Bill Berkson

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William Craig Berkson (August 30, 1939 – June 16, 2016) was an American poet, critic, and educator who worked in the arts and literary worlds from his early teens to today.

Early life and education

Bill Berkson, the only child of Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service and later publisher of the New York Journal American, and fashion critic Eleanor Lambert, born in New York City on August 30, 1939. Despite the fact that his father was of Jewish descent, the son did not find out until he was a youth. His mother was a Presbyterian. In 1945, he attended The Day School of the Heavenly Rest and then migrated to Trinity School. In 1957, he graduated from Lawrenceville High School. After his father died, he dropped out of Brown University to return to New York. Kenneth Koch, a literary scholar at The New School for Social Research, wrote poetry. He studied at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Having begun writing poetry at Lawrenceville, and having been encouraged by such writers as John Silver and Thomas H. Johnson, he continued to study short story writing with John Hawkes and prosody at Brown. But his complete dedication to poetry was ignited under Kenneth Koch's tutelage in spring, 1959 at the New School for Social Research. It was also through Koch that he was introduced to the New York School, which in turn led to close friendships with Frank O'Hara and Alex Katz, as well as poets and artists of his own time such as Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, and others.

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Career

Berkson began working as an editorial associate at ARTnews in 1960, where he stayed for the next three years. He was a regular contributor to both ARTnews and Arts, associator of a program on public television, and taught literature and writing at the New School for Social Research and Yale University during the 1960s.

Berkson started editing and publishing a collection of poetry books and journals under the Big Sky imprint in 1970, and continued to teach regularly in the California Poets in the Schools program.

He married artist Lynn O'Hare in 1975, and their son Moses Edwin Clay Berkson was born in Bolinas, California, on January 23, 1976. Siobhan O'Hare Mora Lopez (b.) also has a daughter. Henry Berkson, Estella and Lourdes Mora Lopez, all three grandchildren, were born in 1969. During his California years, he met with Joanne Kyger, Duncan McNaughton, and Philip Whalen.

Berkson is the author of twenty collections and pamphlets of poetry, including the most recent Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems and Expect Delays from Coffee House Press. His poems have also appeared in many journals and anthologies, and they have been translated into French, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Romanian, Romanian, and Spanish. Les Parties du Corps, a collection of his poetry that had been translated into French, first appeared in Montpellier in 2011. What is Your Idea of a Good Time? Bernadette Mayer's letters and interviews 1977-1985; BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen; Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer; and Repeat After Me with John Zurier

Besides the above mentioned collaborations, he produced extensive projects with visual artists Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Lynn O'Hare, and Greg Irons, as well as with the poets Frank O'Hara, Larry Fagin, Anne Waldman, and Bernadette Mayer.

Berkson rediscovered art criticism in the mid-1980s, contributing monthly reviews and articles to Artforum from 1985 to 1991; he served as a contributing editor for Aperture, Modern Painters, Art on Paper, and others. He began teaching art history and literature in 1984 and curated the San Francisco Art Institute's public lectures program, where he served as interim dean and Director of Letters and Science from 1990 to 1998. He retired from SFAI in 2008 and later held the position of Professor Emeritus. He served on the visiting faculty of Naropa Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Mills College during the same period. Berkson continued to lecture extensively in colleges and universities until the end of his life. To date, he has released three collections of art criticism, the most popular being For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More.

Ronald Bladen: Early and Late (SFMoMA), Albert York (Mills College), Why Painting I & II (Susan Cummins Gallery), Facing Eden: 100 years of Northern California landscape art (M.H.) George Schneeman (CUE Foundation), Gordon Cook (Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis), George Schneeman in Italy (Instituto di Cultura Italiano, San Francisco), and in Bernington, New York, The Art of George Schneeman (Poets House, New York) George Schneeman (CUE Foundation), George Schneeman (Paris), and Gordon Cook (Poets House, New York).

He married Constance Lewallen, a San Francisco curator who lived in the Eureka Valley section. Berkson died of a heart attack in San Francisco on June 16, 2016, at the age of 76.

Berkson's archive of literary, artistic, and other records, as well as extensive correspondence and friendships with O'Hara, Guston, Brainard, Mayer, and others over the years, is preserved in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.

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