Steven Jesse Bernstein

He moved to Seattle, Washington in January 1967, where he adopted the moniker Jesse, and began performing and self-publishing chapbooks of his poetry, the first of which was Choking On Sixth, 1979).

According to Regina Hackett, art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: He read poems from a stage with a live rodent in his mouth, its tail twitching as baseline punctuation.

The concept for the Bernstein album Prison was for Jesse to do a raw live performance at the State Penitentiary Special Offenders unit in Monroe, Washington in 1991.

[5][better source needed] I Am Secretly an Important Man, a collection of poetry, short stories, and spoken performances, was released in March 1996 by Zero Hour Publishing.

His song A Little Bit of Everything (That Brought Me Down to This), from the Trigger Recordings album, The Sad Bag, was also included on the two-CD set Home Alive, the proceeds from which benefited women's self-defense groups in the Seattle area.