All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems

by Charles Bernstein

A NEW RETROSPECTIVE OF ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST INNOVATIVE POETS

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein's best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein's characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry's sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America's most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University.

Bernstein's highly anticipated new work, All the Whisky in Heaven, will be published in Spring 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also to be released in the upcoming year is a Companion to Charles Bernstein, which will be published by Salt Publishing, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Nielsen Innovation of the Year award.

Reviews

[Roshan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know enough about poetry to describe everything Bernstein is doing here, but I feel like he has a perfect grasp of acoustic space, of rhythm, of phonetic logic that is hard to describe and akin to that of a rap producer or a folk singer songwriter. When I read Bernstein's poetry, I feel like I am falling into his sound-state, surrounded on all sides by the acoustics he is creating. That he manages to be funny, wry, clever and create these cogent essayistic arguments about aesthetics and cognition while doing so is sort of remarkable. He is also consistently playful and ventures into borderline goofy wordplay when he feels like it, which I love. Bernstein is a master, but his relentless playfulness is where the real charm is.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last spring Charles put himself on record
that he didn't like crafts. We soon
came to understand his feelings
when we worked with him. Charlie
is not strong in manual dexterity. (This
may be part of a mixed dominance
situation Mrs. B. and I discussed in
relation to tying shoes.) Fortunately,
what he lacks in developed skills
he makes up for in
patience, determination, and
knowledge of what he wants as
results.

[Fredore Praltsa]

He fits a lot of distinct, often conflicting observations into single poems, which imo works best when he strings them together with language (e.g. with alliteration in "Let's Just Say" and "War Stories") or really opens up space between/within them with form ("The Lives of the Toll Takers") but can be a turn off when he presents them as if a cohesive whole (most of the first half of the book).

A lot of the earlier poems seem to expect the reader to find their own meanings in what's generally nonsensical (to "start / with the words and find the world in them"). Reader interpretation is definitely part of good poetry. But at the end of the day, trying to make something of limited sense meaningful is tiring!! And having disjunction presented as if it's a unit feels like being lied to. Beyond that, there's a sort of sterility to this kind of poetry. It doesn't really feel like there's a speaker on the other side of the page who wants to talk to us. It doesn't feel like there's a speaker at all.

What's interesting about this collection, though, is to see Bernstein start to violate the rules his poems follow at the beginning. By the end (decades along in his career), there's emotion, humor, and organizing structure. AND those poems at the end benefit from the focus on language that he maintained all along. He's great at exploiting multiple meanings ("Call me irresistible or call me unreliable / but don't call me I'll call you") ("'I'm all washed up': i.e., come ashore") and subverting common phrases w/ sound (from a poem he wrote after this book: "Time is neither linear nor circular; it is excremental").

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE KIWI BIRD IN THE KIWI TREE

I want no paradise only to be
drenched in the downpour of words, fecund
with topicality. Fundament be-
yond relation, less ‘real’ than made, as arms
surround a baby’s gurgling: encir-
cling mesh pronounces its promise (not bars
that pinion, notes that ply). The tailor tells
of other tolls, the seam that binds, the trim,
the waste. & having spelled these names, move on
to toys or talcums, skates & scores. Only
the imaginary is real –not trumps
beclouding the mind’s acrobatic vers-
ions. The first fact is the social body,
one from another, nor needs no other.
(144)

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly not my cup of tea. I was hoping it would be. Some of the poems are simply no-sense, to me; not nonsense in any useful way, but rather made up or jumbled words, or non-syntactical "sentences". Others, especially in the later poems, are "sensible," but not especially clever--humor in a rather nerdy way, too "ivory tower" to be of much use.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a link to my review at New Pages:

http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2...

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks Brian, now I know your work much better as well.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

A wide variety of poems, in many different forms. The poems were a little too modern or my taste, but they are definitely worth looking at.

[Christian Harder · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting in the way that most poetry aspires to be

[Mills College Library]

811.608 B5313a 2010