Pitch of Poetry

Considered one of “our best outsiders” by the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. With the essays in this volume, he offers an unorthodox reader’s guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

Displaying Bernstein’s characteristic mix of rigor and playfulness, Pitch of Poetryexplores poetry’s ties with politics, rhetoric, and ideology. Subjects include Holocaust representation, the poetics of Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. The book provides detailed overviews of formally inventive poetry, including essays on—or “pitches” for––a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Barbara Guest. In interviews and essays, Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behindL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine he coedited with Bruce Andrews from 1978 to 1981. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, disability, and barbarism. Rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, the essay discusses Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, and others within the context of controversial issues in current poetics.

Taken as a whole, Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein callsechopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration. A fascinating collection of works, this volume is an essential addition to every poetry lover’s library.

Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, Recalculating, also published by the University of Chicago Press.