Poems from With Strings:
The Human
Abstract
The
Boy Soprano(Jacket no. 1)
These
Horses Do Not Move Up and Down (Tinfish No.2)
Johnny
Cake Hollow (Tinfish No.2)
"Poem Composed for Jackson Mac Low ..." (Eoagh 2 )
Log Rhythms (complete book), first published by Granary Books, with pictures
by Susan Bee; text-only version is the final poem in With Strings (ubu
web)
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Drawing Center Launch Reading from With Strings as
part of the Line series (PennSound)
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On With Strings:
Yunte
Huang on With Strings and Marjorie Perloff's 21st Century
Modernism in Boston Review
Tim
Allen on With Strings in Stride Magazine
Thomas
Fink on
With Strings in
the
Verse issue of Jacket
Michael Kelleher, "Charles
Bernstein in the 20th Century, A Brief Revue of Poetic Values" (on "Today's
Not Oppostite Day" in With
Strings) from The Transcendental Friend
Buffalo News review of With
Strings
Publisher's catalog copy:
A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way: Speeches and Poems, Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Charles Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac.
Bernstein remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together.
From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.
"In With Strings, Charles Bernstein plays 'Charles Bernstein’ with furious comedic virtuosity, very much as Lenny Bruce played 'Lenny Bruce’ or Charlie Chaplin 'Charlie Chaplin.’ The comparison of this remarkable collection of poems with the work of such serious and defiant comedians is indicative of only one facet of Bernstein’s writings, but it is apt: his work is iconoclastic and revolutionary. Bernstein’s poetry, however, is driven by aesthetic as well as social passions. The poems that are With Strings are addressed to the great questions perpetually facing art: What is it? Why is it? How is it? And in this context, inevitably, the presence of artlessness is discovered close at hand, never to be subsumed. It is in poetry’s encounter with what is never to be subsumed that the brilliance of Bernstein’s work erupts.”—Lyn Hejinian
“Charles Bernstein is one of the finest poets writing today, and certainly one of our greatest satirists. His poetry presents a profound and highly individual critique of contemporary half-truths, speech forms, and modes of expression, and does it so graphically and with such great good humor that the reader is left breathless—laughing and crying at the same time as the shocks of recognition register.”—Marjorie Perloff
132 pp., Paper $12.00 0-226-04460-2 December 2001
132 pp., Cloth $39.00tx 0-226-04459-9 December 2001
The University of Chicago Press