My Way : Speeches and Poems

Rating:
Summary: A contrarian and Emersonian shakeup of US poetics
Review: "My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play, risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voice and forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poetic diction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk, secular conversion, and fun. Sinatra did it "my way," and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol, and sheep.

Rating:
Summary: A contrarian and Emersonian shakeup of US poetics
Review: "My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play, risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voice and forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poetic diction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk, secular conversion, and fun. Sinatra did it "my way," and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol, and sheep.

Rating:
Summary: Are U kid-ing?
Review: Written/compiled in 1999. If you are a Prince fan you might think that's all there is to it. This collection was put together that year. These days (21st Century) most people are a David Gray fan. Are you kidding?

Charles Bernstein utilized lyrics first not acoustics first; then you of the 21st century oblivious to the 1990s and beyond can perceive the acoustic guitar as synonymous with lyrics which is not the case with Ch. B. but which is indeed the case with the latter namesake, David Gray, the acoustic guitar player, who is not the same person of whom Charles Bernstein is mentioned as winner of the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters of at the State University of New York at Buffalo.