Charles Bernstein Interview in Brooklyn Rail…
… check it out, excellent!
Charles Bernstein by Phong Bui
CHARLES BERNSTEIN with Adam Fitzgerald
by Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is the author of Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011); All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); and Girly Man (Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSoundwriting.upenn.edu/pennsound. See Epc.buffalo.edu for more information.
Adam Fitzgerald (Rail): How long have you been working on the book? Meanwhile, you’re prolifically writing essays, speaking, doing appearances, Interneting.
Charles Bernstein: Interneting? Hmm. I guess so.
Rail: When do you tell yourself these occasional performances, speeches, and texts should assemble into a larger pattern, a “book of essays”?
Bernstein: There’s a different story for each book. The basic unit of writing for me, more than a poem or essay, is the book. The collections are not structured primarily as chronological assemblings: each book has a formal or structural or thematic frame. With All the Whiskey in Heaven, my recent selected poems, even though all but the title poem had been in previous books, I went about making a new book in its own right, selecting works not just as best or representative, but in terms of what worked for the book.
Read on here.
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux