1990
“‘We do not respond often, really,’ Frank O’Hara once noted. ‘And when we do, it is as if a flashbulb went off.’ No stranger to bright lights, Bill Berkson—O’Hara’s protégé, collaborator, and traveling companion—quoted the elder poet’s line in ‘Critical Reflections,’ a 1990 essay for this magazine. The piece, a manifesto of sorts, lamented an art criticism where words let go of the heady rush of looking, listening, and taking it all in, to slip instead into a kind of joyless airplane mode. No flashbulbs now, just the flutter of a smartphone, endlessly dividing our attention. … It’s difficult to write about Bill and not slide into his rhythms, those stumbles, and veers—the damp thump of that damn sentence, A woman has fallen, keeping him from his Costanza. The hardest part about mourning Bill is knowing that now someone else will have to read that sentence for him. We’d heard that woman fall so many times, Bill’s voice carrying over bookstore counters and galleries filled with folding chairs and a league of dedicated Listeners, those that recognized one another more or less by sight, but never went into the specifics of how we ‘knew Bill.’ The truth is, Bill had a startling capacity to draw others into his orbit, though he would have cackled if you tried to make him out as a guru. Decidedly not the guru type, so unassuming, so expert at keeping it casual, an easy generosity and free-flowing enthusiasm just to share the same time and place as another person. In a reciprocal stream of gratitude, he regularly dedicated poems to the people in his life, just as many unknown quantities as art celebrities. Bill wasn’t here for fame and wouldn’t abide by name-dropping; he couldn’t help it if his coterie happened to be legendary. As a poet, Bill was particularly attuned to the odds and ends of the daily grind, the sudden high notes and spare sentences that he picked up and added to his collection of running observations, which he would publish in great globules. …”
ARTFORUM
Jacket2
NY Times: Bill Berkson, Poet and Art Critic of ’60s Manhattan In-Crowd, Dies at 76
W – Bill Berkson
1960s: Days of Rage
1960s: Days of Rage 