Y THE TIME HE KILLED HIMSELF in 1991 - reportedly with three self-inflicted stab wounds to the neck - Steven Jay "Jesse" Bernstein was already a living legend in the poetry and punk undergrounds of his adopted hometown, Seattle. Born in LA in 1950, Bernstein spent the better part of his life furiously self-publishing chapbooks and novels, writing plays and radical journalism, struggling with ill-defined mental illness, hobnobbing with his mentor William Burroughs, and opening punk shows with readings redolent of guttersnipe attitude and intense loathing, self and otherwise.

Shortly after Bernstein's suicide, Sub Pop Records released Prison, a collaborative set of Bernstein poems set to a soundtrack by producer Steve Fisk. And in September of this year, two new books of Bernstein's poetry and prose - More Noise, Please! and I Am Secretly an Important Man - were published by small Seattle presses. Together, the three documents constitute Bernstein's commercially available body of work. They serve witness to Bernstein's deep influence on the Seattle community, outside of which his public impact was marginal. For what it's worth, they also show some of the development and much of the maturity of America's latest, greatest, overlooked poet of despair. You can hear it best, perhaps, in "Party Balloon," printed in More Noise, Please! and adapted as Prison's fifth track [music: 313Kbytes .aiff].

More Noise, Please! patches together a preface by editor Leslie Fried, Bernstein's second wife, a foreword by poet John Bennett, dozens of photographs and performance posters, and 27 poems, some previously published. The book's collage effect presents Bernstein as a performer, and the poems - most of which are from the early 1990s - show how Bernstein learned to trim some of what his first wife, Alison Slow Loris, called the "green mucous and burnt flesh" excesses from his poetry. This newer work is tight, muscular, economic verse that comes close to recreating Bernstein's reading voice. You can track the parallel on "Me and Her Outside," which was adapted to become "No No Man [music: 351Kbytes .aiff]," the first track of Prison.

Featuring music produced and arranged by Steve Fisk, Prison (Sub Pop Records, 1992) was only partly completed at the time of Bernstein's suicide. Still, for an outsider it's the best introduction to Bernstein's work, if only because it links Bernstein's idiosyncratic croak of a voice to his words, making explicit the link between performance and poetry that Bernstein helped to popularly reforge, even before the legions of poetry slams. The album includes black humor, nightmare visions, and a sense of humanity gone so deeply wrong that there's little left to do but dive headfirst into the cesspool and find out what's at the bottom, as Bernstein does in "Morning in the Sub-Basement of Hell" [music: 553Kbytes .aiff].