{"id":99425,"date":"2016-06-16T19:33:40","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T23:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99425"},"modified":"2016-06-17T11:58:33","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T15:58:33","slug":"bill-berkson-1939-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/16\/bill-berkson-1939-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Berkson, 1939\u20132016"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. Berkson\u2019s poems appeared in two issues of The Paris Review<\/em>, from Winter 1968<\/a> and Fall 1970<\/a>; he was also an accomplished art critic, contributing regularly to Artforum <\/em>and Art in America<\/em>. In a column for Harriet<\/em> in 2013, he wrote of \u201cpoetry\u2019s sensational impact<\/a>\u201d:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

At the edges of meaning, words return to their peculiar physicality, provocative then of unheard-of connotations. A poem\u2019s coherence hangs by a thread. Beside creating a momentum, successive lines can be felt to knock against each other, or else they simply stack. A kind of pattern recognition, never exactly recognizably my own, takes charge …<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He was also known to\u00a0argue that the best art is underpinned by a moral standard. \u201cArt is not just a social proposition,\u201d he told The Brooklyn Rail<\/a> <\/em>last year,<\/p>\n

\n

but an ethical proposition that involves ethical choices, therefore the proper response to the work of art\u2014whether it\u2019s any good or not, or whether you like it\u2014has to do with whether you think it is right or not. It\u2019s really weird to me that my saying so gets blank stares, or rings up censorial to some people, as though you were going to put the art in jail\u2014no, nor do I put someone in jail because they behaved badly at a party. You just say, fuck that, I think I\u2019ll go talk to somebody else. The upside is: Great, tell me more! That\u2019s marvelous! Or, nobody ever said that before, in that way!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Below is his poem \u201cRebecca Cutlet,\u201d from our Winter 1968 issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Rebecca Cutlet<\/p>\n

Such a flow of language!
She moves in a strange world,
essentially legitimate,
or what she gambles he tosses
into the drink with not
so much as a word, and butter
reduces to fat. He takes a chance
that this \u201crevisionism\u201d contends up the pitfalls.<\/p>\n

There is a house somebody-or-other and this man in it.
Without being completely satisfactory, this is all
I can let you in on, except to say that \u201cG\u201d,
being the sound of two rear molars and the tongue
pressed hard against the outlet, is not to be found
in the first hundred-or-so pages.
You don\u2019t mind and anyway
it is only after this that the tricks fade
away into indestructible charm, the least
common denominator of what you took this dive for in
the first place.<\/p>\n

Follow her through her mind
as you would through a rich moist shaft
that is caving in, but at
the other end of which, where you see her
hopping up and down frantically,
there is sunlight, many photographs and some text.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. Berkson\u2019s poems appeared in two issues of The Paris Review, from Winter 1968 and Fall 1970; he was also an accomplished art critic, contributing regularly to Artforum and Art in America. In a column for Harriet in 2013, he wrote of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[35,22860,22862,22861,20537,22858,22859,15406,165,2047,13136],"class_list":["post-99425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-art","tag-bill-berkson","tag-brooklyn-rail","tag-harriet","tag-in-memoriam","tag-issue-45","tag-issue-50","tag-obits","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-remembrances"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBill Berkson, 1939\u20132016<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Remembering the poet with one of his contributions to our Winter 1968 issue.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/16\/bill-berkson-1939-2016\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bill Berkson, 1939\u20132016 by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 16, 2016 \u2013 We were sorry to learn that the poet Bill Berkson has died at seventy-six. 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