Friday January 8, 2010
W2 Perel Gallery
112 West Hastings
8:00 pm
Admission – 3 to 5$ sliding scale
(no one will be turned away )
Presented by the Kootenay School of Writing
Charles Bernstein is the author of 40 books, including All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2010), Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsund); editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu); co-editor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998 – ); and host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close Listening, two radio poetry series. He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Like comedy never strikes the same place
More than a couple of times unless you
Change costumes and dance with me, dance
Till the furniture turns to props and
All the mops are a chorus of never
Before heard improbabilities, honeyed alibis
For working too hard, mowing the Astroturf,
Cranking the permafrost, watering the microprocessors
On the kids’ conveyor belts. The bird never
Flies as high as an old-fashioned kick
In the carbonization. –They gave me till
Friday to let them know if the job would
Ever be complete. We’re getting there, just
Fall a little further behind by day
And after dark it’s a mule’s paradise.