The next Other Room is on Monday 3rd October at The Castle Hotel, Manchester, featuring Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein and Maggie O’Sullivan. 7 PM start, free entry, as always.

This clip is of v’s University of Pennsylvania 6o second lecture What Makes a Poem a Poem?

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania and is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets, having co-edited (and co-founded) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine with Bruce Andrews between 1978 and 1981. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published 17 major books of poetry including Legend, with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman and Ray DiPalma (New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980), Controlling Interests (Roof Books, 1980), Islets/Irritations (Roof Books, 1992), Rough Trades (Sun & Moon, 1991) The Sophist (Sun & Moon, 1987) and many others, including two selected volumes: Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000) and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Bernstein is also an important critic and editor of contemporary poetry and this year the University of Chicago press published his Pitch of Poetry. His other remarkable critical writings include: Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago Press, 2011), My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, 1986). Other notable projects include A Conversation with David Antin (Granary Books, 2002) and Shadowtime: a libretto for an opera about Walter Benjamin with music by Brian Ferneyhough (Green Integer, 2005). Find out more about his work at the Electronic Poetry Center and Penn Sound.