Poet & Art Critic Bill Berkson in Portland

An announcement from David Abel:

In two poetry readings and one panel discussion over a two-week period, noted New York School poet and art critic Bill Berkson will make a rare appearance in the Pacific Northwest, to celebrate several recent publications: Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press); and Ted Berrigan (a collaboration with painter George Schneeman) and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (Cuneiform Press).

Spare Room reading series
Sunday, February 21, 7:30 pm
Concordia Coffee House  *  2909 NE Alberta
$5.00 suggested donation
www.flim.com/spareroom

Reed College
Monday, February 22, 6:30 pm
Eliot Hall, Room 314
Free admission

Back Room PDX
“About Philip Guston” — a conversation with Rob Slifkin
Saturday, March 6, 6:30 pm
Cooley Art Gallery, Reed College
Free admission

Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. Director of Letters and Science at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1993 to 1998, he taught art history, critical writing, and poetry, and directed the public lectures program there from 1984 to 2008. He studied at Trinity School, The Lawrenceville School, Brown University, Columbia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

He is the author of eighteen books and pamphlets of poetry — including, recently, Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press), Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press), Goods and Services (Blue Press), and most recently, Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press).

Advance praise for Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems

This is a generous selection of work by an important poet of the New York School. Known for his relationship to the art world, Bill Berkson writes a critically astute, witty (‘no rest for liquidity’), and lyrically present poetry. The push of his work is upward (buoyancy and spirit) and outward into the real — an elevator sitting upright in the snow, ash on the keys. His love poems assert especially what all of his work knows, that ‘the universe reinvents itself ceaselessly.’With each new life comes a new language, from the beauty of the everyday to the skeptical and postmodern. But the purely poetic, as seen in his wonderful translation of Heine (‘Selfsame source of all love’s flows — / Lily, dove, sun and rose’) is also present, with its binding force and knowing glance. — Paul Hoover

I’d like to thank Bill Berkson for: epitomizing objectivity & subjectivity; amusedly living in the cerulean blue, alizarin crimson mixed with titanium white, & burnt sienna world we’ve got; & writing for us. — Bernadette Mayer

This is a keeper. A half-century of trenchant observations that never become cynical, of arcane knowledge (and gossip) neither obscured nor smug. Music and painting as natural as wind and light. ‘Logic can’t atone / Except the fun parts’ and ‘There is life in scatter yet.’ Indeed. — Tom Raworth

Image credit Woodland Pattern.