This is a warm, witty and useful book for creators of all disciplines--especially those who attempt to mine, refine and sell the products of their soul. It's the type of book you read in the middle of the night when the ideas won't come and you're wondering just why in the hell you became an artist in the first place. By dawn, you'll know why, and who knows? you might even feel good enough to catch a little sleep before you start in all over again.

As a professional songwriter I am always searching for that edge, that extra something that will set my songs apart from the rest. I feel blessed whenever I can lay my hands and heart on something that will inspire me and help me grow as a writer. Coming across this rare gem of a book was nothing short of a godsend. A quick peek at the table of contents reveals the coming feast. The author seems well versed in a cornucopia of interesting and diverse topics; from chapter one's ideas on creativity, through fashion, food, jazz, and finally closing with a sweet chapter on community. Mr. Bernstein seems to possess not only the knowledge and skill necessary to thrive in the intense and sometimes cut-throat film music world but seems to also be in touch with some sort of philosophers stone. His wit, wisdom and insights are a constant joy throughout the book. It appears he can make music out of anything and after reading his lovely book, I feel as if I have just experienced one of his compositions live in concert. This really is a book for anyone interested in an artist's take on life, love, and creation. I heartily recommend it. Bruce Michael Miller Nashville, TN

Written/compiled in 1999. If you are a Prince fan you might think that's all there is to it. This collection was put together that year. These days (21st Century) most people are a David Gray fan. Are you kidding?

Charles Bernstein utilized lyrics first not acoustics first; then you of the 21st century oblivious to the 1990s and beyond can perceive the acoustic guitar as synonymous with lyrics which is not the case with Ch. B. but which is indeed the case with the latter namesake, David Gray, the acoustic guitar player, who is not the same person of whom Charles Bernstein is mentioned as winner of the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters of at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

"My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play, risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voice and forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poetic diction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk, secular conversion, and fun. Sinatra did it "my way," and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol, and sheep.

*

From the publisher:

Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.

Contents: Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Sound's Measures

Susan Stewart, Letter on Sound

Nick Piombino, The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry

Bruce Andrews, Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Informalism

Marjorie Perloff, After Free-Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries

Susan Howe, Either/Ether

Performing Words

Johanna Drucker, Visual Performance of the Poetic Text Steve McCaffery, Voice in Extremis

Dennis Tedlock, Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability

Bob Perelman, Speech Effects: The Talk as Genre

Peter Quartermain, Sound Reading

Close Hearings / Historical Settings

Jed Rasula, Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding

Peter Middleton, The Contemporary Poetry Reading

Lorenzo Thomas, Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement

Maria Damon, Was that "Different," "Dissident" or "Dissonant"? Poetry (n) the Public Speak: Slams, Open Readings and Dissident Traditions

Susan Schultz, Local Vocals: Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcoloniality

Afterword

Ron Silliman, Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading

READ THE FIRST ESSAY IN THIS BOOK REPEAT

Louis Zukofsky imbued criticism with the grace of his poetry. He believed that poetry was not a gesture to be revered, but a crystalization of experience, individual and general. Thus his criticism of poetry judges it against vital standards, with reference to philosophy and history, but without reference to critical fashion. The academic formulae which remove poetry from experience to convention are absent from this book: a great writer who takes pains to be an acute reader tells us what sustains him, and can sustain us.

The language of invention, of discovery must always seem strange at first, but time has brought us closer to these original explorations of sincerity in poetry. Zukofsky wrote about his contemporaries as they appeared, and helped many of them to appear. He was there. If you want to know what poetry can do, unfettered by prejudice, you can find it here. I urge you to. Prepositions, in conjuction with his poetry, can change and illuminate how you see, feel, hear, think.

"In With Strings, Charles Bernstein plays 'Charles Bernstein' with furious comedic virtuosity, very much as Lenny Bruce played 'Lenny Bruce' or Charlie Chaplin 'Charlie Chaplin.' The comparison of this remarkable collection of poems with the work of such serious and defiant comedians is indicative of only one facet of Bernstein's writings, but it is apt: his work is iconoclastic and revolutionary. Bernstein's poetry, however, is driven by aesthetic as well as social passions. The poems that are With Strings are addressed to the great questions perpetually facing art: What is it? Why is it? How is it? And in this context, inevitably, the presence of artlessness is discovered close at hand, never to be subsumed. It is in poetry's encounter with what is never to be subsumed that the brilliance of Bernstein's work erupts."
-Lyn Hejinian
*
"Charles Bernstein is one of the finest poets writing today, and certainly one of our greatest satirists. His poetry presents a profound and highly individual critique of contemporary half-truths, speech forms, and modes of expression, and does it so graphically and with such great good humor that the reader is left breathless-laughing and crying at the same time as the shocks of recognition register."
-Marjorie Perloff

