This dossier (published 11/07/2025) was facilitated for the b2o Review by Paul Bové and Arne De Boever.
- Charles Bernstein–The Kinds of Responses I Want
- Al Filreis–The Kind of Bernstein I Want: Five Methods of Cage-Free Reading
- Elin Käck–Constellation, Frame, and Provisionality in Charles Bernstein’s Kinds of Poetry
- Michael Davidson–Groucho Marxism: Charles Bernstein’s Kinds of Poetry
- Kacper Bartczak–Withstanding the Horror of What We Are: Charles Bernstein’s “bent studies” Beyond the Loops of Intentionality
- Andrew Levy–Notes Toward Approaching Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want
- Mark Wallace–“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”: 95 Conversations with Charles Bernstein
- Bob Perelman–A Few Glances At The Kinds of Poetry I Want
- Trace Peterson–Why Bad Poetry Still Happens to Good People (Coda; published 11/13/2025)
Contributor Biographies
Kacper Bartczak is a poet, translator of poetry, and Associate professor of American Literature at the University of Łódź. He has published nine volumes of poetry, two of which were finalists in major Polish literary awards. He is the author of In Search of Communication and Community. The Poetry of John Ashbery(Peter Lang, 2006). He is also the author of Świat nie scalony (2009), a collection of literary essays for which he received the annual award of the magazine “Literatura na Świecie”. As translator, he has published selections of poems from Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi. His translation of Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy has just appeared from Biblioteka Śląska (Katowice, 2025). He has twice been a Fulbright Fellow (at Stanford and Princeton), and the Kościuszko Foundation Fellow (at Florida Atlantic University). This year, he has received the prestigious Silesius Literary Award for lifetime achievement. He lives and works in Łódź, Poland.
Charles Bernstein is the author, most recently, of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021), and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). His work was the subject of The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bové, the Fall 2021 issue of boundary 2.
Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His work has focused on modern and contemporary American poetry, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies and deaf studies. His books on poetics include The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003), and Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan U Press, 2011). His work in disability studies includes Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan, 2008), Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford U Press, 2019) and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York U Press, 2022). He is the author of seven books of poetry, the most recent of which are Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013) and Grace (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002).
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—all at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a member of the faculty and administrator since 1985. His new book is The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community (2025). Recent books are 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (Columbia, 2021) and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, edited with Anna Strong Safford (Pennsylvania, 2022). Among his previous books are Modernism from Right to Left, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He produces and hosts a monthly podcast/radio program, PoemTalk. He has hosted three eminent writers for residencies each spring through the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program since 2000.
Elin Käck is Senior Associate Professor of Language and Culture at Linköping University, Sweden, where she is Director of Doctoral Studies and teaches Comparative Literature and English. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, modern and contemporary American literature, modernism, the avant-garde, ecocriticism, and literature education. Her work has appeared or is slated to appear in journals such as Journal of Modern Literature, The William Carlos Williams Review, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Contemporary Literature. She is the Vice President of the William Carlos Williams Society. Her book Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.
Andrew Levy is the author of Artifice in the Calm Damages (2021), Artifice in the Calm Damages (2017), and Don’t Forget to Breathe (2012), all from Chax Press. He is the author of a novella, Nothing Is in Here (EOAGH Books), as well as 12 other titles of poetry and prose. He was co-publisher of the poetry journal Crayon with Roberto Harrison, 1997-2008. He lives in New York City.
Bob Perelman (http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/authors/perelman/) has published numerous books of poems, including: Chatty Fossils(Roof Books, forthcoming 2026), Jack and Jill in Troy (Roof, 2019); Iflife (Roof, 2006); Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw (Granary Books, 2004); and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1999). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (California, 1994); The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Princeton, 1996); Modernism the Morning After (Alabama, 2017). His work can be heard on Penn Sound and a feature on his work appears in Jacket 39. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Trace Peterson‘s poetry books include The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (winner of the 2025 Alma Award from Saturnalia Books) and Since I Moved In (Chax Press in 2007; reissued 2019). She is co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013), and of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax, 2016). She edits the small press/journal EOAGH, winner of two Lambda Literary Awards and a National Jewish Book Award. Peterson’s scholarly research has been supported by an N.E.A. Fellowship in Poetics at Emory University’s Fox Center. Her critical writing has appeared in TSQ, The Brooklyn Rail, Electronic Book Review, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and numerous edited collections including recently The Weird Sister Collection (The Feminist Press), A Companion to American Poetry (Wiley Blackwell), and The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies (SAGE Publications). She currently teaches at the University of Connecticut.
Mark Wallace is professor of creative writing and literature at California State University, San Marcos. Selections from his multi-book long poem The End of America have been published in chapbooks and magazines over the last two decades. Other recent publications include a play, The Rapture (2024), co-authored with James Sherry; a novel, Crab (2017); and a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy (2014).