Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. Attack of the Difficult Poems, his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art.

Applying an array of essayistic styles, Attack of the Difficult Poems ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature’s place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner.

From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, The Attack of the Difficult Poems sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as coeditor of both the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of Guggenheim and NEA grants. Among his many publications are three books also published by the University of Chicago Press: Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems.

I. Professing Poetics
    The Difficult Poem
    A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices
    Against National Poetry Month as Such
    Invention Follies
    Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment
    Wreading, Writing, Wresponding
    Anything Goes
    Our Americas: New Worlds Still in Progress
    The Practice of Poetics

II. The Art of Immemorability
    Every Which Way but Loose
    The Art of Immemorability
    Making Audio Visible: Poetry’s Coming Digital Presence
    The Bound Listener
    Hearing Voices
    Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics

III. The Fate of the Aesthetic
    McGann Agonist
    Poetry and/or the Sacred
    The Art and Practice of the Ordinary
    Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies
    Poetry Plastique: A Verbal Explosion in the Art Factory (with Jay Sanders)
    Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren’t You the Kind That Tells
    Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime
    Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud
    Fulcrum Interview
    Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice
    Poetry Scene Investigation: A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff
    Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?
    Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

IV. Recantorium
    Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

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