DOCSLIB.ORG

Charles Bernstein/American Innovator More Numerous Of: a Kinetic Approach James Shivers 2019

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Charles Bernstein/American Innovator More Numerous Of: a Kinetic Approach James Shivers 2019 Charles Bernstein / American Innovator (i ERS ERSPECTIV IVE. More Numerous of: A Kinetic Approach 37 Blue Editions James Shivers ©2019 James Shivers. Foreword © Richard Deming. All Rights Reserved. Design by 37 Blue Source Material for cover: Common Place book, 1833, p 109. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon fund. All quotes from Charles Bernstein used with his permission. Charles Bernstein: American Innovator was James Shivers’s PhD dissertation from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 2001. This digital edition adds a new foreword by Richard Deming and a new introduction by the author Another version of chapter three, “Visual Strategies: A line, A Verse, Something on Paper” appeared in the Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein, ed. William Allegrezza (2012). Contact: 37 Blue Editions [email protected] jamesshivers.com Foreword How to Do Things with Charles Bernstein's Poetry Richard Deming Senior Lecturer in English, Director of Creative Writing Yale University One of the most memorable moments of my intellectual life came in the fall semester of 1999, during a graduate seminar that Charles Bernstein was running as part of the Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo. Charles’s dogged interest in archives means that the general outline of the syllabus still exists on line. Charles’s seminars always had some theme by which he structured the semester. That fall, for example, the ostensible focus was “materialist poetics,” and I say “ostensibly” because the discussions felt like explorations of ideas rather than the covering of a single conceptual frame or academic method. The seminars, largely, were built around visits by poets and critics. We would read the work of the visitors and then meet with them during the seminar for a conversation of the work. Between these visits, Charles would have us also spend weeks reading and discussing work by figures that could be seen as establishing a tradition of avant-garde poetry and poetics. To know Bernstein’s work is to be able to guess some of those figures: Ezra Pound, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Zukofsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and, naturally, Gertrude Stein. Charles would establish a context for the discussion, but largely the seminar would flow from student presentations that he would guide into larger contexts. Given how loquacious Charles can be, I was always impressed by his ability to guide the discussion and moderate rather than dictate and lecture. The class, too, was diversely compressed of philosophy students, comparative literature students, Americanists, and poets. There were those in the class that seemed to want to be some new generation of Language poets, but there were also those who had a Freudian desire to dismantle that frame. There were those who just wanted to learn the material, and there was a group of us who knew that Charles—in his poetry, his essays, his editing, and his general advocacy for the arts—had, throughout his writing career, helped change the discussion that poetry was having with itself. It seemed that to take poetry seriously meant wanting to extend that thinking. Taken together, these different constituencies forming the seminar shared a belief in poetry’s social function, but there was no common doctrine or set of values and these divergences played out in the conversations in the seminar room. I mentioned an awareness that Charles had definitely made an impact for my generation (and the one before mine) in our understanding of poetics being involved in ethics as well as aesthetics. Did he help make the stakes for poetry higher? He certainly showed many of us how a consciousness of literary practice could broaden the scope of what poetry could and should do in a way that had a moral—certainly critical—dimension without descending into actual moralizing. In Bernstein’s work, particularly in his adroit use of an irony that seems to mean what it says as well as mean the opposite in the very same moment. For years, the work does not posit lyric truths, but rather has remained focused on asking the questions, or at its, best giving answers that felt more like questions. In the classroom, then, his was an authority that seemed to always be interrogating the very mechanisms of authority. The professor in the room taking such a position was, by turns, liberating as well as frustrating, but then no one ever said poetry should be easy. In fact, probably it should specifically not be. “What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say, “Poets are thus liberating gods”? Revolution, change of any kind, especially changing assumptions, is always messy and frustrating. That is how one can tell it is working. In any event, this range of students and their ideological investments and methodological were a feisty lot. There was quibbling and questioning of every text and indeed every visitor in a way that I have never seen in any other graduate seminar that I have ever been in, seen, visited, or led since. People were civilized, but fiercely critical in a way that sometimes ii made me uncomfortable. I did not always feel that my peers’ comments and observations were always moving towards synthesis or insight. Often, it felt like positions were reifying, as can happen with younger poets and critics. The polemics are a way of trying out one’s commitment even if openness was sometimes the cost. One day we were discussing Stein’s prose. I would like to say