Garrett Caples's Homage to Bill Berkson at City Lights

At City Lights, Garrett Caples has written an homage to Bill Berkson. Caples looks at Berkson's friendship with Frank O'Hara and other New York Schoolers; his own work and friendship with the poet; and the past 15 years, which "saw an extraordinary flowering of his poetry, accounting for more than half of his present output in terms of books and culminating in his most recent volume Expect Delays (Coffee House, 2014)."

I first met Bill, in passing, in the late ’90s but we didn’t connect. Later, in the mid-oughts, he nearly died from emphysema, but managed to bounce back from the precipice with a double-lung transplant, and only then did I get to know him. In 2009, I was editing a volume of poems by Cedar Sigo for the new City Lights Spotlight series. Back then Cedar lived in a tiny semi-detached cottage with a front-yard in SF’s Mission District and threw the greatest parties, and as I was entering the front gate, Bill was exiting the front door. We paused to compare notes. I was astonished at how this 70-year-old man was a sincere admirer of the under-35 Sigo, displaying a level of curiosity and understanding I’d already felt the difficulty of sustaining myself as I merely neared 40. Bill made it seem like a matter of course. At the time, I was also working out a cover for Kevin Killian’s Impossible Princess (City Lights, 2009) with Colter Jacobsen, and Bill’s remarks on Colter’s genius as an artist were so illuminating, so in line with what I felt but so much better thought-out, I was deeply impressed, even as Bill had taken me seriously, for my own appreciation of Colter and Cedar.

Later I had the good fortune to work on a project with Bill for City Lights, his introduction to our 2013 relaunch of Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara, previously printed by New American Poetry editor Donald Allen’s Grey Fox Press. This was the beginning of our friendship, generally conducted over lunch, where we’d handle whatever business we had at hand and then I’d spend the rest of the time picking his brain for advice about editing and publishing. Still later, he proved to be a tremendous help, in an informal capacity, as I worked to piece together the biographical facts for the introduction to Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2016) by Bill’s fellow second-generation New York School poet Frank Lima. I remember Bill taking the trouble to write to me from New York to introduce me to Tim Keane, whose uncle Bob Corliss had been Lima’s roommate in his first apartment. I was struck by the fact that my own project was still on Bill’s mind in the midst of his own business—his expertise was considerate and thoughtful—and Tim proved to be a great source of information about a particularly obscure era of Lima’s life.

Read on at City Lights.