Poetry
Self-Help
Home team suffers string of losses. –- Time to change loyalties.
Quadruple bypass. –- Hold the bacon on that next cheeseburger.
Poems tanking. –- After stormiest days, sun comes out from behind clouds, or used to.
Marriage on rocks. –- Nothing like Coke.
Election going the wrong direction. –- Kick off slippers, take deep breath, be here now.
Boss says your performance needs boost. –- A long hot bath smoothes wrinkles.
War toll tops 100,000. –- Get your mind off it, switch to reality TV.
Lake Tang Woo Chin Chicken with Lobster and Sweet Clam Sauce still not served and everyone else got their orders twenty minutes back. –- Savor the water, feast on the company.
Subway floods and late for audition. –- Start being the author of your own performance.Take a walk.
Slip on ice, break arm. –- In moments like this, the preciousness of life reveals itself.
Wages down in non-union shop. –- You’re a sales associate, not a worker; so proud to be part of the company.
Miss the train? –- Great chance to explore the station!
Suicide bombers wreck neighborhood. –- Time to pitch in!
Nothing doing. –- Take a break!
Partner in life finds another partner. –- Now you can begin the journey of life anew.
Bald? –- Finally, you can touch the sky with the top of your head.
Short-term recall shot. –- Old memories are sweetest.
Hard drive crashes and novel not backed up. –- Nothing like a fresh start.
Severe stomach cramps all morning. –- Boy are these back issues of Field and Stream engrossing.
Hurricane crushes house. –- You never seemed so resilient.
Brother-in-law completes second year in coma. –- He seems so much more relaxed than he used to.
$75 ticket for Sunday meter violation on an empty street in residential neighborhood. –- The city needs the money to make us safe and educate our kids.
Missed last episode of favorite murder mystery because you misprogrammed VCR. –- Write your own ending!
Blue cashmere pullover has three big moth holes. –- What a great looking shirt!
Son joins skinhead brigade of Jews for Jesus. –- At least he’s following his bliss.
Your new play receives scathing reviews and closes after a single night. –- What a glorious performance!
Pungent stench of homeless man on subway, asking for food. –- Such kindness in his eyes, as I turn toward home.
Retirement savings lost on Enron and WorldCom. –- They almost rhyme.
Oil spill kills seals. –- The workings of the Lord are inscrutable.
Global warming swamps land masses. –- Learn to accept change.
Bike going fast in wrong direction knocks you over. –- A few weeks off your feet, just what the doctor ordered.
AIDS ravaging Africa. –- Wasn’t Jeffrey Wright fabulous in Angels in America?
Muffler shot. –- There’s this great pizza place next to the shop.
Income gap becomes crater. –- Good motivation to get rich.
Abu Ghraib prisoners tortured. –- Let’s face it, shit happens.
Oscar wins Emmy. –- Award shows are da bomb.
FBI checking your library check-outs. –- I also recommend books on Amazon.
Gay marriages annulled. –- Who needs the state to sanctify our love?
President’s lies kill GIs. –- He’s so decisive about his core values.
Self-help. –- Other drowns.
Charles Bernstein has published 27 collections of poetry including With
Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Republics of Reality: Poems
1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 2000) and Controlling Interests (reprinted
by Roof in 2004). His essays are included in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (reprinted by Northwestern
University Press, 2001). Bernstein is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Author page: epc.buffalo.edu
Contributor
Charles BernsteinCharles Bernstein’s new collection of poetry, Topsy-Turvy, will be out in April from University of Chicago Press. Recent books include Near/Miss (poems) and Pitch of Poetry (essays).
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Time, Lost and Regained
By George GrellaOCT 2021 | Music
This past August, TIME:SPANS combined last year’s postponed programming with a new 2021 schedule and presented 11 concerts. That number of evenings dedicated to music from the first or second Viennese Schools would be definitive, but near a quarter way into the 21st century, a listener is barely getting a partial survey of what’s happening on the contemporary scene.
Tempo e Relazione (Time and Relation)*
By Paolo FresuSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
A sudden suspension of my inhabitancy gave birth to new relationships between space and time in a spasmodic search for the luogo dell’anima (soul’s space). Enclosed in our homes, the “walls of discovery” became unprecedented spaces where we saw objects that reminded us of ancient journeys into the world and moments lived in the past. We rediscovered music records that we had not listened to in a long time, and we consumed books that, perhaps, we had read thirty years ago, or that we had never even browsed through.
Suspended Time
By Andrea SegreSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
Time is finite, or is indissolubly infinite. These are prisons of existences that, in fact, know very well that they are finite and that they don’t have time. In order to try to find time, we give ourselves intermediate deadlines, we fill ourselves with time limits attempting to pretend that we don't have an inevitable one.
A Time of One’s Own: The Struggle Against One-sided Narratives of History
By Malala AndrialavidrazanaSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
The relationship to time escapes me regularly, and vice versa, due to a chronic desynchronization—an incompatibility of cruising speeds, even—that I experience in my ordinary quotidian life and in my artistic practice. Moreover, the gap between the measurement and the evaluation of time varies significantly according to cultures, eras, and perspectives, and is also reflected in elements of language and in current prejudices that consist, in particular, of praising the strong allure of the great powers as opposed to celebrating slowness.
