With Strings

by Charles Bernstein

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way , his 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate.

Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings , suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together. From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

Genres: Poetry

139 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

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

[Eunice Helera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry and this is my first time encountering Bernstein, but I did enjoy reading some of the poems included in this collection. Quite interesting as he experiments with his form and style.

[andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good poetry. Lots of plays on nursery rhymes.

[Daniela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good; but so not even close to his best work.