Synopses & Reviews
Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as
Girly Man, which
features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Composed of works of very different forms and moodsand#8212;etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousnessand#8212;the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.and#160;and#160;
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of Americaand#8217;s most controversial poets.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#8220;A major achievement. . . . Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should seek out the collection, if only to read one of our most provocative poet-critics writing his most engaging poems to date.and#8221;and#8212;Thomas Devaney, PhiladelphiaInquirerand#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; and#8220;Charles Bernstein writes both prose and poetry about poetry, sometimes brilliantly, in ways calculated to upset the middlebrow and thwart the bland. The more you like the poetic equivalent of a nice tune, easy to hum, the more Bernstein means to disrupt your complacency.and#8221;and#8212;Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
Review
"[Bernstein]and#160;has rattled the chains in close to 30 books of poetry and three spirited and quite wonderful books of essays. At the same time, and almost coincidentally, Bernstein has come up with a bracing way of being both a very political and a distinctly Jewish writer.Girly Man is perhaps Bernsteinand#8217;s most approachable and focused collection. As a rule, his poems do not aspire to recount some experience that lies tantalizingly out of the reach of language. They have nothing to do with the tasteful matching of situation and epiphany...Bernsteinand#8217;s poems insist on their unsettled surfaces, on the way they patch together incompatible levels of our everyday speech, from the most vapid self-affirmations to the densest inanities of professional jargon. The basic unit of Bernsteinand#8217;s poetry is the exploded clichand#233; or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwisdom....Bernstein has made a habit (and a career) out of questioning modern American poetryand#8217;s love affair with personal experience and 'voice.' Now that his critique is something of an institution, it makes perfect sense that this poetic kochleffel should double back and try a cockeyed version of it himself. In Girly Man Bernstein is stirring it up again and and#8212; he would love this scrambled metaphor and#8212; adding something new to the mix."
Review
and#8220;Improvisational volatility, wordplay, near rhyme possibilities, frolic arguments, standup skepticism, loopy affirmation, accurate wit, restless ethical inquiry: I canand#8217;t think of a better way for a reader to experience Charles Bernsteinand#8217;s fierce commitment to poetry as a necessary calling than to read this, his latest and perhaps most accessible collection. In this restless world we live in, Bernstein is one of our most radical and resilient voices.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Cofounder of the journal
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, from which language poetry takes its name, as well as the online poetics list and the audio poetry archive PENNsound, Bernstein is also a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection of seven discrete chapbooklike works. After the invocational four-poem opening of and#8216;Letand#8217;s Just Say,and#8217; the book moves to and#8216;Some of These Daze,and#8217; Bernsteinand#8217;s prose dispatches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and on to the acerbic intimacies of and#8216;World on Fire,and#8217; which critiques clichand#233;s like and#8216;what are we fighting for?and#8217; 'In Partsand#8217; takes up the serial form Bernstein perfected in the classic
Islets/ Irritations (1983) to examine the pieces of and#8216;a world in which there are no narratives in which to believe// simultaneous double negative// flop flip.and#8217; A fascination with the sloganlike rhetoric of Tin Pan Alley runs through the collection, culminating in the title poem: and#8216;So be a girly man/ and sing this gurly song/ Sissies and proud/ That we would never lie our way to war.and#8217;and#8221;
Review
"Charles Bernsteinand#8217;s pairs of jingles of and#8216;public discourseand#8217; are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space betweenand#8217;s the other narrative/as if theyand#8217;re opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the and#8216;presenceand#8217; of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range thatand#8217;s public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' Girly Man is doing it."