it was from The Making of Americans, certainly something characteristically dense, something obdurate, full of repetition and all kinds of distancing effects. The students were caught deep in an argument of the style, talking in vague ways about its surface play and how looking for meaning or an argument was reactionary if not jejune. Charles let this go on, and then calmly broke through the mists of some graduate student’s jargon-filled and lengthy disquisition on Derrida, deconstruction, and Stein’s modernist ineffability. “People always say that Steins’ work is about surface play and that it’s unreadable. That’s not true,” he said. Charles flipped to the middle of the book and started to read a page aloud, stopping every line or so to do a close reading, showing how the repetitions and backtracking of Stein’s prose were still wholly legible strategies. By the time he hit the end of the page, he had offered a breathtaking, absolutely eye-opening close reading of the very text that moments ago someone had said “resisted explanation.” In that moment, it seemed as if he chose the page wholly at random and improvised that reading. Even if it had been a reading he had prepared before class and had inserted it at just the moment to make his point, would it matter? . In fact, arguably, the fact of its being a bit of theater only would make me admire it all the more. The reading was brilliant—certainly the best I have ever seen anyone do of any text without any notes as a guide—and it made the point. The text had not failed us, we had failed it. We had let ourselves settle at illegibility as being its own good. I tell this story because it was riveting and because what I and my classmates saw so upended what many critics of Bernstein might lob at him—and have over the years—in terms of declaring his interest in difficulty as being merely obfuscation, or disruption as the one and only goal. James Shivers, in the chapters that follow, insists, “The difficulty for readers is that iii [Bernstein’s] work cannot be easily categorized into established interpretive patterns” (123). Clearly, Charles demonstrated that even if Stein’s work cannot be categorized within familiar patterns, that does not make it a text that cannot be interpreted. With that in mind, I also relate the anecdote because it positions Bernstein’s work within the pedagogical. By this, I do not mean to describe his teaching strategies, but rather wish to indicate how it shows that language and meaning and interpretation are not things that one can fully finish learning. Learning them means continually sounding their depths and testing their capacities. In the case of Stein, he saw the argument developing in front of him and used evidence to dispute it, but not to dismiss. I guarantee it meant that the students in the seminar could not see Stein’s difficulty as merely an end in itself. His close reading, improvised as it was, demonstrated that difficulty as a textual feature meant not that the work could not be read or interpreted, but rather that more was asked of readers. We had to go beyond our expectations about reading, but not forgo them altogether. Meaning, he showed us, is not a destination at which one arrives, but is a tentative understanding that arises from the process of reading. In that way, Stein’s work, if we read it closely, showed better what the edges of understanding might be. You only find the edge by walking along it and sometimes going past it. In many ways, James Shivers’s More Numerous of: A Kinetic Approach is an important contribution not simply because it is the most comprehensive engagement of Bernstein’s work that exists so far, but because Shivers is so resolutely interested in the pedagogical himself. Again, when I use the term pedagogical, I do not mean this in a narrow, practical way of how one teaches modernist and neo-modernist and avant-garde poetry. Instead, Shivers consistently shows how Bernstein’s poetry and his prose is demonstrates by means exploration what language can make possible, as well as what it cannot.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah
    Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah Ponichtera Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 ©2012 Sarah Ponichtera All rights reserved All Louis Zukofsky material Copyright Paul Zukofsky; the material may not be reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. A fee will be charged. ABSTRACT Yiddish and the Avant-Garde in American Jewish Poetry Sarah Ponichtera This dissertation traces the evolution of a formalist literary strategy through the twentieth century in both Yiddish and English, through literary and historical analyses of poets and poetic groups from the turn of the century until the 1980s. It begins by exploring the ways in which the Yiddish poet Yehoash built on the contemporary interest in the primitive as he developed his aesthetics in the 1900s, then turns to the modernist poetic group In zikh (the Introspectivists) and their efforts to explore primitive states of consciousness in individual subjectivity. In the third chapter, the project turns to Louis Zukofsky's inclusion of Yehoash's Yiddish translations of Japanese poetry in his own English epic, written in dialogue with Ezra Pound. It concludes with an examination of the Language poets of the 1970s, particularly Charles Bernstein's experimental verse, which explores the way that language shapes consciousness through the use of critical and linguistic discourse. Each of these poets or poetic groups uses experimental poetry as a lens through which to peer at the intersections of language and consciousness, and each explicitly identifies Yiddish (whether as symbol or reality) as an essential component of their poetic technique.
