Description
The poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy. Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange--and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.
About the Author
Charles Bernstein lives in New York and is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as coeditor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the Electronic Poetry Center, and PennSound and cofounder of the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many publications are three books also published by the University of Chicago Press: Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems.
Reviews
"I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Originality may be the only course when loss is the mother of invention. These are not my words but I mean them."--Kenneth Goldsmith "Charles Bernstein's ars poetica is courageously resistant to the blandishments of what he calls 'personification' in its easy embrace of the unimaginable. This insistence makes all the more poignant and arresting, then, the abject misery of personal misfortune obliquely sheltered, honored, and given voice in Recalculating, a resounding collection by one of the true originals of the art."--Jed Rasula "Provincetown Arts " "The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness."--Mei-mei Berssenbrugge "Charles Bernstein is writing in the simplest of forms--so simple they become radical. I love reading his work because he's writing on the cusp of what poetry is."--Eileen Myles "Recalculating gathers a substantial selection of (mostly) new poems--a few go as far back as the 80s and 90s--in a remarkably coherent and enlightening collection--though I'm certain Bernstein would abjure both of those adjectives. He has always rejected the idea of the poem as honed and polished object, and the poems in this book are as open as life itself. One thing that Recalculating makes clear is that, though Bernstein can deliver some 'killer' aphorisms, he is primarily a poet of abjection. He has always been drawn, as he puts it here, to the 'painfully clumsy, clumpsy.' Slapstick is bunkmates with failure and even heartbreak. This is especially evident in recent poems such as "Recalculating" and "Before You Go" which directly or indirectly reference the sudden death of the poet's daughter. It is breathtaking--disturbing and admirable--that grief appears in these poems, as it does in life, alongside--well, alongside everything."--Rae Armantrout "The English word 'calculate' has a double life: in standard English it means to 'reckon' or 'intend' and in dialect it means 'to guess.' These contrary, wayward, definitions--the first so full of certainty, the second so full of ironic doubt--shimmer and clash on every page of Charles Bernstein's obsessive, brilliant new book of poems, Recalculating. Through responses, translations, adaptations, and occasional pieces, through little hymns and tragic litanies, Bernstein measures and dreams a circle: a community of readers and writers who spin within a world built from the living history of words."--Susan Stewart
Book Information
ISBN 9780226564722
Author Charles Bernstein
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
About the Author
Charles Bernstein lives in New York and is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as coeditor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the Electronic Poetry Center, and PennSound and cofounder of the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many publications are three books also published by the University of Chicago Press: Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems.
Reviews
"I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Originality may be the only course when loss is the mother of invention. These are not my words but I mean them."--Kenneth Goldsmith "Charles Bernstein's ars poetica is courageously resistant to the blandishments of what he calls 'personification' in its easy embrace of the unimaginable. This insistence makes all the more poignant and arresting, then, the abject misery of personal misfortune obliquely sheltered, honored, and given voice in Recalculating, a resounding collection by one of the true originals of the art."--Jed Rasula "Provincetown Arts " "The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness."--Mei-mei Berssenbrugge "Charles Bernstein is writing in the simplest of forms--so simple they become radical. I love reading his work because he's writing on the cusp of what poetry is."--Eileen Myles "Recalculating gathers a substantial selection of (mostly) new poems--a few go as far back as the 80s and 90s--in a remarkably coherent and enlightening collection--though I'm certain Bernstein would abjure both of those adjectives. He has always rejected the idea of the poem as honed and polished object, and the poems in this book are as open as life itself. One thing that Recalculating makes clear is that, though Bernstein can deliver some 'killer' aphorisms, he is primarily a poet of abjection. He has always been drawn, as he puts it here, to the 'painfully clumsy, clumpsy.' Slapstick is bunkmates with failure and even heartbreak. This is especially evident in recent poems such as "Recalculating" and "Before You Go" which directly or indirectly reference the sudden death of the poet's daughter. It is breathtaking--disturbing and admirable--that grief appears in these poems, as it does in life, alongside--well, alongside everything."--Rae Armantrout "The English word 'calculate' has a double life: in standard English it means to 'reckon' or 'intend' and in dialect it means 'to guess.' These contrary, wayward, definitions--the first so full of certainty, the second so full of ironic doubt--shimmer and clash on every page of Charles Bernstein's obsessive, brilliant new book of poems, Recalculating. Through responses, translations, adaptations, and occasional pieces, through little hymns and tragic litanies, Bernstein measures and dreams a circle: a community of readers and writers who spin within a world built from the living history of words."--Susan Stewart
Book Information
ISBN 9780226564722
Author Charles Bernstein
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
