Pitch of Poetry

by Charles Bernstein

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times , Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine  L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E . The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.

Pitch of Poetry  makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls  echopoetics : a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

Genres: Poetry, Essays

352 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2016

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

[Jeff Buddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay. My computer keyboard refuses to cooperate with me. There are problems when it comes to typing. But this struggle against technology is something that as a poet Bernstein might appreciate. There are keys on my keyboard that just refuse to give. I have to pound the shift key to key it to work; I have to repeatedly push the 'a' to obtain that letter.

I guess I ate too much food over this keyboard and it slipped between the keys and their touchpoints. When I sit down to write, I have to struggle with the tools that i choose to use.

Charles Bernstein would probably love this. He's a LANGUAGE poet, a critic, and a funny man. Does he amuse me? No, he baffles me. In this volume, "Pitch of Poetry," good ol' Charley Bernstein attacks 'official verse culture," and exposes it for what it is, banal and boring. He insults (snidely) poets like Billy Collins and triumphs the likes of Susan Howe and Louis Zukofsky. For Bernstein, "official verse culture" isn't necessarily the academy, it's more the tried-and-true methods of poetics: lyric, narrative, confessional...why operate within these parameters?

It's a worthy way of thinking. Bernstein's own poetry can be beautiful in its weird way. Another critic -whose name I forget- compared the LANGUAGE poets to painters more obsessed with the brushes and the paint than the painting itself. It's sort of true. In "Pitch of Poetry," Bernstein brings the mechanics of poetry to the forefront; let's not let "meaning" cloud the issue; let's make a poem.

Bernstein is a descendent of William Carlos Williams, who resisted the poetry of folks like TS Eliot, decrying it as needlessly intellectual, and that poetry didn't have to be burdened with so much allusive claptrap. Poetry could be a thing in itself. This is what emerges from "Pitch of Poetry." Bernstein's essays, interviews, and critical analysis point to one thing: poetry is a thing built of words. Bernstein answers a question that I have long asked: does a poet write a poem, or does a poet make a poem. You'll have to read "Pitch of Poetry" to know his answer.

[Mills College Library]

808.1 B531p 2016