About this Book

Pitch of Poetry is the Press's third collection of essays by the poet and critic Charles Bernstein, following his My Way: Speeches and Poems (1999) and Attack of the Difficult Poems (2011). With his characteristic mix of rigor and playfulness, Bernstein takes up a range of formally inventive poetry in essay styles ranging from the encyclopedic to the elegiac, from the polemical to the conversational. Together, the pieces here make the case for what Bernstein calls an echopoetics a dialogic poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration. Among the book's highlights is a section focusing on the "pitch" (or approach) of individual poets including Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, and Leslie Scalapino. Several dialogues with others extend the issues broached in the book and delve into aspects of Bernstein's own work. The book concludes with a sweeping summa, published here for the first time, on the poetics of stigma, perversity, disability, and barbarism, with special reference to Wittgenstein's use of "queer" in Philosophical Investigations and the thought of Edgar Allan Poe.