Bill Berkson



Bill Berkson (born August 30, 1939) is an American poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties.

Life
Born in New York on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the only child of Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service and later publisher of the New York Journal American, and the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. He studied at Trinity School, Lawrenceville, Brown University, Columbia, The New School for Social Research and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Having begun writing poetry at Lawrenceville, encouraged there by such teachers as John Silver and the eminent Emily Dickinson scholar Thomas H. Johnson, he went on to study short story writing with John Hawkes and prosody with S. Foster Damon at Brown. But his full commitment to poetry was prompted under the tutelage of Kenneth Koch in spring, 1959 at the New School for Social Research. It was also through Koch that he was introduced to the poetry and arts community loosely termed the New York School, which in turn led to close friendships with Frank O’Hara and such senior artists as Philip Guston and Alex Katz, as well as with poets and artists of his own generation such as Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll and others.

After leaving Columbia in 1960, he started work as an editorial associate at ARTnews, where he continued for the next three years. During the remainder of the 1960s, he was a regular contributor to both ARTnews and Arts, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art, an associate producer of a program on art for public television, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School for Social Research and Yale University.

After moving to Northern California in 1970, Berkson began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint and taught regularly in the California Poets in the Schools program.

In 1975 he married the artist Lynn O’Hare; their son Moses Edwin Clay Berkson was born in Bolinas, California, on January 23, 1976. He also has an adopted daughter, Siobhan O’Hare Mora Lopez (b. 1969) and three grandchildren, Henry Berkson and Estella and Lourdes Mora Lopez. New friendships in the California years have included those with Joanne Kyger, Duncan McNaughton, and Philip Whalen.

Berkson is the author of some twenty collections and pamphlets of poetry—including most recently Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems and Lady Air.His poems have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies and have been translated into French, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Czechoslovakian, Rumanian, Italian, German and Spanish. Les Parties du Corps, a selection of his poetry translated into French, will appear from Joca Serie in Spring 2011. Other recent books are What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer; BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen; Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman and Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer.

Beside the aforementioned collaborations, he has done extensive projects with visual artists Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, Lynn O’Hare, and Greg Irons, as well as with the poets Frank O’Hara, Larry Fagin, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer.

In the mid-1980s Berkson resumed writing art criticism on a regular basis, contributing monthly reviews and articles to Artforum from 1985 to 1991; he became a corresponding editor for Art in America in 1988 and has also written frequently for such magazines as Aperture, Modern Painters, Art on Paper, artcritical.com and others. In 1984, he began teaching art history and literature and organizing the public lectures program at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he also served as interim dean in 1990 and Director of Letters and Science from 1993 to 1998. He retired from SFAI in 2008 and now holds the position of Professor Emeritus. During the same period, he was also on the visiting faculty of Naropa Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Mills College and continues to lecture widely in colleges and universities. He has published three collections of art criticism,to date, the latest being For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More.

As a sometime curator, he has organized or co-curated such exhibitions as Ronald Bladen: Early and Late (SFMoMA), Albert York (Mills College), Why Painting I & II (Susan Cummins Gallery), Homage to George Herriman (Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery), Facing Eden: 100 years of Northern California Landscape Art (M.H. de Young Museum), George Schneeman (CUE Foundation), Gordon Cook: Out There (Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis) and George Schneeman in Italy (Instituto di Cultura Italiano, San Francisco).

In 1998 he married the curator Constance Lewallen, with whom he lives in the Eureka Valley section of San Francisco.

Berkson’s archive of literary, artistic and other materials, including extensive correspondence and collaborations with O’Hara, Guston, Brainard, Mayer and others through the years is maintained in the Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Awards

 * Dylan Thomas Memorial Poetry Award, The New School for Social Research, 1959
 * Poets Foundation Grant, 1968
 * Yaddo Fellowship, 1968
 * Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, National Endowment for the Arts, 1980
 * Briarcombe Fellowship, 1983
 * Marin Arts Council Poetry Award, 1987
 * Artspace Award for New Writing in Art Criticism, 1990
 * Visiting Artist/Scholar, American Academy in Rome, 1991
 * Fund for Poetry Grant, 1994, 2001
 * San Francisco Public Library Laureate, 2001
 * Guest of Honor, Small Press Distribution Open House, 2004
 * Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow (lecture), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2006
 * “Goldie” for Literature, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2008
 * Balcones Poetry Prize, Austin, Texas, 2010
 * Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM) grants for publishing, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978
 * Honorable Mention, Editor's Fellowship, CCLM, 1979
 * NEA, Small Press Publishing Grants, 1975, 1977