Charles Bernstein

As co-editor of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal and one of the key poets and theorists of the Language movement, Charles Bernstein is definitely one of the most important figures in experimental poetry. Born in New York City in 1950, he attended Harvard University, where he studied Philosophy and wrote his final thesis on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein (What could be a better way of launching a career as an experimental poet?!). In the mid-1970s he became active in the experimental poetry scenes in New York and San Francisco and started to work not just as a poet but also as a publisher, editor and theorist. In 1978 Bernstein and fellow poet Bruce Andrew founded the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which would go on to lend its name to the entire movement of poetry.
As he Poetry Foundation says of Bernstein’s work

"[It] explores the wide-ranging uses of language within diverse social contexts. His poetry combines the language of politics, popular culture, advertising, literary jargon, corporate-speak, and myriad others to show the ways in which language and culture are mutually constructive and interdependent." 

A project which is probably most pointedly summarised by Sarah M. Schultz in her Jacket Magazine article about Bernstein, in which she states:

“what Bernstein has done throughout his nearly 30 year career, is to critique fashions of writing that attempt to conceal their status as fashion. […] Language is, in and of itself, highly artificial for Bernstein - not natural, as the post-Romantic confessional school claims it is.”

It is this kind of reflection on the language we use and the way this language conveys meaning, which can probably be called Bernstein’s primary focus as a poet and theorist. A topic which is driving the work of many poets of the Language movement and certainly not an easy one. But as Hoover puts it in the anthology: “Despite the difficulties presented by Bernstein’s poetry, it frequently displays an antic sense of humour.”

Bernstein has received numerous awards and honours, including a Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
With Al Filreis, he is the co-founder and co-editor of PENNsound.

Links:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein.php
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-bernstein
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/charles-bernstein
http://jacketmagazine.com/14/schultz-bernstein.html - Sarah M. Schultz on Bernstein in Jacket
http://jacket2.org/commentary/charles-bernstein - Index of Bernstein’s contributions to Jacket2



My below poem takes its starting point from a line in Bernstein’s “The Klupzy Girl” and weaves together modern internet language with a 1967 Reader’s Digest article about Programmed Instruction books.

~ - ~

maybe anger would be better than complaining

it’s a new kind of teaching book
w w w it’s virtually painless
it enables almost anyone to learn almost anything
spell it right or autocorrect anyway
it’s virtually void
the platform where everyone gets together
democratically
haters gotta hate you know
of course you know you little piece of …nazi
and soon you are surrounded
by worlds which you never dreamed of:
the accounting country
the electronics empire
the computer land
the world of modern art
cat videos
pornography
uncle roger’s food blog
it is the stuff put into so called teaching machines
google it
follow stumble fumble tumbl
crack or hack it
a programmed text is quite different
from an ordinary text book
it’s a visual world out there
virtually headless
you should post more pictures
make it obvious
make it topless
the main thing is the question
how to use apple pay
letting you make your own discoveries
10 things you didn’t know about anything
you teach yourself
how to make pancakes
ur a fat cow eat less hamburgers
youre so sick go bore someone else w/ your opinion
a man (or beast) tends to repeat
an act which has been immediately followed
by a pleasant result.
send me a naked pic
work play watch  yolo
how to use a slide rule
the new math
statistical methods, genetics, nutrition,
work-out videos in hot pants
a national survey shows that as leisure grows,
people want to learn more about how to play.
just a bit of fun nothing real
virtually painless
this may someday be used to teach people
to observe more, to think more powerfully,
to be more creative, to be more understanding
of other people. meanwhile, it is an exciting
and handy way to extend
the education you got in school.

August Kleinzahler

Allen Ginsberg once commented on August Kleinzahler:

"August Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare - that quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Ezra Pound's work. A loner, a genius."

In addition to Bunting who taught at the University of Victoria in British Columbia while Kleinzahler was studying there, it was primarily the work of William Carlos Williams and the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn which proofed a major influence for Kleinzahler in early years.