Review
and#8220;Charles Bernstein may be our most inspired formalist. He dares to look at all the things that poetry historically is not in order to fashion what it might become. In his brilliant new collection, Bernstein continues his genuinely unreasonable assault on the gentle reading public. Long live the girly man!and#8221;
Review
DIRECTIONS: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint.
and#160;
a. Girly Manand#8217;s meanings are largely organized by luck or chance.
b. Charles Bernsteinand#8217;s intentions determine what these poems mean.
and#160;
a. Girly Man is indifferent to human needs.
b. Girly Man has some purpose, even if obscure.
and#160;
a.and#160; Poetry like this brings the greatest happiness.
b.and#160; Poetry like this is illusory and its pleasures, transient.
and#160;
a.and#160; Overall, Charles Bernstein has been harmful to American culture.
b.and#160; Overall, Charles Bernstein has been beneficial to American culture.
and#160;
(This written endorsement of Girly Man should be removed for inspection and verification.)
and#160;
Jerome McGann
Review
and#8220;When we thought we had Bernstein pegged or that his work had possibly reached its limits, he emerges in Girly Man as a poet at the top of his form, capable still of the greatest modernist and postmodernist swervings, and for whom no form of expression is now entirely foreign. As with other poets of his rank (and that rank is very high), he has the ability to make categories dissolve and for himself, as poet, to become happily unclassifiable.and#160; From the comic to the archromantic, the avant-garde to the avant-pop, the formally constructed to the deceptively lawless, the personally political to the impersonally poetical, the poems in Girly Man are an example of what poetry can be in the hands of a supercharged and superrestless poet.and#160; Charles Bernstein is now more clearly what he has always beenand#8212;a major poet for our timeand#8212;and then some."
Review
"[Bernstein] hammers his way into your consciousness as he describes the ways of the post-9/11 world."
Review
"Girly Man, Charles Bernstein's latest assault on contemporary life, is poetry to be read for pleasure and solace in our rather sobering timne."
Synopsis
After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as
Girly Man, which
features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moodsand#8212;etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousnessand#8212;the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representationand#8212;and related claims to truth and moral certaintyand#8212;is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernsteinand#8217;s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood.and#160;
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of Americaand#8217;s most controversial poets.
Synopsis
After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as
Girly Man, which
features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performs its ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.
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 and#160;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.
Table of Contents
Lets Just Say
In Particular
Thank You for Saying Thank You
Lets Just Say
“every lake . . .”
Some of These Daze
Its 8:23 in New York
Today is the next day of the rest of your life
Aftershock
Report from Liberty Street
Letter from New York
World on Fire
Didnt We
The Folks Who Live on the Hill
One More for the Road
In a Restless World Like This Is
Ghost of a Chance
Choo Choo ChBoogie
Stranger in Paradise
Broken English
Lost in Drowned Bliss
Sunset at Quaquaversal Point
A Flame in Your Heart
Warrant
Warrant
Fantasy on Nightmare on Elm Street Theme
“Cum ipse . . .”
Hes So Heavy, Hes My Sokal
Why I Dont Meditate
Questionnaire
Language, Truth, and Logic
from Canti Antichi
Slap Me Five, Cleo, Marks History
In Parts
Reading Red
Pomegranates
In Parts
122
Photo Opportunity
Likeness
Castor Oil
Shenandoah
Jacobss Ladder
Dont Get Me Wrong
Interim Standoff
Should We Let Patients Write Down Their Own Dreams?
Bridges Freeze Before Roads
Pocket in the Hole
Evening Sail with Prawns
Secrets of a Clear Hand
Rain Is Local
Set Free (Knot)
If You Lived Here Youd Be Home Now
The Warble of the Ammonia-Bellied Barkeep
“And if then . . .”
Comforting Thoughts
Further Color Notes
Likeness
Girly Man
War Stories
Theres Beauty in the Sound of the Rushing Brook as It Forks & Bends in the Moonlight
Sign Under Test
A Poem Is Not a Weapon
Emmas Nursery Rimes
Wherever Angels Go
Death Fugue (Echo)
The Beauty of Useless Things: A Kantian Tale
Self-Help
The Bricklayers Arms
The Ballad of the Girly Man
Notes and Acknowledgments