    [Show full text]
  • CHARLES BERNSTEIN & HANNAH WEINER Interview for Linebreak
    CHARLES BERNSTEIN & HANNAH WEINER Interview for LINEbreak I was intrigued when I discovered, in the course of seeking permission to publish this transcript, that Hannah Weiner’s 1995 conversation with Charles Bernstein for the public radio program LINEbreak had been edited down for broadcast. The show’s producer, Martín Spinelli, replied quickly to my e-mail: “[Hannah’s] recording session was one of the longest we did for the series.” The raw tape of the session is preserved in Spi- nelli’s archive at the immense UB Poetry Collection, and runs about twenty minutes longer than the broadcast version ar- chived at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/LINEbreak. html. In keeping with the spirit of Weiner’s own impusle to let her “nonliterary” surround in, I have transcribed all the conver- sation on the tape. — Robert Dewhurst One extremely hot summer afternoon in 1995 Charles Bern- stein and I drove across Manhattan to Hannah Weiner’s clut- tered but comfortable apartment to record her for our radio series LINEbreak. Charles and I had been recording other po- ets and writers for the series and Hannah was one of last (if not the last) to be taped. This would turn out to be her last broadcast interview before her death. As I set up the recording equipment we wondered about the noise coming in from the open windows and decided to close them for better acoustics. 141 WILD ORCHIDS But even as we sweated in her airless living room the noise from the street made it through and prompted me to stop a couple of times.
    [Show full text]
  • Dear Friends and Readers, Happy Holidays, Phong
    Emma Bee Bosco Sodi’s IN CONVERSATION Poems by Bernstein Casa Wabi Eric Walker Philip Taaffe 67 IN IN CONVERSATION CONVERSATION Epstein Will Vestry Barbara Street Ecological The Held Gregory J. Markopoulos Rose Activisim Essays On Alex Visual Art on in France SIONE IN WILSON Ross CONVERSATION Duchamp Robert Guest Editor: Gober Best Raymond Foye Dear Friends and Readers, IN CONVERSATION Henry Threadgill Art Jason Moran & Books a Tribute to IN CONVERSATION of 2014 Alanna Heiss Rene Ricard ow can ecological and social forces be transformative? In her recent Philip Taaffe AICA-USA Distinguished Critics Lecture, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev “Sanctuarium,” 2010. Installation Hexplored this question through the lens of Lacan’s fascination with of 148 drawings. Oil pigment topology and the creation of chain relations or knots. Te notions of alchemy on paper, dimensions vari- and “thought form” were brought up repeatedly in her presentation, Tought- able. Collection Kunstmuseum Forms being the well-known book of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater that Luzern. Purchase made possible helped spread the ideas of the Teosophical Society—a central infuence on by a contribution from Landis & modern art. Mahler, Sibelius, Mondrian, Hilma af Klint, and Kandinsky, Gyr Foundation. ©Philip Taafe; were members along with many writers and poets, from James Joyce, D.H. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, William Butler Yeats to Lyman Frank Baum (the Augustine, New York. author of the Wizard of Oz), even the inventor Tomas Edison. Our latest Rail Curatorial Project, Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior at Red Bull Studios in Chelsea, ofered a similar opportunity to submit ourselves to a realm of play and experiment, expanding our “thought forms” beyond conventional norms and expectations.