*

A companion to the critically acclaimed My Way, Charles Bernstein's 1999 montage of essays, conversations, and poems, With Strings catapults Bernstein into the future of American poetry. A compilation of sixty-nine poems in various forms and styles, dating mostly from the 1990s, With Strings is his most buoyant collection to date. With its fractured nursery rhymes, distressed mottoes, runcible riddles, and inscrutable sayings, Bernstein takes us on a poetic trip that swerves from the comic to the political, from the whimsical to the elegiac.

Bernstein remains one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. The title of his new collection, With Strings, suggests the lush arrangement of a musical work as well as the unacknowledged implications of our everyday agreements. Just as language binds us together with its associated meanings, With Strings bounces against the ties that rend us apart as they fasten us together.

From his samplings of everyday life, to his demented yet sonorous iambic beats, Bernstein has once again created a poetry of our time, for our time, and by our time.

*

Charles Bernstein is the Director of the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to My Way, he is the author of two collections of essays, A Poetics and Content's Dream, and more than twenty books of poems, including Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Islets/Irritations and Rough Trades.

I really enjoyed these essays, which range from theory to personal reflection. When discussing specific projects that she has been involved with, it's fascinating they way you are drawn in to feel like you're seeing the behind-the-scenes of the creation process. The treatments of issues of theory were cogent, and well presented. I confess that I dog-eared many a page. The moments of personal reflection were at times almost too personal to bear...not what you might expect from a collection of essays, but welcome to this reader, nonetheless.

More platitudes. Needs more time in Comp. 101.

This is a good book with the basics of how to deal with psychiatric emergencies. It is great for the psych intern just starting out, and for non-psychiatric professionals. However, at times it is a little simplistic and does not offer enough options in terms of treatments.

It's 3:00 A.M.and you are called into the E.R. to see a patient with a psychiatric problem. What do you do? This book provides a quick but thorough step by step guide for dealing with psychiatric emergencies. It broken down into all the steps anyone working on a P.E.T. (Psychiatric Emergency Team) or provides basic emergency care needs to know. Smaller than the pocket DSM-IV. It is portable and usable.

Once again, reading Charles Bernstein is a wasted intellectual exercise. Berbstein's theories about language are old hat, too. Jackson MacLow and many others beat him out for originality long ago. It is a pity to see that people like Marjorie Perloff, coming from the "Gertrude Stein School," so to speak, can be so fooled by Berstein's nonsense. He wastes paper with his over done, old hat experiments. Stein beat him to the things he attempts, too, and in a more interesting whimsical fashion. If one really wants to read about language and its implications, one does better to read Noam Chomsky. The thing is that Chomsky at least never pretends to be a poet, and at best, tops Bernstein for true intellectual power. Charles Bernstein would do well to attempt to really communicate some experience of life on THIS planet, not just his bookish attitudes. His claim to any originality is arrogant. We poets were all doing these sort of experiments all through the 1960's and 1970's before we decided to really write in order to communicate. Gertrude Stein and Jackson MacLow were our leaders, along with the French Dadaists and Symbolists, like Rimbaud. American poetry simply does not need Bernstein's influence or theories at this juncture. He sets things back, not forward. This silly emperor really has not clothes and it doesn't take a child to see it. We grown up poets know it two. And, we must tell the truth from the rooftops to save other younger poets from this foolery with l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e.

look how angry te fool above me got that's why you should read chuck-also he's funny 'nuff said

If you like to see the English language --- the Queen's English, that is to say --- subjected to the most vicious of butcherings and prententious, pedantic doodeling, than I think this books will be right up your alley. I, however, prefer such masters of Her Majesty's language as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Hobi Baba, ann Michael Hardt. Not.

. . . and completely dishonest--these folks affect a vague anti-capitalist stance, but really. Charles Bernstein was the star of a commercial for the Yellow Pages broadcast during the Super Bowl. How much did you get for that, Chuck? Gave the money to the masses, did you? Ah, but his poetics of interference is busily subverting the established economic order! What arrogant, smirking, privileged garbage. If you fall for this crap, it's because you long to believe you're stupid and this grade-school nonsense is deep.

Bernstein is one of the great poets in the world today and this is a brilliant insight into the poetics of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E "school". If you have any serious interest in poetry and poetics, you should read this book.