Carol Bergé

Carol Bergé (1928–2006) was an American poet, highly active in the literary, performing and visual arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. In the 1980s a scandal in academia and her choice to fictionalize it cost her teaching jobs as well as support from the publishing industry. From there she championed antiquing as a profession, taking an extended sabbatical from writing.

Life
A native of New York City, Berge was an organizer of the Lower East Side (East Village) bohemian arts scene in Manhattan. She studied at New York University, The New School, and others for a decade, opting out of a degree program. Alongside, she married twice and divorced, raising a son as a single mother.

Travel and relocation were major components of her lifestyle. Paris, Manhattan, and Santa Fe remained her favorite cities. She attended the Vancouver poetry seminar at the University of British Columbia in 1962, and wrote The Vancouver Report (1964), a summary of that event. She published/edited the literary magazine Center, from 1970–1984. Associates in her circle included (however briefly) Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Ronald Tavel, Jackson Mac Low, Mickey Ruskin, Carolee Schneemann, Gregory Corso, Judith Malina and Paul Blackburn.

While giving readings and working her manuscripts, she taught at Goddard College; the University of Southern Mississippi, where she edited the Mississippi Review; the University of New Mexico; and Wright State University, among other institutions. A quiet scandal broke in 1984 among those "in the know" when she published Secrets, Gossip and Slander, a self-described "Derrida" style of prose that blends fact and fiction with a political and social or philosophical thrust. It essentially ended her literary career. A few years later she became estranged from her son. Yet over the ensuing decades she persisted, soliciting mini-memoirs from associates for her tome on the origins of coffeehouse poetry in New York, Light Years; she also resumed writing fiction for her collection on antiques-traders titled Antics: Passionate Stories. With the assistance of a publisher and an editor she completed both books during the last year of her life.

Berge's papers are held at the University of Texas-Austin, and Washington University. Some letters are at Kent State University, and some manuscripts are at Syracuse University, etc.

Awards

 * Helene Wurlitzer Foundation fellowship (1964)
 * Fellowships-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony
 * National Endowment fellowship for creative writing (1979).

Work
Carol Berge authored 23 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and her writings appeared in over 200 literary venues, including Origin, The Nation, Beatitude/East, Yale Literary Review, Triquarterly, Outburst, Seventh Street, American Poetry Review, The Plume Horn, etc.

Quote
"Having a poem of mine from the 1960s ('Position') chosen to appear in a college textbook in 1998... was a big payoff. I thought only square poets, far more socially acceptable than I, made it into the textbooks. There's even a Cliff's Notes type page on Internet telling students how to write an analysis of my poem, and it's inaccurate in its interpretation of my writing, to my amusement and dismay—who would imagine it would be so easy to misunderstand such a simple poem as 'Position'... It makes me chuckle. It is a poem I read at Les Deux Megots. One among hundreds. Go figure."—excerpted from Carol Berge's memoir chapter in LIGHT YEARS (AWAREing Press/Spuyten Duyvil, 2010)