A life spent between the cities of San Francisco and New York City, between the language poets and the New York School poets. Both a poet and an art writer, Bill Berkson was part of the Tibor de Nagy and Ninth Street scene of painters and poets. Frank O’Hara’s protégé and muse, Berkson was straight, but something of a Cocteau-inspired-dandy. A strong sense of duality defines Berkson’s life, and duality has defined mine as well. I’ve lived half my life in Florida, half in Vermont. I write poetry and nonfiction. I’m a Gemini. I’m bi-sexual. I’m a mother, and not. I’m married, with no marriage contract. Someone called me “two-faced” once, when they learned my astrological sign—a rude, imprecise thing to say, but I do identify with Janus, the god with a face that looks in two directions, forward and back. Sometimes I think I’m not this, I’m that. Then I change my mind and believe the reverse. I think the essence of a person, what lies beyond all contradictions, can be captured best by poetry, painting, or music. The self communicated through criticism is a different kind of self, a self in conversation with the world, with society. A poet has to activate a less conscious arena, the one where trees talk to each other and bulbs store energy underground. Some fiction writers can do this—Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, there’s two. The only critic I can think of who can regularly occupy this realm is Hilton Als, with his mats of mycorrhizal thought. About Bill Berkson, there is one area in which duality was entirely missing: gender, with his bias made evident in his 1969 anthology Best & Company, which included zero. women. poets.
-Morgan English