The Kinds of Poetry I Want

Auteur

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.

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"For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, always wary of "Official Verse Culture," always reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and genres, and always suspicious of any attempt at a single, master narrative contrived by the self-sanctioned journals of cultural opinion. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a veritable celebration of invention: including short introductions to dozens of poets, extended reflections on the poetics of aesthetic possibility, briefs for new approaches to literary criticism, interventions into modernist and postwar literary history, interviews and biographical flashpoints, and a set of poems and aphorisms that echo themes in the essays and prose pieces. At once a grand dialogic novel (full of debates over language), or a long poem (including history, philosophy, memoir, and polemic), or a grand opera with a copious cast of characters who pepper the pages with comic riffs and alternate strains of literary history, The Kinds of Poetry I Want arrives at a time when both literary criticism and poetry are routinely vilified or given up for dead. In characteristic Bernsteinian style, he shows us that poetry, poetics, and literary criticism are still very much alive-and loved. This latest collection shows Bernstein at his polemic, humorous best, and promises, like his previous prose books, to become an instant classic"--