Interview with Alí Calderón

In 2018, Mexican poet Alí Calderón interviewed Charles Bernstein for his influential web magazine Círculo de poesía. The interview is published here in English for the first time. Bernstein addresses the poetics of “hybridity” and the possibilities for poetic disruption. The discussion ends with Bernstein's then new poem, written for John Ashbery on the day he died.

Introduction to Charles Bernstein's Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019

This brief introduction to Charles Bernstein's work, given in Hangzhou, China, in November 2019, on the occasion of Bernstein's Distinguished Lectureship, discusses the basic principles of Language poetics as put forward in the early books Content's Dream and A Poetics. From the first, Bernstein emphasized the idea that poetry is not the expression of feeling but a constructivist art in which language is taken out of its normal context and recharged. In “Artifice of Absorption,” Bernstein insists that the poet uses all the tools at his command to create a new kind of absorption, arresting the reader's attention. Difficulty is thus inherent to poetry—a difficulty challenging the reader to rise to the challenge of what it means to read poetry. A few examples like “Standing Target” are discussed briefly.

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

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.

Afterword to Pied bot

This essay was the afterword to Charles Bernstein's Pied bot, trans. Martin Richet, Collection Américaine (Nantes, France: Editions Joca Seria, 2012).

Editor's Note

Charles Bernstein is a major crossing point for poetry and poetics. His art and discussion of poetry exploit and develop the vernaculars of language as they echo across time and international borders and national languages.

Remarks at the Retirement Celebration for Charles Bernstein

Remarks made at Charles Bernstein's retirement celebration at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, April 4, 2019.

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

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.

Charles Bernstein: Against the Idea of Poetry

This text is Leevi Lehto's introduction to his Finnish translation of Charles Bernstein's work, both poetry and poetics. Lehto argues that Bernstein's poems are interventions into various constellations, or power relations, in the field of poetry, always reacting to something, always against a particular idealization—among them the idea of interventionism as such.

“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks / in the manner of enclosure”: An Afterword to Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte

The following text was published in German as an afterword to the bilingual poetry collection Charles Bernstein: Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte (München: luxbooks, 2014). Originally intended as a critical survey and introduction for German-language readers, it traces Bernstein's work as a radical modernist poet, distinguished scholar, and critical theorist in his own right from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. From his early poetry to L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E magazine, from his major books of poetry and collective avant-garde performances to his essays on poetics, Bernstein, I argue, consistently articulated with wit and precision why and how radical modernism affects what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.”