Girly Man
After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, 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, which features 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. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performs its ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood.
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. 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 clichés 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
:
“A charming and necessary book, one which reminds us what Charles Bernstein and his fellow Language poets understood: that poets don’t need to sacrifice form for content or vice versa, nor do they need to forgo humor in order to be serious.”—Kathleen Rooney, Harvard Review
“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
Let’s Just Say
In Particular
Thank You for Saying Thank You
Let’s Just Say
“every lake . . .”
Some of These Daze
It’s 8:23 in New York
Today is the next day of the rest of your life
Aftershock
Report from Liberty Street
Letter from New York
World on Fire
Didn’t We
The Folks Who Live on the Hill
One More for the Road
In a Restless World Like This Is
Ghost of a Chance
Choo Choo Ch’Boogie
Stranger in Paradise
Broken English
Lost in Drowned Bliss
Sunset at Quaquaversal Point
A Flame in Your Heart
Warrant
Warrant
Fantasy on Nightmare on Elm Street Theme
“Cum ipse . . .”
He’s So Heavy, He’s My Sokal
Why I Don’t Meditate
Questionnaire
Language, Truth, and Logic
from Canti Antichi
Slap Me Five, Cleo, Mark’s History
In Parts
Reading Red
Pomegranates
In Parts
122
Photo Opportunity
Likeness
Castor Oil
Shenandoah
Jacobs’s Ladder
Don’t Get Me Wrong
Interim Standoff
Should We Let Patients Write Down Their Own Dreams?
Bridges Freeze Before Roads
Pocket in the Hole
Evening Sail with Prawns
Secrets of a Clear Hand
Rain Is Local
Set Free (Knot)
If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now
The Warble of the Ammonia-Bellied Barkeep
“And if then . . .”
Comforting Thoughts
Further Color Notes
Likeness
Girly Man
War Stories
There’s Beauty in the Sound of the Rushing Brook as It Forks & Bends in the Moonlight
Sign Under Test
A Poem Is Not a Weapon
Emma’s Nursery Rimes
Wherever Angels Go
Death Fugue (Echo)
The Beauty of Useless Things: A Kantian Tale
Self-Help
The Bricklayer’s Arms
The Ballad of the Girly Man
Notes and Acknowledgments
Literature and Literary Criticism: Poetry
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