Bill Berkson

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Bill Berkson (born August 30, 1939) is an American poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties. Born in New York on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the only child of Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service and later publisher of the New York Journal American, and the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert. He studied at Trinity School, Lawrenceville, Brown University, Columbia, The New School for Social Research and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Having begun writing poetry at Lawrenceville, encouraged there by such teachers as John Silver and the eminent Emily Dickinson scholar Thomas H. Johnson, he went on to study short story writing with John Hawkes and prosody with S. Foster Damon at Brown. But his full commitment to poetry was prompted under the tutelage of Kenneth Koch in spring, 1959 at the New School for Social Research. It was also through Koch that he was introduced to the poetry and arts community loosely termed the New York School, which in turn led to close friendships with Frank O’Hara and such senior artists as Philip Guston and Alex Katz, as well as with poets and artists of his own generation such as Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll and others. After leaving Columbia in 1960, he started work as an editorial associate at ARTnews, where he continued for the next

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