Girly Man - by Charles Bernstein (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods--etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness--the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America's most controversial poets.
"A major achievement. . . . Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should seek out the collection, if only to read one of our most provocative poet-critics writing his most engaging poems to date."--Thomas Devaney, PhiladelphiaInquirer "Charles Bernstein writes both prose and poetry about poetry, sometimes brilliantly, in ways calculated to upset the middlebrow and thwart the bland. The more you like the poetic equivalent of a nice tune, easy to hum, the more Bernstein means to disrupt your complacency."--Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

Review Quotes

"[Bernstein] has rattled the chains in close to 30 books of poetry and three spirited and quite wonderful books of essays. At the same time, and almost coincidentally, Bernstein has come up with a bracing way of being both a very political and a distinctly Jewish writer."Girly Man" is perhaps Bernstein's most approachable and focused collection. As a rule, his poems do not aspire to recount some experience that lies tantalizingly out of the reach of language. They have nothing to do with the tasteful matching of situation and epiphany...Bernstein's poems insist on their unsettled surfaces, on the way they patch together incompatible levels of our everyday speech, from the most vapid self-affirmations to the densest inanities of professional jargon. The basic unit of Bernstein's poetry is the exploded cliche or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwisdom....Bernstein has made a habit (and a career) out of questioning modern American poetry's love affair with personal experience and ''voice.'' Now that his critique is something of an institution, it makes perfect sense that this poetic kochleffel should double back and try a cockeyed version of it himself. In "Girly Man" Bernstein is stirring it up again and -- he would love this scrambled metaphor -- adding something new to the mix."

"Charles Bernstein may be our most inspired formalist. He dares to look at all the things that poetry historically is not in order to fashion what it might become. In his brilliant new collection, Bernstein continues his genuinely unreasonable assault on the gentle reading public. Long live the girly man!"--Peter Gizzi

"Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of 'public discourse' are ''simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.'' In the space between, outside representation but in the 'presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is ''Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.'' "Girly Man" is "doing" it."--Leslie Scalapino

"Improvisational volatility, wordplay, near rhyme possibilities, frolic arguments, standup skepticism, loopy affirmation, accurate wit, restless ethical inquiry: I can't think of a better way for a reader to experience Charles Bernstein's fierce commitment to poetry as a necessary calling than to read this, his latest and perhaps most accessible collection. In this restless world we live in, Bernstein is one of our most radical and resilient voices."--Susan Howe

DIRECTIONS: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint.
a. "Girly Man"'s meanings are largely organized by luck or chance.
b. Charles Bernstein's intentions determine what these poems mean.
a. "Girly Man" is indifferent to human needs.
b. "Girly Man" has some purpose, even if obscure.
a. Poetry like this brings the greatest happiness.
b. Poetry like this is illusory and its pleasures, transient.
a. Overall, Charles Bernstein has been harmful to American culture.
b. Overall, Charles Bernstein has been beneficial to American culture.
(This written endorsement of "Girly Man" should be removed for inspection and verification.)
Jerome McGann

"Cofounder of the journal "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," from which language poetry takes its name, as well as the online poetics list and the audio poetry archive PENNsound, Bernstein is also a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection of seven discrete chapbooklike works. After the invocational four-poem opening of 'Let's Just Say, ' the book moves to 'Some of These Daze, ' Bernstein's prose dispatches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and on to the acerbic intimacies of 'World on Fire, ' which critiques cliches like 'what are we fighting for?' ''In Parts' takes up the serial form Bernstein perfected in the classic "Islets/ Irritations" (1983) to examine the pieces of 'a world in which there are no narratives in which to believe// simultaneous double negative// flop flip.' A fascination with the sloganlike rhetoric of Tin Pan Alley runs through the collection, culminating in the title poem: 'So be a girly man/ & sing this gurly song/ Sissies & proud/ That we would never lie our way to war.'"--"Publishers Weekly"


