Since When

(Paperback)

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Bill Berkson was a stalwart of our second generation NY school list, and beloved to us and generations of students and friends in the poetry and art worlds, including notables like Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Holland Cotter, Patti Smith, and Devendra Banhart.
Berkson's ability to be everywhere, and see everything, makes this memoir a notable artifact of its time, but his joyousness and openness, his pleasure in all he saw and did, make it a vibrant and infectious testament to a life well-lived. His dual identity as an art critic and poet gives his observations a remarkable keenness.
There has been a resurgent interest in second generation writers among younger readers, and this book captures that group, and their charms, in all their sly glory.
Situating itself as memoir, cultural history, and literary history, Since When offers something to a broad range of readers eager for a glimpse into the recent past and lives of their artistic forebears.

Reviews

Since When is a sentimental prayer to the great artists Berkson knew, not unlike a bittersweet and light-hearted speech delivered at a memorial service. Commonplace Review

Berkson was the ultimate fly on the wall, and through his evocative writing the reader gets to be the same. Ploughshares

Since When is a pleasingly scattered series of reminisces, interviews, lists and character sketches by Berkson, who hung out in the 1950s, 60s and 70s with scads of poets, artists and other creative typesso many that he can credibly list that interesting subset of poets who were born in 1934. Star Tribune

Since When offers a significant historical addition to the dreamlike worlds in Berksons poetry. Poetry Foundation

[Since When] serves as a vivid testament to the enduring indispensability of relationships between artists. Open Space

The resulting mosaic gives a vivid account of Berksons colorful life in the intertwined literary and artistic milieus of New York and San Francisco during the postwar decades. Art in America

[Since When is] sentimental and funny, and makes you believe in a shared social project. Berkson was dedicated to this, and the example of his poetry and practice astonishes in this terrific memoir. Entropy Magazine

Imagine an ideal friend, someone of good character, honorable, congenial, smart, well-read, judicious, articulate, self-aware, open-minded, and socially graceful, a gifted writer at the center of New Yorks and the Bay Areas artistic communities for sixty years. That ideal friend is Bill Berkson, and in this marvelous book he tells the true and fascinating story of his life and times. Ron Padgett

Since When captures the throbbing zeitgeist of a NYC/California experimental poetry/art rhizome and brims with dazzling encounters and glamorous portraiture of some of the best, most talented minds, including the authors own parents and their coterie. Enthralling conversation, quotation, and astute commentary: Judy Garland! Ezra Pound! Greta Garbo! Frank OHara! Joan Mitchell! Amiri Baraka! Poet and art critic Bill Berkson spanned high and low: uptown/downtown zones of radical art mind. The Bohemian, dandyish, psychedelic, and the troubling hegemonic follies of a USA growing old because it entered the twentieth century first (G. Stein) all romp in here. Bill had a shining boyish inquisitiveness, phenomenal memory, and a panoramic intelligence. Read this and eat your heart out for the belletristic, wild, and intimate days of the New York School. Entertainingyou feel you are in a very glamorous moviebut never shallow, this is serious history, required reading. Anne Waldman

Its tough to write a blurb about one of the most effortlessly cool and genuinely wise people youve ever met, especially when they already said it best with their high school yearbook quote: Plato or comic books, Im versatile. That was Bill, all the way. As his student, the main theme was, Be kind, be clear, and a little humor goes a long way, a message that impacted our class deeply and continues to do so to this very day. This memoir is a celebration of his life and friends as told by Bill Himself, in that gentle and knowing voice, tales of getting karate chopped at by Norman Mailer, drinking with Joan Mitchell, long nights with Frank OHara, Elaine de Kooning, and Amiri Baraka, to name a few. Essential reading for any and all! Devendra Banhart

Both a valuable cultural history and a wonderfully appealing mosaic of an autobiography.On the Seawall

Bill was a still point in a turning world. He made grace and kindness, careful intelligence and everyday happiness, seem properties of a social commonswhere you found yourself, when around him, and missed, when not. This beautiful book immortalizes that spell. Peter Schjeldahl

Author Bio

Bill Berkson (New York, 1939) was a poet, critic, teacher, and curator who became active in the art and literary worlds in his early twenties. He collaborated with many artists and writers, including Alex Katz, Philip Guston, and Frank OHara, and his criticism appeared in ArtNews, Art in America, and elsewhere. Formerly a professor of liberal arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, he was born in New York in 1939. He died in June 2016.