In strong opposition to the Language poetry movement, Kleinzahler’s understanding of poetry is marked by a particular attention to the poetic craft of vocabulary, syntax and line. As Hoover quotes Kleinzahler in the anthology:

“for a poet, the handling of time becomes a very intimate, hands-on business. Each word is a shape carved in time… Vowels have their varying durations and pitches: eek! what a weird moon.”

Even though his poetry of “dive bars, greasy soup, alcohol and old girlfriends,” (as John Glionna of the LA Times put it) has given Kleinzahler the reputation of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment, his fame has built steadily over the past few decades. He won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2004 and his volume of new and selected poems, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City (2008), was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award.  His prose is also regularly published in the London Review of Books and Slate.

Links:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/august-kleinzahler
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/august-kleinzahler
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/apr/18/august-kleinzahler-poetry-interview
http://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/august-kleinzahler


My poem below takes its inspiration not from any particular poem of Kleinzahler, but maybe more from his very focused, critical view on the world around him in general.


~ - ~

Digital na[t]ive

I took a picture today.
Undying, eternal record
of my dinner:
chickpea and kale
balsamic sourdough drizzle
roasted pine nuts
with flakes of Parmesan cheese.
My 21st century still life
horn of plenty
370 calories, 600 pixels wide.
I know how to do this.
I keep count of my click rate
my followers and my likes.
And one day, one day I’ll be famous.
Like the grumpy cat
Or the Starbucks Drake Hands guy.
I rock this game.
Can’t you seen?
I am ahead of the tribe.

Hilda Morley

Hilda Morley is often referred to as a “painter’s poet”. Born in 1916 in New York City, she spent several years of her childhood and early adulthood in Israel and England, before returning to the US during the war. It was upon her return to New York that she met her second husband, the painter Eugene Morley and was introduced to many painters and poets of the New York scene.

While her work is generally filed under the “Black Mountain” label due to her brief teaching period at Black Mountain College in 1952, it has also been significantly influenced by Abstract Expressionism. As Harper's contributor and poet Hayden Carruth wrote of Morley’s work:

"How simple the language is, not a rhetorical gesture, not an unnecessary adjective, yet heightened by interweaving lines, cadences, and tones, by urgency of feeling and fineness of perception. We have these expressive works, indispensable to what we call American literature.”

Morley gained wider recognition as a poet only fairly late in her life. Her first major collection What Are Winds & What Are Water was only published in 1983. It is a book-length threnody for avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe, Morley’s third husband, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1972. Her other collections include A Blessing Outside Us (1976), To Hold in my Hand (1983), Cloudless at First (1988) and Between the Rocks (1992), in addition to the posthumously published The Turning (1998). Morley died in London on 23 March 1998.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/hilda-morley
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/morley.html (Robert Creeley: For Hilda Morley)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Morley
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/27/arts/hilda-morley-81-wrote-poetry-shaped-by-abstract-expressionism.html (obituary)



My poem below is a response to Morley’s “For Elaine de Kooning”. It took its starting point with the Tate Gallery’s #workoftheweek post of “Seafood” (2001) by Howard Hodgkin on Instagram.

~ - ~

@ Howard Hodgkin

lived in a square
lived in a box
treasure
as natural
wide as the sea
the see #workoftheweek
as deep texture
and pigment motions
the taste of memory
the crispy salt along
the beach
my feet and surf always
dancing
wet tangled hair
the breeze and you
the journey on wet sand
heavy
and light expanding
in a box
in a square
the see in
#workoftheweek

Ed Dorn

"I think I'm rightly associated with the Black Mountain 'school,' not because of the way I write, but because I was there." Ed Dorn was part of the diverse group of artists and writers who were lucky enough to study at the legendary Black Mountain College during its fairly brief existence between 1933 and 1957. He attended the college between 1955/6, studying with Charles Olsen and Robert Creeley. It is often claimed that Olsen’s ideas of Projective Verse had a great influence on Dorn, but as Marjorie Perloff put it in 1974: “Dorn is really quite unlike Olson; he is, for that matter, quite unlike any poet writing today.” Of his most acclaimed poem, Slinger (1968), she writes: it is

“one of the most ambitious and interesting long poems of our time, a truly original cowboy-and-indian saga, rendered in the most ingenious mix of scientific jargon, Structuralist terminology, junkie slang, Elizabethan sonneteering, Western dialect, and tough talk."

