Charles Alexander Introduces Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein to Tuscon

Jacket2 has published Charles Alexander's introduction to Tuscon's latest POG series reading, held virtually on Oct. 10, 2020, with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein. Also included is a video of the readings. From the intro:

…These two poets are at the centers of POG's concern to help keep innovative poetry and poetics alive through our presentations to public audiences, and, now, to online public audiences. Both Berssenbrugge and Bernstein are veterans of a wave, a lifetime, invested in creating kinds of poetry that test the llimits of what our literature might include, and in doing so, they inspire what POG has always sought to accomplish.

Berssenbrugge, in her many books (Hiddenness, Empathy, Mizu, Hello the Roses, Endocrinology, and many more, including the recent A Treatise on Stars, finalist for the National Book Award at present) has sought to create a space for the mind, the breath, the perceptions, to intertwine in long lines which draw in and include the reader in a variety of observations and meditations based on the world in which we live and think, and the impacts of such life & thought. Long ago, Mei-mei told me that she had made two important commitments for and through her work -- to the sentence, and to beauty. She has also, in the course of her oeuvre, entirely interrogated those two notions, how they might work, what they might mean, how we might find beauty, and what we may have to say about it. We are fortunate witnesses to her imagination, which I find nothing less than visionary. In the company of such writers as William Blake and Hildegarde of Bingen, she expands us.

Charles Bernstein functions as something like a dean of our innovative or avant-garde poetics, yet what a funny, inquisitive, and sometimes unsettling dean. He can hypnotize us with what seems like a comic routine that then turns to a socio-poetic point we can not fail to hear, and by which we cannot fail to be moved.…

Read and watch more at Jacket2.