Pitch of Poetry
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.
About the Author
Charles Bernstein lives in New York and is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as coeditor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the Electronic Poetry Center, and PennSound, and cofounder of the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many publications are four books also published by the University of Chicago Press: "Girly Man", "With Strings", "Attack of the Difficult Poems", and "My Way: Speeches and Poems".
Reviews
"Often elliptical, argumentative, and personal, this is a radical work about the nature of poetry and of language itself" – "Publishers Weekly"
"The traits and energies that made Bernstein, the foremost poet-critic of our time, a leading figure of the 1980s-era avant-garde have continued unabated: a fearless willingness to challenge orthodoxy and to risk his own position by openly trying out new arguments and approaches; an original independence of thought; an uncannily prescient foresight; and a restless intellectual curiosity. In short: Bernstein's genuinely experimental nature means that he is constantly proving new ground, reassessing the theoretical and poetical terrain, and revising even his own claims. In the process, he transforms our sense not only of the present but of the possible" – Craig Dworkin, author of "No Medium"
"'Pitch of Poetry' is wide-ranging, protean, exhilarating. Refreshingly polemical and polemically refreshing. As someone who has read Bernstein since his very first books, I am impressed most by his ability to retread his thinking and discover new angles to old routes. This is criticism that makes up its own rules and then doesn't follow those either" – Pierre Joris, author of "Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012"