    [Show full text]
  • Laura Riding Pointed to the Fact That, Looking at the Canon Of
    UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS/INGLÊS E LITERATURA CORRESPONDENTE MINDSCAPES: LAURA RIDING’S POETRY AND POETICS por RODRIGO GARCIA LOPES Tese submetida à Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina em cumprimento parcial dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de DOUTOR EM LETRAS FLORI.\NOPOLIS Dezembro de 2000 Esta Tese de Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, intitulada MINDSCAPES: LAURA RIDING’S POETRY AND POETICS, foi julgada adequada e aprovada em sua forma final, pelo Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, para fms de obtenção do grau de DOUTOR EM LETRAS Área de concentração; Inglês e Literatura Correspondente Opção: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa Anelise Reich Corseuil Coordenadora BANCA EXAMINADORA; é Roberto O ’Shea ientador e Presidente 'h/y Maria Lúcia MiUéo Martins Examinadora Susana Bornéo Funck Examinadora J^iz Angé^o da Costa Examinador ífid Renaux Examinadora Florianópolis, 11 de dezembro de 2000 In the memory of Laura (Riding Jackson (1901-1991) To my parents, Antonio Ubirajara Lopes and Maria do Carmo Garcia Lopes IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the several people and institutions that helped me, in inestimable ways, to succeed in accomplishing the present thesis. To my advisor, José Roberto O’Shea, for his infinite patience, collaboration, and understanding. To CAPES, for conceding me the scholarship that provided the necessary means to carry out original research on Laura Riding collections in the United States. To The Board of Literary Management of tiie late Laura (Riding Jackson: Dr. James Tyler, Dr. William Harmon, Robert Nye, Theodore Wilentz, Joan Wilentz, and especially to Alan J.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Bernstein Papers
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt896nd20f No online items Charles Bernstein Papers Mandeville Special Collections Library Mandeville Special Collections Library The UCSD Libraries 9500 Gilman Drive University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0175 Phone: (858) 534-2533 Fax: (858) 534-5950 URL: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/ Copyright 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Charles Bernstein Papers MSS 0519 1 Descriptive Summary Creator: Bernstein, Charles, 1950- Title: Charles Bernstein Papers, Date (inclusive): 1962-2000 Extent: 50.00 linear feet(129 archives boxes, 5 card file boxes and 5 oversize folders) Abstract: Papers of Charles Bernstein, writer, editor, librettist, educator, and publisher, who is most often associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a body of writing named for the journal (1978-1982) by this name which Bernstein co-edited with Bruce Andrews. Bernstein writes poetry, essays and librettos which foreground the materiality and sociality of language as it exists in different contexts. The papers include correspondence with writers, artists, publishers and friends; manuscript drafts and production materials for his collected works, especially CONTENT'S DREAM (1986), A POETICS (1992) and MY WAY (1998); notebooks and journals (1971-1994); and uncollected poem drafts and working papers. Also included are drafts for the multi-authored poem LEGEND written with Ray DiPalma, Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. Bernstein's editorial work on Asylum's Press publications, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Journal, the Segue Catalog, BOUNDRY 2: 43 POETS and BOUNDRY 2: 99 POETS, as well as numerous smaller projects are well represented.
    [Show full text]
  • Language Poetry and Ecopoetry: a Shared Pragmatic Work
    Language Poetry and Ecopoetry: A Shared Pragmatic Work in A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin Jack Massie A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of East Anglia School of American Studies August 2018 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived therefrom must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 Abstract The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin commit to a pragmatic poetic project of working language to facilitate cultural renewal. In illuminating this shared pragmatic work in poems from the turn of the 1990s, the thesis contradicts ecocritical assertions about the inimical relationship between ecopoetry and postmodern poetries such as Language. As ecocriticism established itself as a school of literary criticism in the 1990s, its proponents were damning of the influence postmodern literary theory was exerting on American poetry. Ecocritics argued that postmodernism had dangerously devalued the referential relationship between word and world at a time of escalating environmental crises. Taking Bernstein and Howe as representatives of Language poetry, and Ammons and Merwin as representatives of ecopoetry, the thesis will contest this ecocritical argument by illustrating that these four poets share a vision of poetry as a uniquely positioned medium for rejuvenating language and, subsequently, shifting cultural attitudes in a politically progressive manner.
