Charles Bernstein: Portraits, Series 2

Pierre Joris, October 22, 2006

Pierre and I met for lunch at Franklin Street Cafe, where he told me about his new anthology project, which will be part of the Poems for the Millenium series.
(mp4, 38 sec., 6.2 mb)

Wystan Curnow
Wystan had just come to town from the Creeley conference. In 1993, he had spent a semester in  Buffalo as a Poetics Program Fellow (along with Arkadii Dragomochenko, Eric  Mottram, and Ernesto Livon-Grosman). I asked him about going to graduate school at Penn, where he was the first New Zealander to get a PhD in English in the U.S.
(mp4, 45 seconds, 5.8 mb)

Leevi Lehto
Leevi and I were on the train from Helsinki to Turku (the old capital city) for the launch, at the annual Turku book fair, of my Finnish book, Runouden puolustus. Esseit ja runoja kahdelta vuosituhannelta (A Defence of Poetry. Essays and Poems From Two Millennia. So I asked Leevi — "What was the first Finnish poem?"
(mp4, 1 min. 6 secs, 8 mb)

Robert Grenier
Bob, Mimi Gross, and I met at Pecan's, in Tribeca, just before taping Close Listening at WPS1's Clocktower studio on Leonard Street. We walked across the street and  Bob sat on the stoop and talked about his visit to New York.
(mp4, 25 seconds, 4 mb)

James Sherry
James moved to his loft on the Bowery (at Houston) about 30 years ago. At the time, it was still skid row. Roof books and Segue Distributing were run out  of the space and from time to time we had readings there too. And our first local talk series, "New York Talks," which I curated in 1984.
(mp4, 31 seconds, 5.1 mb)

Johanna Drucker Johanna, Susan, and I were on a Chelsea art walk. When she is at home in Charlottesville, Johanna will sometimes spend hundreds of hours typesetting and printing a book. The results are stunning but it's sometimes hard to take in how labor intensive the work is.
(mp4, 36 seconds, 5.9 mb)

Video Portraits Home Page

• Portraits series 1 : Régis Bonvicino, George Lakoff, Heny Hills, Mimi Gross, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Caroline Bergvall
• Portraits series 2 : Pierre Joris, Wystan Curnow, Levhi Lehto, Robert Grenier, James Sherry, Johanna Drucker
• Portraits series 3 : Ann Lauterbach, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nick Piombino, Richard Tuttle
• Portraits series 4 : Rod Smith, Nicole Brossard, Douglas Messerli, Peter Middleton, Norman Fischer, Tina Darragh
• Portraits series 5 : Myung Mi Kim, Charles Alexander, Alan Davies, P. Inman, Phong Bui, Bob Perelman
• Portraits series 6 :Kenneth Goldsmith, John Yau, Peter Gizzi,  Dubravka Djuric,  Elizabeth Willis, Tan Lin
• Portraits series 7 : John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Emma Bee Bernstein, Susan Howe, Sigmund Laufer
• Portraits series 8: Maggie O'Sullivan, Christian Bök, Darren Wershler, Tonya Foster, Marty Ehrlich & Erica Hunt, Lev Rubinstein
• Portraits series 9: David Antin, Ted Greenwald, Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Joel Kuszai
• Portraits series 10: Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Willis, John Tranter, Bruce Andrews, Cecilia Vicuña, Tom Raworth
• Portraits page 11: Ben Yarmolinsky, Hank Lazer, Marjorie Perloff, Alan Loney, Claude Royet-Journoud, Li Zhimin
• Portraits page 12: Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Susan Howe, Ernie Gehr

Thanks for Steve McLaughlin for technical and design assistance. These video recordings are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the artist. ©2006-2012 Charles Bernstein. Used with permission of Charles Bernstein. Distributed by PennSound.