Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein's first
full-length collection of new poems in seven years*.* As a result of
this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic
variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein's previous work.
Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through
the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as
seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy. The
collection's title, the now-familiar GPS expression, suggests a change
in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal
invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all
his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new
structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and
conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the
doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to
pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical
deflationary ardor, "The pen is tinier than the sword." In these
poems*,* Bernstein makes good on his claim that "the poetry is not in
speaking to the dead but listening to the dead." In doing so,
Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire,
Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to
writers crucial to Bernstein's work and a set of epigrammatic verse
essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and
aesthetic slapstick. Formally stunning and emotionally charged,
Recalculating makes the familiar strange--and in a startling way,
makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and
rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life
events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and
the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to
metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic
to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by
bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.
