Charles Bernstein - Recent Life and Works

Recent Life and Works

From 1989 to 2003, Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo, where he was co-founder and Director of the Poetics Program. He is also co-founder of The Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo. He is currently the Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-founder of the poetry audio archive PennSound. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego. Since 1980, he has published a further eighteen books of poetry, as well as editing a number of anthologies of prose and verse. Working with the composers Ben Yarmolinsky, Dean Drummond, and Brian Ferneyhough, he has written the libretti for five operas and has collaborated with a number of visual artists, including his wife, Susan Bee, Richard Tuttle, and Mimi Gross. Bernstein's Poetry has appeared in four editions of David Lehman's The Best American Poetry series, most recently in the 2008 edition. His work has also regularly appeared in Harper's Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and Critical Inquiry. While Bernstein has supported small presses throughout his career, he has also published on such mainstream academic presses as Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Northwestern University Press, and, most recently, The University of Chicago Press, which has published his last three major works. The publication of All the Whiskey in Heaven by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2010 was his most commercial endeavor to date. He has said about his work, "It’s true that, on the one hand, I mock and destabilize the foundation of a commitment to lyric poetry as an address toward truth or toward sincerity. But, on the other hand, if you’re interested in theory as a stable expository mode of knowledge production or critique moving toward truth, again, I should be banned from your republic. (I’ve already been banned from mine.) My vacillating poetics of poems and essays is a serial practice, a play of voices."

Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He appeared in the 2000 movie Finding Forrester, as Dr. Simon and in a series of 1999 TV commercials, with Jon Lovitz, for the Yellow Pages.