    [Show full text]
  • Information to Users
    INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy sutimitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorged copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9* black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. ProQuest Information and Leaming 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 UMÏ EIHETORICAL HYBRIDITY: ASHBERY, BERNSTEIN AND THE POETICS OF CITAHON DISSERTATION Presented in. Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree Doctor of Philosophy m the Graduate School o f The Ohio State University By \fatthew Richardson^ hlA . ***** The Ohio State Unwersity 2001 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Jon Erickson. Adviser Professor Jessica Prinz .
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Bernstein (1950– ) to Date the Beginning of a Poet's Authority
    Charles Bernstein (1950– ) To date the beginning of a poet’s authority one often looks to the poet’s first book, which in Charles Bernstein’s case is Asylums, published in 1975. Bernstein’s effect on American poetry, however, truly began in 1978, when with Bruce Andrews he started L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which ran until 1981. Practically at the same time, then, Bernstein’s presence was announced both as a poet and as someone orchestrating new means of community (re)formation. In the last quarter century, he has lived both roles simultaneously as a refutation of the idea that poets write in isolation. His poetry and his community work have walked in step with each other, neither one possible without the other. Alongside the publishing of well over twenty books of poetry, Bernstein started or helped to start two reading series (Ear Inn in New York, and Wednesdays @ 4 Plus in Buffalo), a website (Electronic Poetry Center), an email discussion list (Poetics@), and an academic book series on Modern and Contemporary Poetics (with University of Alabama Press). His provocative essays have now been collected three times, in Content’s Dream (1986), A Poetics (1992) and My Way (1999), and he has edited or co-edited numerous collections of essays, including The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (1990) and Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998). Playing on Robert Creeley’s well known expression of the relationship between form and content, one could say with Bernstein’s career in mind [111] that poets are never more than extensions of their community.
    [Show full text]
  • Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu Michael Nardone
    Poetics in a Networked Digital Milieu Michael Nardone College Literature, Volume 47, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 248-258 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/746212 Access provided at 15 Jan 2020 00:21 GMT from Concordia University Library POETICS IN A NETWORKED DIGITAL MILIEU MICHAEL NARDONE In the study of what writing is, has been, and might be, the figure of the archive and the discourse of poetics fuse together. Not confined to a singular narrative or trajectory, but a vast territory or “complex volume” of articulations in which “heterogeneous regions are dif- ferentiated or deployed in accordance with specific rules and prac- tices that cannot be superposed” (Foucault 2002, 145), the figure of the archive and the discourse of poetics concern the assembling and organization of past compositions, the transmission of their inscrip- tions into the present, and the viable futures those traces make leg- ible. If, as Kate Eichhorn argues, “to write in a digital age is to write in the archive” (2008, 1), what can the composition of archives—their materials, contexts of production, protocols, and interfaces—teach us about poetics today? In my contribution to this critical forum, I focus on a specific archival genre, the digital repository, which, with the rapid expan- sion of digital networks since the mid-1990s, has served as a primary means for extending the purview and program of poetics as a con- temporary institutional formation. I detail, briefly, the development of three significant examples of poetry- and poetics-related digital repositories—the University at Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center, Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, and the University of Pennsylva- nia’s PennSound—so as to describe their impact on the publication, COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 47.1 Winter 2020 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2020 Michael Nardone | Forum 249 dissemination, and storage of poetic works.
