Charles Bernstein Interview in Brooklyn Rail…

… check it out, excellent!

Charles Bernstein by Phong Bui

In Conversation

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.

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