Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word

by Charles Bernstein

Overview

Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer brilliant and wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors—including Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe—cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"—not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in—and as—performance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195109917
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/30/1998
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.30(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)

About the Author

Charles Bernstein is David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York, Buffalo. His books of essays and poems include Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984, A Poetics, Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995, Dark City, and The Sophist. He also edited The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy and coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

Editorial Reviews

...[T]he appeal and importance of thes volume is steadfast, engaging. The collection cargues for a fuller understandingof 'reading' and 'writing' and calls for a reassessment of 20th-century poetics.
— Washington Review

James Shivers

"Close Listening pays homage to...the twentieth century poetries often ignored or overinterpreted, to theories not listened to, to strategies not employed, and makes public a social history, a canvas, a recording."—Washington Review

"...it might very well be the most important book on poetry published in some years...Bernstein's collection provides analysis that should help us to think more about kinds of readings and the formal and social factors to be considered in writing about or discussing them."—Modernism/Modernity

From the Publisher