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for Poems | Critical Responses
Notes & Extensions | Sound
Files | Author
Bio
On-line poems from Girly Man
EPC Author Page
|
University
of Chicago Press
Sept.
15, 2006
160
pp.
now in paper
Images for Poems
"Jacob's
Ladder"
"Slap Me Five, Cleo, Mark's History"
Boston Review: David Greenberg, “When That Becomes This” partly on "War Stories" (July/August 2011) & response (March 2012)
Brooklyn
Rail: Gordon
Tapper (March 2007)
Buffalo News: R.D.
Pohll 10/13/06
EBR: "Either
You're With Us and Against Us: Charles Bernstein's Girly Man,
9-11, and the Brechtian Figure of the Reader" (2008)
Experimental Fiction
and Poetry: Jefferson Hanson
(2008)
Forward: David
Kaufman, "Rattling the Chains of American Poetry : Charles
Bernstein’s unique blend of polemic, parody and just plain
invention" (12/21/06)
Harvard Review: Kathleen Rooney (Spring 2007)
Jacket 33: Dan Thomas-Glass (July 2007)
Kansas City Star: Robert
Hicks review (12/31/06)
Klassekampen (Norway): Martin
Glaz Serup (4/7/2007) (Norweigan)
Allen Mozak on Girly Man For the Birds, Dec. 2009)
The Line Break: Tom Holmes on 12x12
The
New Review: Douglas Messerli, "The
Possibility of Rectitude" -- on Let's Just Say (2005)
Philadelphia Inquirer:
Thomas Devaney (2/18/07)
Poetry
Project Newsletter: Chuck Stebelton (April-June, 2007)
Poetry
Magazine: Ange Mlinko & David Yezzi (May 2007)
Post IV: Maurice Devitt, "Girly Man: poetry as reality TV" (Irish Center for Poetry Studies, c. 2012 "In
Particular "
Publishers
Weekly (8/28/2006)
The
Quarterly Conversation by John Herbert Cunningham (Feb.
2009)
Meredith
Quartermain on World on Fire
Stanza:
Ton van 't Hof, (in
Dutch)
Susan
Schultz on "Some of These Daze" in "'World Trade
Center': Wrting after 9/11," the coda to A Poetics of
Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005).
Ron
Silliman on World on Fire; and also on two
poems from Let's Just Say: Silliman
on "In Particular" and Silliman
on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" (2003-4); Silliman
on Girly Man (2006)
Talisman:
Corinne Robins (#34 Winter/Spring 2007)
William
Watkin's Blog (March
15, 2007)
Verse:
Thomas Fink (Feb. 2007)
Washinton Post:
Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice" (1/28/07)
:Marko Niemi's javascript extension/version
:full screen version
"Jacob's Ladder"
"Reading Red"
: Discussion of poem in a dialog with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, published in Conjunctions
: Richard Tuttle image with text of "Loopy" (poem # 14)
"Some of These Days"
: First publications & Granary Books collaboration with Mimi Gross
"Slap Me Five, Cleo, Mark's History"
World on Fire
: Susan Bee cover for original Nomados edition
: sheet music for "World on Fire" (1941 song)
: Discussion of poems on "Cross-Cultural Poetics" (3/15/04): text of interview, published in Jacket
: Discussion of "In a Restless World Like This Is" on Poem Talk
---------------------------------tear here--------------------------------------
DIRECTIONS: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint. a. Girly
Man’s meanings are largely organized by luck or chance. a. Girly
Man is indifferent to human needs. a.
Poetry like this brings the greatest happiness. a.
Overall, Charles Bernstein has been harmful to American culture. (This written endorsement of Girly Man should be removed for inspection and verification.) —Jerome McGann |
---------------------------------tear
here--------------------------------------
After
9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein
here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and
resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic
and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg,
Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical
moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically
addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, which features
works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response
to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating
humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute
crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political
consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something
necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and
related claims to truth and moral certainty—is
an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may
be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic.
Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performs its ideas so that they
can be experienced as well as understood.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is
a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical
verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.
When we thought we had Bernstein pegged or that his work had possibly reached its limits, he emerges in Girly Man as a poet at the top of his form, capable still of the greatest modernist & postmodernist swervings, & for whom no form of expression is now entirely foreign. As with other poets of his rank (& that rank is very high), he has the ability to make categories dissolve & for himself, as poet, to become happily unclassifiable. From the comic to the archromantic, the avant-garde to the avant-pop, the formally constructed to the deceptively lawless, the personally political to the impersonally poetical, the poems in Girly Man are an example of what poetry can be in the hands of a supercharged & superrestless poet. Charles Bernstein is now more clearly what he has always been – a major poet for our time – & then some.
