Charles Bernstein is the recipient of 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the premier prize for lifetime achievement in poetry, administered by Yale University. He will read poems from Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018), honored by the prize, and more recent work. Presented in relationship to the exhibition Eternal Gradient, Bernstein will also read works in response to Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ work, reflecting his decades-long friendship with the artists.

This event is presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016),  Recalculating (Chicago, 2013) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago, 2011).  In 2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is codirector of PennSound. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

Image: Arakawa’s cover for Bernstein’s book Islets/Irritations, (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983)

For more information on the exhibition, Eternal Gradient , click here.