My Way: Speeches and Poems (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The men on the hill, they say, "learn the rules, then break them..." (more)
Key Phrases: official verse culture, disattend track, mimeo revolution, New York, Charles Reznikoff, Collected Poems (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the key theorists of the workshop-busting Language poets, the charismatic Bernstein (A Poetics; Dark City, Rough Trades) continues to expand his purview past the formal concerns of that group. His latest critico-poetic salvo takes in issues of multiculuralism; "standard" vs. "non-standard" forms of language usage; the ossified conservative agenda of literary institutions in the United States; poetry in performance?both on the page and on stage; and graduate-level pedagogical practices ("Frame Lock"). Eclectic both in its forms of expression (scholarly essays; interviews; generous explications of poets like Charles Reznikoff, Larry Eigner, Hannah Weiner and Susan Howe; quirky poems; and forms that are hybrids of all of these) and in its range of interests, My Way also grants us peeks beneath the surface of Bernstein's sometimes strategically difficult discourse, as in a long autobiographical interview with Loss Glazier, or deceptively accessible poems like "A Test of Poetry," which documents the traumas of his translators. "Water Images of The New Yorker" is a fine little investigative piece, discovering that 86% of the poems over a 16 week period contained images of water, while "Dear Mr. Fanelli," a poem in skinny Schuyleresque lines, takes the language of a subway administrator's "request for comments" literally, highlighting how even bureaucratic language is vexed with double-meanings. "Poetics of the Americas" creates an important bridge between the ethnically marginalized practices of poets like Claude McKay and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and more self-consciously "avant-garde" writers like Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and the Language poets themselves. This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, offered in good faith, yet cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this collection of speeches, cultural critiques, personal essays and anecdotes, interviews, and poems, Bernstein (poetry and letters, SUNY at Buffalo) intentionally bounces back and forth among sociological, ontological, poetic, and banal frequencies. There are flashes of brilliance but often with enormous helpings of malice and defensiveness. Self-indulgence in the style and authoritative presumptions and irreverent cleverness in the writing sometimes detract from what might have made for a leaner, more interesting volume. Bernstein loves class polemics, has a Rousseauean notion of "relevant discourse," and displays a wicked sense of humor. But his rhetoric often opts for inference over observation, and readers may be left wandering whether for Bernstein having it "my way" isn't having it at all. If one is after genuine insight into the elegance of writing (which counts modesty as an ingredient), one would do better with Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen's Beat Not the Poor Desk (1981). For those who like their discourse theoretical and shrill.?Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 329 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226044106
• ISBN-13: 978-0226044101
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,114,017 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A contrarian and Emersonian shakeup of US poetics, May 11, 1999

By	Rob Wilson (Honolulu and Santa Cruz) - See all my reviews

"My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play, risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voice and forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poetic diction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk, secular conversion, and fun. Sinatra did it "my way," and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol, and sheep.