Review: Assuming Bill Berkson

All right, people: the Pill is pissed. Off. Where have you all been hiding Bill Berkson for all these years and why the hell didn’t anybody tell me about this guy? I mean, he’s published 18 collections of poetry since 1961 (the first through the Tibor de Nagy Gallery), as well as collaborations with the likes of Joe Brainard (among other artists) and Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer (among other poets), plus writings on and editions of works by and about Frank O’Hara.

OK. So maybe the oversight was mine. It ain’t like the man was hiding. Still, though, all you poetry pals of mine: why did you bogart the Berkson?!


Thanks to Coffeehouse Press, however, the secret’s out and I’m glad, at last, to meet this poet through the poems he’s been producing since the late 1950s.

That gets it kind of wrong, though, because Berkson’s poems, like the best poems in the humble opinion of this ever so ‘umble blog, are much less about Bill Berkson than they are about how language determines our perceptions. Our perceptions of Bill Berkson, sure, but also, and more importantly (not just to me but also, I think, on the basis of these poems, to Berkson), of everything else.

But that’s not quite right, either, because it’s not just language in all its languageyness (which is, of course, a very good thing for poems to emphasize, and even enact), but also language in, on, around, interacting with the physical space of the page. Not for nothing did Berkson collaborate with a collagist and detourneur like Brainard and spend attention on an artistically inclined poet like O’Hara (who engaged in his own collaborations with visual artists – e.g. the wonderful Stones series of lithographs he produced with Larry Rivers).

In a fairly early poem like “Still Earth,” for example, Berkson uses the space of the page (intralinear space, interlinear space, setting strophes off to one side or another rather than stacking everything out from the left-hand margin) in ways reminiscent of the Mina Loy of "Songs to Joannes," isolating bits and pieces of language not only to emphasize their lexical meanings but also to call attention to their look and sound. And in "Four Great Songs," we get upside-down lines so that, on first reading anyway, we encounter the unpronounceable and incomprehensible so that all the lines present is their appearance.

Given all that, though, I still find myself preferring here the poems in complete sentences, even when the relationship between subject and predicate is not immediately sensible. Or sensical. “What would the new fork bring me?” he asks in “Saturday Afternoon, “and why / are porticos assuming sulfur?” I’m not sure what either of these questions “means,” and while I could go on for a while about substitution along the syntagmatic axis (couldn't we all?), I’d rather just enjoy the way each twists, and by twisting renews, simple (or not so simple) words and concepts. The carrying of food on a fork, seen as “bringing,” so that the fork has agency, estranges eating, and the assumption of the capacity of assumption for architectural elements, and of the capacity for being assumed to a suggestive element like sulfur makes sitting on my porch and sensing the aromas carried there by the breeze suddenly rich and strange.

Let's say every poet publishes, from time to time, an ars poetica. Berkson's early stuff might be encapsulated in "History" (or these lines therefrom): "Trying to understand what it is actually like / on a balcony with one's hat off / though distinguishing between actual despair / and trickery / a certain passivity of habit . . . // History itches." Indeed. With their non sequitirs, strange adjectives (especially strangely adjectival forms of nouns -- "arsenical"), suggestions of narrative without narrative development or clear reference, these poems are up to both the attempt to understand what it's like and the attempt to inhabit the sentient subjectivity of that capitalized abstraction in its attempt (like Benjamin's version of Klee's angel) to understand.

Phew.

But then there's a poem like "East End," which captures pure and straightforward heartache like no other poem I've recently read (the very idea of a nearest consolation is rendered accurately in all its unhelpfulness):

Sometimes I think it's here too,
which is to say the joy your dress
drags in with it.
To go from that to the nearest consolation
is enough to tear my soul apart.
So stay.
The mystery has been proven.

Berkson's forms and rhetorics change over the ensuing decades. The poems get shorter for a while in the 60s, more prose poems show up in the late 70s, more dedications and epigraphs in the 90s. His preoccupations remain consistent, but not in a way that would suggest any Mirandized arrest of development, artistic or philsophical. Instead, a layered richness characterizes many of the later poems, a sense of familiar reference behind the witty, slip-slidy wordplay. I love the punning fun in, say, two poems titled "Parts of the Body" from the mid-70s, poems that shift the terrain of the blazon from the body of an individual person to what might be the embodiment in language and culture of what Eliot called the "mind of Europe." Berkson quotes a couple of prose sentences about Scriabin at one point, shortly thereafter renovates the cliche of aging ("over the hill") by imagining what we imagine we'll see when we get there, across the page glosses the gall bladder with the fact that deer have none, figures the "Phenomenology of Perception" in the bubbles that form in spit, quotes Tommy Edwards's "All in the Game," but rescues the pop song's falling tear from worthlessness by capturing its cleanness and clarity, and on and on.

And in the most recent poems, that itch of History, that attempt to get at what it's really like, that drive to renew language and perception by renovating the cliches into which we fall like ditches full of shit, all are directed at the violence done to our ways of speaking and seeing under the recent and current debased forms of our culture and politics. We live, "Without Penalty" suggests, during a time when "Traffic School becomes the ruling / Paradigm of higher learning," "Careening en route / To regime change, permanent and without end."

And given that, it's impossible to read a poem titled "Rendition," which explicitly complains about the song played at Willem de Kooning's funeral ("Aida -- fucking Aida," the angels mutter), without hearing in both the title and the narrative of bait and switch, subjects bagged and secretly sent off to black sites where they will endure torture to keep our freedoms safe.