With Strings (Paperback)

~ (Author) "What are aesthetic values and why do there appear to be lesser & fewer of them?..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"These statements are based on current expectations and projects about the aesthetic environment and assumptions made by the author and are not guarantees of future performativity," writes Bernstein in "Today's Not Opposite Day," one of many cagey, slapstick satires in his large new collection. Bernstein has never been an easy pleasure, from the early minimalist sensibility of his Language-oriented work, through his prose poems, collage pieces, and recent poetic incarnation as borscht belt professor. These poems nevertheless reflect a growing comfort with the role of public intellectual and avuncular proselyte for all things radical, marked by a decisive turn toward vaudevillian satire: "the toilet seat is down now/ it's there I plan to sit/ until I find that doggy bag/ I lost while just a kid." Many poems are nail-scratchingly obvious in their form, as in the inverted ballad or "Besotted Desquamation," in which every line in the poem contains four words beginning with the same letter "marshalling muted might majestically," and are in deep engagement with the most mundane modes of culture. This rationale for writing very "bad" poetry makes one put all aesthetic and by extension social and moral judgments in scare quotes, pitting the reader against the very value system that may have brought him or her to the poem itself: "& the moral/ of that is: If you kill the spirit/ in others, you kill it in yourself./ & the moral of that is: Watch the slings and arrows & the automatic/ weapons will get you every time." There is no real way to determine where the plentiful filler ends and reality begins, or where the poem ends and the jacket copy starts, which seems to be Bernstein's entailed, `self'-defeating intent ("suspicion/ in the travail/ made foam"), forcing readers to recognize and confront their formal and ideological chaff.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, his 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. The whole presents a densely sounded echo chamber in which a range of themes, moods, and perceptions extend and reverberate.

Charles Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He 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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 139 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226044602
• ISBN-13: 978-0226044606
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,475,665 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back Cover Copy, February 26, 2002

By	Charles Bernstein (New York, New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"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

*

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults 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.

*

Charles Bernstein is the Director of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to My Way, he is the author of two collections of essays, A Poetics and Content's Dream, and more than twenty books of poems, including Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Islets/Irritations and Rough Trades.