"When we thought we had Bernstein pegged or that his work had possibly reached its limits, he emerges in "Girly Man "as a poet at the top of his form, capable still of the greatest modernist & postmodernist swervings, & for whom no form of expression is now entirely foreign. As with other poets of his rank (& that rank is very high), he has the ability to make categories dissolve & for himself, as poet, to become happily unclassifiable. From the comic to the archromantic, the avant-garde to the avant-pop, the formally constructed to the deceptively lawless, the personally political to the impersonally poetical, the poems in "Girly Man" are an example of what poetry can be in the hands of a supercharged & superrestless poet. Charles Bernstein is now more clearly what he has always been--a major poet for our time--& then some."--Jerome Rothenberg

"Bernstein's latest book, "Girly Man", is his most accessible and rewarding volume to date....[It] contains enough entertainment and comedy, as well as political and philosophical insights, to make a strong argument that poetry can entertain us and address popular culture without compromising its value as high art."--Robert Hicks, "Kansas City Star"

"Cofounder of the journal "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E", from which language poetry takes its name, as well as the online poetics list and the audio poetry archive PENNsound, Bernstein is also a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection of seven discrete chapbooklike works. After the invocational four-poem opening of 'Let's Just Say, ' the book moves to 'Some of These Daze, ' Bernstein's prose dispatches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and on to the acerbic intimacies of 'World on Fire, ' which critiques cliches like 'what are we fighting for?' ''In Parts' takes up the serial form Bernstein perfected in the classic "Islets/ Irritations" (1983) to examine the pieces of 'a world in which there are no narratives in which to believe// simultaneous double negative// flop flip.' A fascination with the sloganlike rhetoric of Tin Pan Alley runs through the collection, culminating in the title poem: 'So be a girly man/ & sing this gurly song/ Sissies & proud/ That we would never lie our way to war.'"--"Publishers Weekly"


"[Bernstein] has rattled the chains in close to 30 books of poetry and three spirited and quite wonderful books of essays. At the same time, and almost coincidentally, Bernstein has come up with a bracing way of being both a very political and a distinctly Jewish writer.Girly Man is perhaps Bernstein's most approachable and focused collection. As a rule, his poems do not aspire to recount some experience that lies tantalizingly out of the reach of language. They have nothing to do with the tasteful matching of situation and epiphany...Bernstein's poems insist on their unsettled surfaces, on the way they patch together incompatible levels of our everyday speech, from the most vapid self-affirmations to the densest inanities of professional jargon. The basic unit of Bernstein's poetry is the exploded clich??? or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwisdom....Bernstein has made a habit (and a career) out of questioning modern American poetry's love affair with personal experience and 'voice.' Now that his critique is something of an institution, it makes perfect sense that this poetic kochleffel should double back and try a cockeyed version of it himself. In Girly Man Bernstein is stirring it up again and - he would love this scrambled metaphor - adding something new to the mix."

"Bernstein's latest book, "Girly Man," is his most accessible and rewarding volume to date....[It] contains enough entertainment and comedy, as well as political and philosophical insights, to make a strong argument that poetry can entertain us and address popular culture without compromising its value as high art."

"ÝBernstein¨ has rattled the chains in close to 30 books of poetry and three spirited and quite wonderful books of essays. At the same time, and almost coincidentally, Bernstein has come up with a bracing way of being both a very political and a distinctly Jewish writer.Girly Man is perhaps Bernstein's most approachable and focused collection. As a rule, his poems do not aspire to recount some experience that lies tantalizingly out of the reach of language. They have nothing to do with the tasteful matching of situation and epiphany...Bernstein's poems insist on their unsettled surfaces, on the way they patch together incompatible levels of our everyday speech, from the most vapid self-affirmations to the densest inanities of professional jargon. The basic unit of Bernstein's poetry is the exploded clich or the dislocated fragment of conventional unwisdom....Bernstein has made a habit (and a career) out of questioning modern American poetry's love affair with personal experience and 'voice.' Now that his critique is something of an institution, it makes perfect sense that this poetic kochleffel should double back and try a cockeyed version of it himself. In Girly Man Bernstein is stirring it up again and - he would love this scrambled metaphor - adding something new to the mix." -- David Kaufmann "Forward" (12/22/2007)

"Bernstein is . . . a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection."-Library Journal

"Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of public discourse' are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' "Girly Man" is "doing" it."-Leslie Scalapino

About the Author

Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of more than twenty books, including My Way: Speeches and Poems and With Strings, both published by the University of Chicago Press.