Improvisational volatility, wordplay, near rhyme possibilities, frolic arguments, standup skepticism, loopy affirmation, accurate wit, restless ethical inquiry: I can’t think of a better way for a reader to experience Charles Bernstein’s fierce commitment to poetry as a necessary calling than to read this, his latest and perhaps most accessible collection. In this restless world we live in, Bernstein is one of our most radical and resilient voices.
Charles Bernstein’s poems in Girly Man are frequently series of pairs, jingles of a ‘public discourse’ that purports to represent us and by which Bernstein misrepresents us, the pairs being apparently contrary to each other and from which we are to choose as if without middle ground: “simultaneous double narrative/the space between’s the other narrative/as if they’re opposite.” In the space between, outside representation but in the ‘presence’ of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that’s public and mind at once and inseparable, that is “Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.” Girly Man is doing it.
Charles Bernstein may be our most inspired formalist. He dares to look at all the things that poetry historically is not in order to fashion what it might become. In his brilliant new collection, Bernstein continues his genuinely unreasonable assault on the gentle reading public. Long live the girly man!
Girly Man demonstrates why many critics hold Charles Bernstein to be among the most important poets writing in America. This book is infused by Bernstein’s signature poetics—a fusion of form and content, poetic language and argument, entertainment and philosophy, the personal and the social. Above all, Girly Man exhibits Bernstein’s rigorous attention to language and ways of speaking from which many of his recurrent themes emerge. Girly Man’s strength is the strength of Bernstein’s overall poetic project: his ability to critique institutions and life, often making everyday speech strange in order to make its underlying assumptions visible.
Cue Art Foundation Launch/Reading (audio and video), Jan. 16 2007
"The
Bricklayer's Arms," studio recording in New
York (2004) & BPC (2004)
"The
Ballad of the Girly Man": excerpt
on the Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC (2005); complete poem, recorded
in Chicago (2004)
; in Brooklyn (2004);
& BPC (first reading, 2004)
"from
Canti Antichi" (studio, 2007)
"Castor
Oil," with Emma Bee Bernstein, Morrow Studio (2004;
also recorded
in Chicago.
with Emma (2004)
"Don't
Get Me Wrong" (studio, 2007)
"every
lake...," Morrow
Studio recording (2004) and Oslo (2009)
"If
You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now," BPC
(2004)
"Likeness," Morrow
Studio recording (2004), also recorded in Chicago (2004) & in Brooklyn (2004) &
BPC (2004)
"Shenandoah"
(studio, 2007)
"Secrets
of a Clear Hand", BPC (2004)
"Self-Help": recorded
in Chicago (2004) & at BPC (2004)
"Slap
Me Five, Cleo, Mark's History," recorded at Harvard
(2001): image
"Thank
You for Saying Thank You," Columbia University, 2001 & Weekend
America (Boston, 2002). Video:
Ireland, 2005 (poem intercut with interview on Shadowtime)
" War
Stories," with Emma Bee Bernstein,
Morrow Studio (2004); video of
Buffalo reading (2003)
"The
Warble of the Ammonia-Bellied Barkeep": Brooklyn (2004) & BPC (2004)
====
Cross-Cultural
Poetics Interview on Girly Man, including reading, April
15. 2007 (32 20:): MP3
Joe
Milford Show reading and discussion
of Girly Man on BlogTalk.Com: MP3 (1hr10m)
:::::
World
on Fire and Let's Just Say recorded at the University
of Pennsylvania (2003)
"Likeness," "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now," "Secrets of a Clear Hand," " Self-Help," "The Warble of the Amonia-Bellied Barkeep," "The
Bricklayer's Arms," "The Ballad of the Girly Man"
:::recorded
at Segue/Bowery
Poetry Club, 10/2/04
"Self-Help," "In
Particular," "Thank You for Saying Thank You," "Castor
Oil," "The Bricklayer's Arms," "The Ballad
of the Girly Man," and World on Fire
::::
recorded at Mills
College (2004)
University
of Chicago (2006)
[recordings
courtesy PennSound]
Some of the poems in Girly Man have appeared on-line; these initial publications are linked here.
Charles Bernstein author page EPC
Bernstein Web Log
University of Chicago Press
web design: Caudio Amberian
John Reynolds, "Pretty Ugly" (2004)
text
from Let's Just
Say