CharlesBernstein and Kenny Goldsmith Back-to-Back Lectures: Thursday, Feb. 2, 7:00, ERC427

“The Present of the Word”

CharlesBernstein explores the significance of verbal language reproduction from theinvention of the alphabet to the phonograph to the age of the internet, withspecial reference to poetry, poetics, and the politics of forms, genres, andmedia and the recorded reproduction of human voice.

“Uncreative Writing”

KennethGoldsmith explores how techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scopeof composing literature, such as cutting and pasting, data basting, identityciphering, and programming, can inspire the reinvention of writing. He suggeststhat the Internet and digital environments present writers with newopportunities to rethink creativity, authorship, and their relationship tolanguage.

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CharlesBernstein is author of Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays &Inventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), All the Whiskey inHeaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), BlindWitness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008), Girly Man(Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999).From 1978-1981 he co-edited, with Bruce Andrews, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Emagazine. In the 1990s, he co-founded and directed the Poetics Program at theState University of New York—Buffalo, where he cofounded the Electronic PoetryCenter. He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literatureat the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound<writing.upenn.edu/pennsound>.

KennethGoldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautifulcollage work yet produced in poetry” by PublishersWeekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor ofthe online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which wasthe basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of2007. An hour-long documentary on Goldsmith’s work, “Sucking on Words”premiered at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The Universityof Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetryarchive. He held the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship inAmerican Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the QwartzElectronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In 2011, he co-edited, Against Expression: An Anthology ofConceptual Writing and published a book of essays, Uncreative Writing.