In the Un-American Tree: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein, Translated

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 99-105
Author(s):  
Leevi Lehto
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Specific Relation ◽  
Charles Bernstein

Abstract Leevi Lehto, in a keynote on American poetry presented in China, outlines the challenges and possibilities of Language poetry outside the American context, with specific relation to the meaning of translation.

The Epiphany of Language: The Connotation of Zen-Taoism in Charles Bernstein's Echopoetics

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Yi Feng
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Taoist Philosophy

Abstract As a prominent representative figure of American Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has incorporated many themes concerning “nothingness” into his poetry. Contrary to the traditional Western philosophy that defines the concept of “nothingness” as meaninglessness and agnosticism, “nothingness” in Bernstein's poetics is endowed with profound poetic and aesthetic implications. Bernstein studied the works of Zen-Taoist philosophy in his early years. Understanding the Zen-Taoist connotations of “nothingness” is an important new dimension in interpreting Bernstein's echopoetics. Bernstein integrates the anti-traditional ideas in Zen-Taoist philosophy and aesthetics with the experiment of American avant-garde poetry. “The transformation between Xu (emptiness) and Shi (Being),” the beauty of “speechlessness,” and the expression of “defamiliarization” show the “epiphany” of language and the “nature” of language. The Chinese traditional Zen-Taoist philosophy is an important part of Bernstein's echopoetics.

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
David Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
American Poets

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

Interview with Charles Bernstein on Language Poetry

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 56-58
Author(s):  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Yubraj Aryal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Poetry ◽  
Charles Bernstein

Fartspottings: Reflections on “high seriousness” and poetic passings of wind

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Nester
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThe mention of farts in English language poetry has changed just as the role of poetry in our lives. This essay offers a survey of the uses and mentions of the word fart and the act of farting in poetry, centering around poet and critic Matthew Arnold's notion of “high seriousness” as the ideal place for poetry, as well as poet Robert Lowell's idea of the “raw and cooked” in 20th century American poetry. Questions posed: Can poetry and the mention of farts coexist? Can both anti-academic and academic poets' farts find their way to the page in a post-post-“high seriousness” age?

Poems, Poetry, Personhood

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
Fundamental Object ◽  
Anglo American

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.

Long Poems about Everything: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016

2020 ◽  
pp. 257-280
Author(s):  
Giles Goodland
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Visual Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Language Poets

This chapter discusses the use of dictionaries and books of reference as a motif and a formal device in American poetry, particularly in the avant-garde stream, from Zukofsky to the Language poets, with special reference to the work of Ron Silliman and Tina Darragh. It distinguishes long poems in the Whitman tradition, which attempt to comprehend the world in the form of lists and extended descriptions, often using alphabetical orderings or other kinds of organisation similar to dictionaries, and smaller works of visual poetry able to subvert the notion of definition in a dictionary.

Introduction to Chinese Anthology of American Poetry (19th–20th c.), ed. Li Zhimin

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-84
Author(s):  
Charles Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
First Time

Abstract Li Zhimin, poet and professor at Guangzhou University, asked Charles Bernstein to write the introduction to his anthology of American poetry, which spanned from Dickinson to Stevens, with Bernstein the youngest poet in the collection. Published here in English for the first time.

A Source Which Is Also a Translation: Toward an Expanded- Yiddish Poetics, with Special Reference to Charles Bernstein

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 184-214
Author(s):  
Ariel Resnikoff
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Charles Reznikoff ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Jerome Rothenberg

Abstract The present essay contextualizes the poet, scholar, editor, and translator Charles Bernstein (b. 1950), as an artist and practitioner working within a speculative translingual (language-crossing) field and tradition of expanded Yiddish. Reading Bernstein in relation to other expanded-Yiddish figures, such as his elders, Hannah Weiner (1928–77) and Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931), and ancestor, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), among others, this essay makes a case for Bernstein as a writer who works from a position of antinomian Jewish translational originlessness, and a diasporic poetics of “need” (à la Charles Reznikoff), in which every source can be understood as a translation and every translation might be treated as a potential source. The coda of the essay addresses the stakes of Bernstein's praxes from the perspective of widespread modern and contemporary anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred and concludes with the first ever translation of Bernstein's poetry into Yiddish proper.

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