The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein. For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration of invention and includes not only poetry but also essays on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more. At once a dialogic novel, long poem, and grand opera, The Kinds of Poetry I Want arrives amid renewed attacks on humanistic expression. In his polemical, humorous style, Bernstein faces these challenges head-on and affirms the enduring vitality and attraction of poetry, poetics, and literary criticism.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Paul Auster Act One: Pixellation Ocular Truth and the Irreparable [Veil] The Body of the Poem 95 Theses The Unreliable Lyric A Fabric of Expectation Offbeat Groucho and Me Shadows Pesapalabra Interview The Brink of Continuity The Poetics List The Swerve of Verse “Too Philosophical for a Poet” Act Two: Kinds Free Thinking: Spring and All versus The Waste Land at 100 #CageFreePoetry Forewords & Backwords Weathermen Three Flasks of Gin with a Flax Chaser Stein Stein Stein Dichtung Yammer Act Three: Doubletalk Summa contra Gentiles UP against Storytelling, for David Antin Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime Index of Names and Titles Coda (Echo): Index of Motifs

About the Author :
Charles Bernstein, winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize, is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, most recently two volumes of poetry, Near/Miss and Topsy-Turvy, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review :
"This is not so much a collection of poems, as conventionally understood, as a display of the possibilities for poetry. Each work here is not just in a different style or form but rather explores different aspects of poetry as a medium: resounding, re- vising, resonating, re- calling, re- performing, reimaginings." "A month or so ago, having my thirteenth collection of poems in the designer’s hands, I felt queasy about the possibility of writing new poems because of a fear of repeating myself and doubts about whether I could do anything different. Then I read Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies. . . . thanks to his cogent articulation of the most powerful reasons (beyond approval, for example) for writing poetry and poetic criticism as well as his comic and serious call for practitioners not to be influenced by perspectives that inhibit the flowering of inventiveness, of a vibrant exploratory poetics, I resolved to take further 'leap[s] of poetic faith' . . . The comedian with the letters CB — that’s one kind of poetry critic I want." "This is a funny book. Bernstein is a funny writer. . . . the ability to repeatedly raise a smile in the reader in a book of such eminently serious intent is to be admired. Go read it." “The book is an aesthetic event, an art object in a way analogous to a book of poems’ existence as an art object, a poem, in toto. Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal or Yeats’s Tower come to mind.” “Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. In the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country. Whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to listen to what he is saying.” “A tireless provocateur, Bernstein may be as known for his critical writing as for his poetry. His innovative, genre-bending essays . . . offer an inspired blend of contrarian polemic, acute analysis, and ironic humor as they confront the stifling rules and protocols of poetry and the institutions that underlie it.”