999), /A Poetics/ (1992), and /Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984/ (1986).
In the 1970s, Bernstein co-founded the influential journal /L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/. Language writing, sometimes written L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E because of the journal, has been much debated, complained about, and celebrated. Basically, the term language writing tends to describe a school of experimental writing that appears in the late 1970s and 1980s mainly in the bay area and east coast. The term is more social than aesthetic; there are a wide range of poems that can be called "language poems." But if there is anything that seems to join the various forms of writing that get called language writing, it is an attention to how things are made: how language is constructed and how genres such as poetry are constructed, and then how these constructions shape--limit or expand--thinking.
Bernstein also a fine ironist and his later work in particular is distinctive for its sense of humor. He is unusually prolific (at least twenty books of poetry, probably more by now). And he also frequently takes on public issues, such as National Poetry Month.
A selection of his books are on reserve in the library.
And his website has extensive links. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein
Some suggested readings...
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/difficult-poem.html, “The Difficult Poem” (from Harper's, June 2003)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html, "Against National Poetry Month as Such" (originally for NPR)
And this in closing...
Charles Bernstein, "A Defence of Poetry"
for Brian McHale
My problem with deploying a term liek
nonelen
in these cases is acutually similar to
your
cirtique of the term ideopigical
unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce
interprestive proacdeure.
You say too musch lie a steamroller when
we need dental (I;d say jeweller's)
tools.
(I thin youy misinterpret the natuer of
some of the political claims go; not
themaic
interpretationmn of evey
evey detail in every peim
but an oeitnetation towatd a kind of
texutal practice
that you prefer to call "nknsesne" but
for /poltical/ purpses I prepfer to call
ideological!
, say Hupty Dumpty)
Taht is, nonesene see, msm to reduce a
vareity of fieefernt
prosdodic, thematic and discusrive
enactcemnts into a zeroo degree of
sense. What we have is a vareity of
valences. Nin-sene.sense is too binary
andoppostioin, too much oall or nithing
acccount with ninesense seeming by its
very meaing to equl no sense at all. We
have preshpas a blurrig of sense, whih
means not relying on convnetionally
methods of /conveying/ sense but whih may
aloow for dar greater sense-smakihn than
specisi9usforms of doinat disoucrse that
makes no sense at all by irute of thier
hyperconventionality (Bush's speeches,
calssically. Indeed you say that
nonsense sheds leds on its “antithesis”
sense making: but teally the antithsisi
of these poems you call nonselnse is not
sense-making itself but perhps, in some
cases, the simulation of sense-making:
decitfullness, manifpultaion, the
media-ization of language, etc.
I don’t agree with Stewart that “the
more exptreme the disontinuitites . . . the
more nonsisincial”: I hear sense
beginning to made in this sinstances.
Te problem though is the definaitonof
sense. What you mean by nomsense is
soething like a-rational, but ration (and
this does back to Blake not to meanion
the pre-Socaratics) DOES NOT EQUAL
sense! This realtioes to the sort of
oscillation udnertood as rhythmic or
prosidci, that I disusccio in Artiofice.
Crucialy, the duck/rabitt exmaple is one
of the ambiguity of /aspects/ and clearly
not a bprobelm of noneselnse: tjere are
two competing, completely sensible,
readings, not even any blurring; the
issue is context-depednece )otr
apsrevcyt blindness as Witegenstein
Nonesesen is too static. Deosnt’t
Prdunne even say int e eoem “sense occurs
“at the contre-coup:: in the process of
oscillatio itself.
b6y the waylines 9-10 are based on an
aphorism by Karl Kraus: /the closer we
look at a word the greater the distance
from which it stares back./
<< Home