Background
Bill Berkson was born on August 30, 1939, in New York City, New York, United States. He is the son of Seymour Berkson, a journalist, and Eleanor Lamber.
Bill attended Brown University from 1957 to 1959.
Bill attended Columbia University from 1959 to 1960.
Bill attended New School for Social Research from 1959 to 1961.
Bill graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1957.
Bill At the University.
Bill Berkson reads from “Biotherm” for O'Hara birthday event.
Poet Bill Berkson had movie star good looks and a true gentleman's manners.
Bill Berkson at age 19.
(Titled after a Jackson Pollock painting at once figural a...)
Titled after a Jackson Pollock painting at once figural and abstract, this collection spans nearly fifty years of Bill Berkson’s poetry in all its deftness and variety.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1566892295/?tag=2022091-20
2009
Bill Berkson was born on August 30, 1939, in New York City, New York, United States. He is the son of Seymour Berkson, a journalist, and Eleanor Lamber.
Bill attended The Day School of the Church of the Heavenly Rest and transferred to Trinity School in 1945. He graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1957. He dropped out of Brown University to return to New York after his father died. He studied poetry at The New School for Social Research with Kenneth Koch. He also attended Columbia University and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
During the 1960s Berkson was an editorial associate at Art News, a regular contributor to Arts, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art, an associate producer of a program on art for public television, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School and Yale University. After moving to Northern California in 1970, he began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint. Before coming to the Art Institute, he taught regularly in the California Poets in the Schools program.
In the mid-1980s Berkson resumed writing art criticism on a regular basis, contributing monthly reviews and articles to Artforum from 1985 to 1991; he became a corresponding editor for Art in America in 1988, a contributing editor for artcritical.com, and wrote for such magazines as Aperture, Modern Painters, Art on Paper, and others.
Berkson was also professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, where, between 1984 and 2008, he taught art history, art writing and poetry; Berkson also served as interim dean in 1992 and directed the Letters and Science and public lectures programs.
As a curator he organized or co-curated such exhibitions as Ronald Bladen: Early and Late (SFMoMA), Albert York (Mills College), Why Painting I & II (Susan Cummins Gallery), Homage to George Herriman (Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery), and Facing Eden: 100 years of Northern California Landscape Art (M.H. de Young Museum), and two exhibitions of George Schneeman’s Italian landscape paintings, at the CUE Foundation, New York, in 2003 and at the Italian Cultural Center, San Francisco, in 2011.
He was the author of some twenty books and pamphlets of poetry, including Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz; Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently; Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems; and Expect Delays. His poems also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Other recent books are Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman; Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer; Repeat After Me with watercolors by John Zurier; and Invisible Oligarchs, a reproduction of a notebook from Berkson's travels through Russia in 2006. In 2018, Coffee House Press published his memoir Since When: A Memoir in Pieces.
(Titled after a Jackson Pollock painting at once figural a...)
2009(A fascinating account of Frank O'Hara in the prime of his...)
(Bill Berkson was a poet, art critic, and joyful participa...)
Berkson married Lynn O’Hare. Later they divorced. He married Constance Lewallen on December 11, 1998. He had one son from his first marriage, Moses, and a adopted stepdaughter Siobhan.