poetry
Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In this podcast, we hear Charles Bernstein think aloud about the performativity of poetry and the multiplicity of voice, elaborating on questions such as the sound of writing, presence and absence, orality, aurality and a/orality. Along the way, Bernstein recounts his first textual experience and acknowledges the influence of Artaud, Bob Wilson and the Living Theatre in shaping him as a poet. We also revisit the early discussions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E constellation, their policy of exchanging poems and essays by setting up horizontal cultural mechanisms, and a collaborative effort to reread poets from past decades in order to write an alternative, non-hegemonic history of American poetry.
Roberto Jacoby opens up his poetry books and talks about writing, inspiration, plundering and dematerialisation; about blacks and whites, sofa-beds, politics and activism.
María Salgado talks about low-tech poetry, syncretism, spoken text, writing and orality, busy channels, the powers of the prefix 'an', drugs, and the productive tension between expressions used on the streets and those stored in books.
In this instalment, we capture some of the infinite instances of voice and repetition in Eduard Escoffet's sound poetry collection.
This is an email conversation with the sound poetry and voice collector Eduard Escoffet, which took place in Summer 2013.