● Recalculating By Charles Bernstein University of Chicago Press, 189 pages, $25 As an old joke goes, there are three types of people in the world: schlemiel, the guy who will spill the soup; schlimazel, the one whose lap the soup will get spilt on, and the nudnik, who asks, “What kind of a soup…
To last week’s “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Holocaust” published here in the Forward, another significant contribution can be added: Jerome Rothenberg’s “Triptych,” which assembles three serial poems — “Poland/1931,” “Khurbn” and “The Burning Babe.” Today on The Arty Semite, we’re featuring an excerpt from the middle section. As Rothenberg poignantly points out in the…
Charles Bernstein has effectively argued that National Poetry Month celebrations tend to focus on establishment-endorsed, “blockbuster poets,” and he has reminded us just how much great poetry exists outside of well-known publishing houses and literary journals. Bernstein’s dictum came to mind when I came across Bracha Meschaninov’s poetry collection “Tender Skin,” published over a decade…
MEMOIR AND ESSAY By Michael Gottlieb Faux Press, 170 pages $16 Poets of the Language School (aka the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, tendency, faction or sociological phenomena — the occasionally rancorous debate continues) have risen to become the dominant avant-garde of modern American poetics. The first generation (including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Lyn…
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish poetry books of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. All…
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week Jake Marmer writes about “Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture.” Last year’s excellent anthology “Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture,” a comprehensive collection of writings from leading Jewish poets and critics such as Charles Bernstein, Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie…
“April,” famously wrote T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” “is the cruellest month.” Despite this underwhelming endorsement, the Academy of American Poets inaugurated April as the National Poetry Month back in 1996 and, every year since, has hyped up a surge of readings, publications and all other things poetry-related. In the Jewish world, the initiative…
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