As the Poetry Foundation points out:

“Dorn's writing is almost always socially and politically oriented. From his earlier studies of Shoshoni Indians and the transients near Puget Sound to his reflections on the state of America in Slinger, Dorn's concern for his neighbors is evident in his work.”

This aspect, in addition to his ingenious usage of irony and satire, really makes him one of the most delightful reads in the anthology. I highly recommend taking a look at the poems which are available online at the Poetry Foundation and listening to the readings at PennSound.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-dorn
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/dorn/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dorn.php


My below poem is a piece developed out of some thoughts when I read Dorn's poem "Geranium".


~ - ~

Geranium, Don’t

As a Flower I can never quite remember
silly silly silly me
I used to be a Rosebud surely
made happy
made merry marry and successful tears
or not through woods Buttercups and bitter wisdom.
My money raised though
I used to be a Poppy in a field
when you picked me and you picked me
it wilted quickly read and red and blue.
We Daisy perfect for your business
your voice and connectivity
I the mobile manageable capitulum.
Narcissus, you said, were well known
in ancient point giving head, no teeth.
You used to call me Daffodil sweetly.
But then I never was.
I never was a Thistle:
inspiration sweeping sea
views 36 hectares of tropical
nine hole in the sad sand dream.
Surely surely sometimes Dandelion,
both edible in their entirety.
I was the centre of the no no,
a Tulip in the Pamir Hindu Kush,
Tien Shan along the rocky road.
“ In modern horticulture they tend to use the term
‘ Pansy ’ for those large-flowered multi-coloured hybrids
that are grown for bedding purposes each year. “
“ Sign up to the newsletter and get in the know, Daliah. ”
“ You can have hyacinths flowering for Christmas
if you plant specially ‘prepared’ bulbs. “
I wanted to be that Honeysuckle.
My hardiness mostly fully
 some tender species but always easy always for you.
Magical ingredients for deliciously simple quickly.
We grew moist summers - I, an Aster -
especially cool nightly temperature.
Or maybe I was Hortensia:
a Roman woman who successfully
repealed a tax imposed by the Second Triumvirate in 42 BC.
A sweetly scented highly poisonous woodland flower,
Lily of the Valley, I used to be a song so sweet.
So sweet, you cried and died and I grew in you,
laying down my roots more firmly
in the decomposing weeds.
But I never never wanted to be the Geranium.
Never that one one.
The Geranium.
Please, please don’t make me be.

Anselm Hollo

Anselm Hollo was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland. He worked as a poet, translator, editor and journalist in Sweden, Germany, and Austria before coming to the US in 1966.

He took up teaching positions at SUNY Buffalo and the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City where he first met Ted Berrigan with whom he remained very close friends. The Beat movement and New York School was certainly a major influence on Hollo’s writing: even before coming to the US he had translated Ginsberg into Finnish. Another important influence was however William Carlos Williams – another poet he had translated previously. As Paul Hoover notes in the anthology: “Hollo’s work privileges the details of everyday life. He is adept at capturing isolated moments of perception.” A tendency he shares with both Williams, as well as his fellow poets such as Philip Whalen and Berrigan. “Often whimsical and gently satirical in tone, Hollo’s poems are open-ended, valuing an ongoing human attentiveness rather than rejecting closure on the basis of theory.” (Hoover)

Hollo taught creative writing at a wide range of different institutions across the US, including the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he held the rank of Full Professor since 1985. Hollo’s many honours and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Government of Finland’s Distinguished Foreign Translator’s Award, and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. Hollo lived with his wife, the artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, in Boulder until his death in 2013.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anselm-hollo
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/anselm-hollo
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anselm-hollo-poet-translator-and-teacher-8473828.html


My below poem is a response to Hollo’s poem entitled “The Dream of Instant Total Representation”. Taking a look at the idea of possible political change and new beginnings, it works with found text I gathered from Twitter under #Greece.

