#bill berkson

[thepapersnail]

George Schneeman with Bill Berkson, Untitled (Ten Ways to Watch It), c. 1970, mixed-media on illustration board

[majestativa]

That song is you.

Bill Berkson, Expect Delays

[gregorygalloway]

40-year-old Frank O’Hara was struck by a jeep on Fire Island in the early morning hours of 24 July 1966 (O’Hara was with a group of about a dozen people waiting for a beach taxi to fix a flat tire, and O’Hara had stepped away from the crowd before he was struck head-on by the jeep). O’Hara was taken (by taxi, then police boat, then ambulance) to the hospital, where it was thought that he had suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries (contusions, gashes, shock, and a badly smashed left leg).

While O’Hara initially seemed to improve (he even spoke with visiting friends, including Willem de Kooning and Larry Rivers), he died the next day of a ruptured liver.

John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Rivers, and others eulogized O’Hara at his burial on 27 July 1966.

“There are at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend,” Rivers said in his eulogy. And Bill Berkson captured his personality and his craft: “Frank was the most graceful, quick, courageous, sometimes terrifying intelligence. Often, no matter how intimate or involved you might be, you could only begin to imagine what and how much he was feeling. It was electric, full of light and air and blood, amazing, passionate, and full of sense. As a poet, a genius, just walking around, talking, he had that magic touch: He made things and people sacred…”

[grupaok]

John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem, 1969

[davidhudson]

Frank O’Hara, March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966.

With Kenneth Koch, Patsy Southgate, Bill Berkson, and John Ashbery in New York in the early 1960s. Photo by Mario Schifano.

[majestativa]

Extreme reverie.

Bill Berkson, Expect Delays

[majestativa]

The modern soul went out in search of a self to come home to.

Bill Berkson, Expect Delays

[majestativa]

The point about sensation is that it is or can be a condition of impact, face to face with being or actuality; the modern (and also traditional Asian) understanding of this is that it is sacred ground, primordial. Actuality is missing, missed most of the time. Sensation is in its way the showplace of beauty and also of what was realized and valued in modern discourse as The Sublime. Interestingly, this is not necessarily in sequence: what is beautiful is as often apprehended as such through cognition or recognition or perceiving. The mathematician Poincaré’s famous moment of realizing that a theorem he had worked up was correct, had to be, “because it was so beautiful” is an instance; so is T.S. Eliot’s saying of John Donne that a thought to him was a sensation (Eliot said “experience” but I am translating to get closer to the bone) and that this is typical of the poetic turn of mind. Be that as it may, the issue of sensation—in art, anyway—seems primarily tied to appetite – literally, a taste for living., the desire (and hence, the will) to live. Berthold Brecht in his journals took up Wordsworth’s promise of a poem’s efficacy “to haunt, to startle, to waylay” and wondered at “a possible criterion . . . . does it enrich the individual’s capacity for experience?” & then goes on: “Poetry is never mere expression. Its reception is an operation of the same order as, say, seeing or hearing . . . . a human activity, a social function of a wholly contradictory and alterable kind, conditioned by history and in turn conditioning it.”

Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs