JOHN ASHBERY POETRY SERIES CONTINUES WITH READING BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN ON MARCH 15
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.--"For me, poetry and poetics are part of an exploration not so much of how I can make words mean something I want to say, but rather letting language find ways of meaning through me," says poet Charles Bernstein, who will be reading from his recent works at Bard College on Friday, March 15. The program, part of the John Ashbery Poetry Series presented by The Bard Center, begins at 4:00 p.m. in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building and is free and open to the public.
Bernstein is the author of 21 books of poetry, including With Strings, Republics of Reality: 1975?1995, Dark City, Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, Stigma, Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma), and Parsing. He is also the author of three books of essays, My Way: Speeches and Poems, A Poetics, and Content's Dream: Essays 1975?1984. He has edited many anthologies of poetry and poetics including Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (with Bruce Andrews). Among his translations from the French are Red, Green, and Black (by Olivier Cadiot) and The Maternal Drape (by Claude Royed-Journoud). In the 1970s, Bernstein cofounded the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He has also written the librettos for a number of operas with such composers as Ben Yarmolinsky, Brian Ferneyhough, and Dean Drummond.
Bernstein is the executive editor and cofounder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo and also serves on the executive committee of the Poetry Division of the MLA. His essays and poetry have appeared in hundreds of periodicals in North and South America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Korea. Some recent anthologies that have feature his poetry are The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Poems for the Millennium (vol. 2), From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960?1990, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.
Bernstein's honors and awards include the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize (awarded biennially to an American poet-scholar in recognition of his or her distinguished lifetime contributions to poetry and literary scholarship). He has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, University of Auckland, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he is the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, Buffalo, director of the University's Poetics Program, and an associate member of its Comparative Literature program. Bernstein has been writer in residence or a visiting faculty member at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, and Temple universities, and at Bard College, The New School for Social Research, Queens College, and the University of California at San Diego.
Bernstein, who was born in New York City and is a graduate of Harvard University, resides in Buffalo and New York City with his wife, painter Susan Bee, daughter Emma, and son Felix.
The next reading in the series will be with poets James Tate and Dara Wier on Friday, April 26, at 3:30 p.m. in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building. For further information, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425.
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