Susan Bee is an artist, book artist, and editor living in NYC. She has had eleven solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC, and he has published many artist’s books. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014.

Charles Bernstein’s most recent books are The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies and Topsy-Turvey (both from University of Chicago Press).

This is an excerpt from the first work in Charles Bernstein’s new book, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies, from the University of Chicago Press. Bernstein is the editor of the Rail’s memorial tribute to Richard Foreman, due out in mid-April.

One of Richard’s last enthusiasms was
bullfighting—he told me that, with its
ritual staging, bull fighting is theater’s
heart—a person coming within a
hair’s breadth of death &—¡Ole!—
not dead / dead. Maybe that’s what his
bouts with breath were all about.

I came to Neeli Cherkovski late and that’s made all the difference. I don’t know whether it was he or I took the road less travelled: it turns out we took it together. Neeli is a poet of San Francisco in the way I am a poet in New York, but we both inhabit the same city of poetry: we are building it together and it has taken a lifetime.