Praise for Bill Berkson:
“A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous.”—Publishers Weekly
Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed.
Dress Trope
Critics should wear
white jackets like
lab technicians;
curators, zoo
keepers’ caps;
and art historians,
lead aprons
to protect them from
impending
radiant fact.
Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Reviews
“Like his good friend Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson writes about friends and family (wife, son, mother on her 100th birthday) and isn’t afraid to drop a few glam names from life in the cities where he lives, in his case San Francisco and New York. In this he resembles Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote verses on fans (the kind you wave) and notes on fashion, as well as difficult dreamlike poetry. Berkson includes two celesta-toned Mallarmé translations, one of them ‘Brise Marine’: (‘The flesh is sad, alas! And I’ve read all the books’) alongside journalistic patter: ‘Lovers for a time, Lee Wiley and Berigan began appearing / together on Wiley’s fifteen-minute CBS radio spot, / Saturday Night Swing Club, in 1936.’ Expect Delays is an all-too-familiar warning to urban Americans. In this case, the delays are as rewarding as the invigorating voyage.”—John Ashbery
“Bill Berkson affords the pleasures of raucous refinement and epigrammatic élan in lyrics, translations, gleanings, and reflections. Like dissolving into a 40s movie or then again a dream of a conversation about new art and old jazz standards, these poems are sad and wise. ‘Part song, part simple fact,’ Expect Delays is recommended for libraries of every stripe and readers of every disposition: to all those who want their poetry dry and with a twist.”—Charles Bernstein