    [Show full text]
  • Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, by Charles Bernstein Hélène Aji
    Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, by Charles Bernstein Hélène Aji To cite this version: Hélène Aji. Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, by Charles Bernstein: Selection, Absorption, Projection. Aji, Hélène; Kilgore-Caradec, Jennifer. Selected Poems: From Modernism to Now, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp.193-202, 2012, 978-1-4438-4124-5. hal-01639970 HAL Id: hal-01639970 https://hal.parisnanterre.fr//hal-01639970 Submitted on 28 May 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Charles Bernstein’s Louis Zukofsky Hélène Aji Université du Maine (France) Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, by Charles Bernstein: Selection, Absorption, Projection. Volumes of Selected Poems are versatile objects that put into question the very nature of authorship. They come in a variety of forms and respond to a whole range of preoccupations. To mention but a few major trends, one thus has first to make a distinction between selections that are of the concerned poet’s own making and selections that arise through external work, often a-posteriori or posthumously once this poet’s corpus has come to completion and can be considered as a more or less coherent body. Spanning the years and circumstances of a career in poetry writing, these latter selections, which are the ficus of this study, respond to a number of demands: notably those of publishers, wanting to provide usable one-volume formats for the greater public, and those of teachers, whose aim is to expose the poetry to the reactions and appreciation of younger readers.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ward Phillips Lectures, 2006 Department of English Charles Bernstein November 27, 28, 29 (All Events Scheduled in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium)
    The Ward Phillips Lectures, 2006 Department of English Charles Bernstein November 27, 28, 29 (All events scheduled in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium) The Attack of the Difficult Poems: Poetics, Technology, Invention Monday, November 27 5:00 p.m. “The Task of Poetics, the Fate of Innovation, and the Aesthetics of Criticism” Topics will include the role of close reading and poetry criticism for contemporary writing; the relation of theory to poetics and poetic practice; the professionalization of academic literary scholarship; the role of aesthetics for poetry and scholarship. 6:30 p.m. A reception at the Morris Inn will follow the lecture Tuesday, November 28 5:00 p.m. “The Poetics of Invention & the Art of Teaching” Is innovation a tired metaphor of modernist utopian thinking? Is it possible to teach difficult poetic works to uninitiated students? Includes some practical discussion of using the web and my own “poem profiler,” as well as the “wreading experiments” list in teaching. 7:00 p.m. A reading by Charles Bernstein of his poetry will follow a brief reception in the atrium of the Hesburgh Center Wednesday, November 29 5:00 p.m. “Objectivist Blues & the Art of Immemorability” How has language recording technology (from the alphabet to sound recording to the digital archive) affected the development of poetry? The lecture focuses on second wave modernist poets, tin pan alley lyricists, and blues performers, with special reference to their innovations in recording speech (in writing and song). Among the artists discussed are Louis Zukofsky, James Weldon Johnson, Vachel Lindsay, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Charley Patton, Paul Robeson, and Cole Porter.
    [Show full text]
  • 7. Roland Barthes, a Lover's Discourse, Fragments (I 977; Harmondsworth: Pen• Guin, 1990}
    Notes Introduction Notes 1. Ron Silliman, "Language, Poetry, Realism," In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), xix. 2. Silliman, "Language, Poetry, Realism," xvii. 3. Silliman, "Language, Poetry, Realism," xvi. 4. David Antin, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry," Boundary 2 1 (Fall1972}: 98-133. 5. See Plato, Symposium 184e-206a, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875), from which Zukofsky has lifted phrases and quotations to compose the bulk of the poem. For notes 5 and 6, I am grateful to Ian Tompkins of the University of Wales, Aberyst­ wyth, for his aid with finding these sources and his translation of the Greek. 6. For example, see Plato, Timaeus, trans. and ed. Rev. R G. Bury, Loeb Classical library (1929; London: Heinemann, 1966), 23b, 75e, 89d, or Plato, Laws, trans. and ed. Rev. R G. Bury, Loeb Classical library (London: Heinemann, 1952}, 716d, 870b, where the brightest and the best as a form of good is fre­ quently a phrase used by Athenians as a way of distinguishing themselves. 7. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Fragments (I 977; Harmondsworth: Pen­ guin, 1990}. 8. Suzanne Clark has explored this sentimental discourse in relation to women's poetic modernism in Sentimental Modernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991}, in which she points out the way in which a "mascu­ line" modernism sought to repress the sentimental as a feminized discourse. She points to Ann Douglas' book, The Feminization ofAmerican Culture, as one example of the case against the sentimental in favor of a tough, Puritan critical reason.
    [Show full text]