THE KINDS OF POETRY
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
WANTS


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Limited capacity
Thursday,
December 5, 2024

6:30pm
Doors open

7pm
Event begins
Charles Bernstein's new book is called The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies. 

It includes not just poetry but essays on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more. It's a dialogic novel, a very long poem, and a grand opera all wrapped into one. 

In this foreword, the late Paul Auster writes that “whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to listen to what he is saying.”
Joined by Susan Bee, Felix Bernstein, Tracie Morris, and Tan Lin, Charles orchestrates a performance of the book and hosts an evening of tributes, poetics and polemics with a mosaic of voices that appear in it: from Antin to Zukofsky, from Creeley to Stein, from Tonya Foster to Johanna Drucker, along with flights of fancy on translation, identity, and aesthetic possibility.

Charles Bernstein (b. 1950, New York) is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Since the 1970s, Bernstein has published dozens of books, including poetry and essay collections, pamphlets, translations, collaborations, and libretti. He won the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (Chicago, 2018) and lifetime achievement, and the 2025 America Award for lifetime contribution to international writing. Recent books include Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). With Al Filreis, he is the co-founder and co-editor of PENNsound, a vast archive of recorded poetry. He lives in Brooklyn.

Susan Bee is an artist living in Brooklyn. Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works 1981-2023 was at the Provincetown Art Museum this fall. Her next solo show opens in March 2025 at A.I.R. Gallery.
Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015). His writing has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Poetry Magazine, Spike Arts Magazine, Bomb, Mousse, May Revue, Bookforum and Texte Zur Kunst.

Tracie Morris is the author of 10 books. Her most recent is Applying J.L. Austin: A Black Speech Act Workbook (Chax Press, 2024). She is a Guggenheim Fellow, Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, experimental filmmaker, theorist and performance artist. 

Tan Lin is a poet, artist, professor, essayist, and novelist whose works include The Fern Rose Bibliography (New York: The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2022), ambience is a novel with a logo (Katalance Press, 2007), and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), Lin's novel, Our Feelings Were Made by Hand, is being published by Coffee House Press in 2025.
Due to the age and character of the building, the space is not optimized for ADA accessibility and is located up a single flight of 20 stairs with handrails. If you have questions about access, please contact us in advance of the event, and we will make every effort to accommodate you.