~ - ~

The Dream of Instant Total Revolution

Isn’t there an extra second added today

3 hours before the payment deadline

the rundown confederate crash help

makes history

might crowd funding be the answer?

you can find the Paypal link below

the total debt split across all citizens

is nearly thirty thousand per head

storm clouds literally over the capital

capital or capital

early July heatwave

change – change part 28

the talks continue

litter bins and boarded windows in every town

bailout for bailout for bailout for out

what is happening here is what they have done to

many poorer nations through structural

adjustment on behalf of corporate capital

capital or capital

the talks continue

not often - but in these days I regret

that I did not learn to speak the ancient language

by the time the country closes its banks

few hedge funds had much direct hold

we stand by the people of Greece

default in 2 hours

we stand by the people of Greece

as Fitch downgrades

further into junk status

from ccc to cc plus

we stand

crowds gathering

we stand

O X I

James Schuyler

Image by Minnette Layne

Paul Hoover regarded James Schuyler as “one of the most accomplished and insightful of the New York School poets”. A judgement which is adequately reflected in his 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry award for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem.

Schuyler’s New York life, closely connected to other poets like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and a variety of visual artists such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter gives the impression of a true urban, bohemian soul – he even lived in the Chelsea Hotel for a period of time. But as Hoover puts it: “Paradoxically [he is] one of the finest nature poets in contemporary American poetry.” His attention to the little, overlooked details and his “accurate ear for the cadences of speech and the rhythms of consciousness” (David Lehman) give his poetry something that transcends the urban surroundings they might originate from.

I highly recommend having a look around the resources on EPC and PennSound. It’s great stuff!

My own response takes inspiration from Schuyler’s “Letter To A Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?” – but then I guess it goes a bit of a different route after the first line or two…

Links

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/schuyler/

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Schuyler.php

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/james-schuyler

~ - ~

Letter to a digital jay (Who is JW?)
Remembering James Schuyler

All things real

no one just virtual

the violent pounding in my guts

wringing the sense of inside me

pulling me partially somewhere small

drowning the words

the tarnished safeness of inter

face flatness cracked shocked 

deep into security reset

halting setting curling off-focus stills

the doubt of every single syllable

floundering midsentence in pools

of black ink backspacing pages

the blushing shame utterly utterly

beating stuck in shrinking lungs

the hesitation

the helpless anger

the w.t.f. me of all people with

no harm to anyone

just words just words just

the misunderstood grope of ex

perimentation in the dark inside

as these solemn honour guards

with blazing torches my only

in the age of AA batteries

and usb leads 

just this a web

log of process

of mid air reckless that’s all

I am sure you understand

Bill Berkson

Bill Berkson is a true New York City child. He was born in Manhattan’s Upper Eastside in 1939 and attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, where he studied with Kenneth Koch in 1959. It was also Koch who introduced Berkson to many of the New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman, with many of which he collaborated in the following years.
Berkson left New York in the 1970s and moved to California where he began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint. He also started to focus more on his work as an art critic. He was teaching art history and art writing at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1984 to 2008 and still holds the position of professor emeritus today. Berkson has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Artspace, the Poets Foundation, the Fund for Poetry, and the Briarcombe Foundation.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bill-berkson
http://jacket2.org/content/bill-berkson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Berkson

My response to his work focusses on his poem “Melting Milk”.



~-~

Melted

I was taught to think of it as an aggregate. Collection of items that are gathered together to form a total quantity. Melted trees to wet concrete. The shiny glister of the drop on the flat surface: broken sunshine. It is June and I have gathered my quantities in shaky cupped hands. I was taught to think of it as the world. He poured me a Whiskey Sour on clear crystal ice cubes. That was yesterday; I am passing today. Running down the page like quicksilver. I am room temperature. Call me tepid. I cool a little more with each surface augmentation. I cool a little more with each plunge. I was taught to think of it as I sat on the steamy side of the window. I am liquid. Now approaching Airdire. Drumgelloch. Running down a diagonal path across our lives: downhill. Always subject to gravity. Slipping down the drain pipe with the withered leaves of last spring. I was taught to think of it as a light solution. Watered down toxic goo. I trickle. Syrupy contemplations. I was taught to think of it as little as possible.