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Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

First published in 1986 by Sun & Moon Press, and now a classic for all who care about the poetry and poetics of the late 20th-century, Content’s Dream is a witty, consummately intelligent, and ever-stylish collection of essays by one of the country’s most innovative and influential poets, whose work has come to be associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited at the time these essays were being written.

Addressing a wide range of arts and ideas, Bernstein moves rapidly from philosophical reflections on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, to the film antics of Mad Max and the cinema of Stan Brakhage; from the paintings of Arakawa to the poetics of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley; from the modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, and Louis Zukofsky to the contemporary poetry of Jackson Mac Low, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman. Bernstein’s essays are poetic enactments rather than abstract theories, embodying in the way they are written the aesthetic values they passionately and eloquently express.

While providing an essential introduction to the innovative poetry and poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bernstein’s investigations center on the relation of art to politics and specifically the politics of poetic form. He also explores the conditions, experiences, and alienation of everyday life and the ethical traps of characterization and representation. Bernstein imagines a “thinking” poetry of both process and critique that acknowledges—and responds to—the intractability and complexity of contemporary cultural and social problems.

As Ezra Pound’s Gaudier-Bzeska, William Carlos Williams’s Collected Essays, and Gertrude Stein’s How to Write served for their time, Bernstein’s provocative essays are documents central to the poetic theory of their day.

At once irreverent and politically engaged, complex and comic, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Karl, Content’s Dream is essay-writing at its most exuberant and profound.

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“Certain works are recognized as defining an epoch.... Postmodernism is now a distinctly articulated cultural formation. Within it, Content’s Dream has been without question one of its defining critical and aesthetic documents.”
— JEROME MCGANN, University of Virginia

“A terrific manifestation of an exemplary contemporary intellectual forging what we might consider a conscience for his time.”
— CHARLES ALTIERI, University of California, Berkeley

“[Content’s Dream] is the most exciting and challenging book of essays I have read in quite some time. The range of reference, style, and thought makes for stimulating reading, the kind that inevitably leads to other reading (as well as re-reading).”
— HANK LAZER, Missouri Review

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Dark City

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

Dark City, Charles Bernstein's twentieth book, is an at times comic, at times bleak, excursion into everyday life in the late 20th century. In Dark City, Bernstein moves through a startling range of languages and forms, from computer lingo to the cant of TV talk shows, from high-poetic diction to junk mail, from intimate address to philosophical imperatives, from would-be proverbs to nursery rhymes and songs.

Bernstein's city is flickering and evanescent, moving from Madras to New York to Los Angeles, from "Virtual Reality" to "The View from Nowhere." Yet his collage of diversive/divisive voices also represents, as The Village Voice has noted, "A tireless attempt to regain our attention and bring us from inertia into discourse again":

Love is like love, a baby
like a baby, meaning like
memory, light like light.
A journey's a detour
and a pocket a charm
in which deceits are borne.
A cloud is a cloud and
a story like a story,
song is a song,
fury like fury.

Republics of Reality 1975-1995

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature
Part of 50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics

Recognized internationally as one of the major forces of contemporary poetry, Charles Bernstein—formerly the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, Buffalo—is now a professor of Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Bernstein co-founded L=A-N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in the late 1970s, giving rise to what has come to be called “Language” poetry.

However, as these poems reveal, Bernstein's allegiance has not been to any one kind of poetry, but to an “artificed” writing that refuses simple absorption into the society around it. Including the complete poems of early books such as Parsing, Shade, Senses of Responsibility, Resistance, and The Absent Father in Dumbo, as well as new work (collected here as Residual Rubbernecking), Republics of Reality is one of Bernstein's most important collections to date, revealing his great diversity and the witty, quirky, comic, philosophic, and lyric quality of his poems.

See also the author's Interview with Romina Freschi in Green Integer Review Issue No. 1.

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Rough Trades

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

Charles Bernstein is, simply put, one of the most influential and widely read poets of our age. One of the true masters of irony in poetry, Bernstein manages to also infuse each poem with an affirmative vision which verges on the utopian. Bernstein is a poet of language, in the fullest sense of that word, a poet who "want[s] no paradise, only to be / drenched in downpour of words..." In Rough Trades, language is taken in every direction possible, from the straight lines of jokes filled with pregnant pauses (George Burns) to the paratactic lines of a Hennie Youngman, and from the lines of Maoist thought to the lines of ladies' dresses which his father pushed — not downstairs in the street but upstairs in a factory as the head of a dressmaking company. These lines of language, of thinking, intersect, dissect, converge, and emerge again as new ideas and emotions, hit and bounce and point and disappear over the horizon, only to reappear from the periphery.

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Shade

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

Side-stapled, with an illustrated cover by Susan Bee. Edition of 500. This book was included, reset, in the collection Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996).

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Shadowtime

Charles Bernstein

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

Shadowtime is a thought opera based on the work and life of the German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. The libretto was written by Charles Bernstein for composer Brian Ferneyhough and had its premiere in May 2004 at the Munich Biennale, with subsequent productions at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York.

In its seven scenes, Shadowtime explores some of the major themes of Benjamin's work, including the intertwined natures of history, time, transience, timelessness, language, and melancholy; the possibilities for a transformational leftist politics; the interconnectivity of language, things, and cosmos; and the role of dialectical materiality, aura, interpretation, and translation in art. Beginning on the last evening of Benjamin's life, Shadowtime projects an alternative course for what happened on that fateful night.

Opening onto a world of shades, of ghosts, of the dead, Shadowtime inhabits a period in human history in which the light flickered and then failed.

Tess Crebbin in Music and Vision, says "Bernstein's libretto, plain and simple, is the finest contemporary libretto that I know of."

See also the author's Interview with Romina Freschi in Green Integer Review Issue No. 1.

The Nude Formalism

Charles Bernstein

with Susan Bee

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Winner of the America Award for Literature

SEE ALSO:
20 Pages #2: Four Lorca Suites
20 Pages #4: Narrativity
20 Pages #6: Material, Materials, Recovery of

The Nude Formalism was originally published by Sun & Moon Press in 1989. It combines the poetry of Charles Bernstein with the drawings of Susan Bee.