Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions

by Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems , his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art. Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner. From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Essays, Writing

296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2011

About the author

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Bernstein's highly anticipated new work, All the Whisky in Heaven, will be published in Spring 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also to be released in the upcoming year is a Companion to Charles Bernstein, which will be published by Salt Publishing, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Nielsen Innovation of the Year award.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For well over a hundred years, we have been living through a period of aesthetic disruption, which is to say, shifting and readjusting to, reeling and spinning from, the social and technological changes of the long twentieth century. Of course, the risk for invention is that your invention fails; it usually fails, since most art produces failure, no matter its successes. The risk of not inventing is to succeed—at little or nothing. So these are poles: it can be admirable to succeed at nothing (I have just made a point of it) just as it can be illumination to fail at innovation."

(from 'Invention Follies', p35)

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bernstein is so pleasant to read, and this book is filled with great essays that suggest some of the best ways one might approach poetry & teach it. And for that, this is an incredibly important book, for those who teach, or should be teaching poetry.