Charles Bernstein: Portraits, Series 8

Maggie O'Sullivan
Maggie had just arrived in New York and came by my place after visiting Steve Clay. She was in the U.S. for the Bob Cobbing festival at Penn. We talked about Bob's generous spirit but also how generally inhospitable she found England, which often has greeted artists like her with a colossally cold shoulder. Maggie remembered that I always wrote my poems by hand and with a fountain pen, if possible. Or used to anyway. I gave her my favorite current pen, the Impact Gel writer.
(mp4, 46 seconds, 34.5 mb)

Christian Bök
I met up with Christian and Brigitte a few days earlier. We had met at the noisy lounge at his hotel on West 55th and walked over to the Mandarin Oriental lobby sky bar overlooking Central Park. But it was too dark to take any pictures. I saw Christian again at Kenny's on New Year's Day. Cheryl's studio was fairly quiet and the light was right.
(mp4, 1 min. 2 sec., 8.1 mb)

Darren Wershler-Henry
Darren's Iron Whim was all about the typewriter. But what about handwriting?
(mp4, 25 seconds, 19 mb)

Tonya Foster
Tonya grew up in New Orleans and was heading down for the Spring. Now she is a graduate student at CUNY, about to write a dissertation of poetry and place. We had just eaten in the new sushi joint across the street. I asked her what she missed most about what is gone in New Orleans.
(mp4, 37 seconds, 27.6 mb)

Erica Hunt and Ehrlich Marty
Erica and Marty had collaborated once before, at Harvard. Now they brought the show to New York, to Cue Art Foundation in Chelsea. This was their last piece of the set.
(mp4, 3 min. 7 sec., 30.7 mb)

Lev Rubinstein
Matvei Yankelevich asked me to join Lev Rubinstein in a memorial tribute to Dmitri Prigov at the Bowery Poetry Club. Rubinstein's is a poetry of changing parts that ensnares the evanescent uncanniness of the everyday (in ways that bring to mind the seriality of both Reznikoff and Grenier). By means of rhythmically foregrounding a central device — the basic unit of the work is the index card — Rubinstein continuously re-makes actual for us a flickering now time that is both intimate and strange.
(mp4, 3 min. 34 sec., 36.4 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.