Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems
Author Interview

On Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems: Bill Berkson in conversation with Miles Champion

Miles Champion: Portrait and Dream—the reference is Pollock, but a 1953 painting of his that you aren’t especially fond of. Why did you choose it?

Bill Berkson: True, I don’t like the Jackson Pollock painting very much, but I always liked the title. Actually, I do like the painting to the extent that it puts two ostensibly incompatible ways of image making, a figure—presumably a self-portrait—and an abstract jumble, side by side, and the discrepancy doesn’t pull the picture apart. It shows a multiplicity that Pollock isn’t normally given credit for, something I’ve come to believe is extremely generative. My book may well work, as someone suggested, in reverse order: the early work is a kind of dreaming that then wakens, perhaps, into varying types of portraiture. In any case, the question of stylistic unity is one that used to worry me. A single poem may be a riot of discontinuity, a whole book of them a mess of styles. Then, at some point, I understood the pleasures of being capable of many different kinds of poems, and around the same time, people began pointing up consistencies in my writing where I thought there were none.

MC: The chronological seems always to be a useful frame for a “Selected Poems”; nevertheless, your poems have shaken out into distinct “phases” almost of their own accord. Is there anything you’d care to say about the book’s different sections?

BB: The chronology is accurate insofar as I have some sense of the phases, and allowing for the fact that, for the most part, I have been very casual about dating my poems; I have only the most general sense of when I wrote many of them—late 1960s, mid ‘80s, and so on. Or else I recall certain poems as tied to particular events—the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, a public event coincident with being unlucky in love—or others I associate with friends and places in my life at different times. The poems in my book Shining Leaves were all written during the summer of 1968, at Yaddo, that much I know—but those poems are melded into a section of Portrait and Dream that covers a bigger span—from 1962 to 1972, I believe. The present book is divided into five distinctly chronological phases, really, of the work, as I now see it. The middle section, which makes six, is set off simply because it comprises one long work, “Start Over,” which overlapped the poems of the later ‘70s to around 1980. There are phases, phases within phases, and one-of-a-kind poems that just happen to occur at one time or another.

MC: Particularly noticeable is a shift that occurs early on, from poems with the more all-over surface that one associates with the New York School, to poems in an “other” mode that seems more particularly Berksonian and that is somehow both gentler and—to use Bernadette Mayer’s description of your poems—more “packed in.” How would you characterize this other mode—if, that is, you agree it exists?

BB: I suppose “packed in” characterizes some of the poems I wrote in the 1980s, but I don’t see any intrinsic contrast between “packed in” and “all over.” In fact, an impacted poetry probably occurs because one wants more, more resistant, dense, or frontal, surface—brick by brick, as I’ve sometimes imagined it. Then again, I see my more recent poetry as getting airier again, though those air bubbles may themselves be pretty dense.

MC: You gave a recent collection of your talks and lectures the title Sudden Address (Cuneiform, 2007), although you had earlier used the phrase in relation to the late appearance of the pronoun “you” in your poem “Blue is the Hero.” This distinction between direct address and a sudden address that relies on timing for its effect seems particularly applicable to poets of your generation—can you think why this might be?

BB: An imaginary addressee or a phantom set of possible addressees seems called for in a lot of contemporary poetry. Love poems that evoke someone other than the poet as “you”; shifts from the sense of talking to oneself as “you” to addressing an audience or general condition or both at once. Bad poetry tends to lack all sense of an actual audience, so is neither direct nor sudden, but flat and somewhat unconscionable—in the sense of who, if anyone, is this poem presuming to talk to? Bad poetry is disgusting more often than not for its failure in terms of sociability.

MC: Another quality that has been associated with your work is its quiet insistence on art as a form of social behavior. Obviously, the New York School has long been associated with a valorization of the everyday, but something more precise seems to be at play here—something that relates to the interference that art runs between the serious and the inconsequential. Could you say more about this?

BB: Again, this has to do with who’s reading, who’s listening, how distinct that designation is, as well as exactly where the line between importance and trivia is drawn. It is never drawn solidly, that’s for sure. I don’t know what else there is other than the everyday. I have no taste for special cases, or for any art that proposes itself as a sacrosanct domain, exempt from the terms of everyday life. If it’s not between us—you and me, so to speak—as a social fact, a matter of enjoyment within the culture we both somehow know, then where is it? Too much is made of this life-inclusive attitude as a New York phenomenon, whereas in fact it’s all over the place as an aspect of poetry retrieved in say, Williams—for openers in the 20th century—and then practically all the worthies of the New American Poetry of the 1950s and onward—certainly in O’Hara, in Whalen, Kyger, Corso, Creeley eventually, Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, and then Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Amiri Baraka, Kit Robinson, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Ted Greenwald, and others.

MC: All of the poets I know—from the East Coast, certainly—who are roughly your age share a love of Balanchine/Stravinsky’s Agon and Ozu’s Late Spring. Would you care to comment?

BB: Agon is now bicoastal, thank goodness. It took the San Francisco Ballet about ten years to learn how to get the drive of that, and then another couple of years to do it right but in their own way. For all the rococo fantasy, Agon fully sustains a New York beat. Ozu, on the other hand, probably has had more fans in San Francisco where there are more people with the kind of civilized lives that can pause for Ozu’s nuance. At least that used to be the case; I don’t know that there’s any of that kind of civilization left at large anymore. I’d like to have both drive and nuance operating simultaneously in my poetry, or anyway those are qualities I appreciate. Stravinsky’s technical brilliance runs deep, and Balanchine’s perhaps even more so. Ozu’s empathy is precise in its turned-out classicism, too. When you exit their works there’s the sensation of more light, air, scale and poignancy on the street; there’s anyone’s impulse to get hold of that always-unexpected exaltation and pass it on.

MC: Sticking with music for a moment, you have mentioned elsewhere your love of Ornette Coleman and Monk, Feldman and Satie, among others. Is there something about the off-kilter rightness and occasionally almost childlike simplicity/freshness of their compositional structures that is of particular use to you as a poet?

BB: I discovered those composers, and also John Cage, at the end of the 1950s, just when I began to settle into writing poetry seriously, around the time of the poems in the first few pages of Portrait and Dream. Monk, Satie, and Feldman especially have in common a respect for the discretion of every sound—the note or chord or phrase—and the space it makes for itself, and then how it goes with the ones around it. Each has a spatial understanding of music, which affects, maybe diminishes, the requirement to develop. Their sounds seem to spread out and hang there, in one’s hearing, rather than heading for any conclusion. Early on, I used to have Monk’s, Feldman’s, and Ornette’s records playing all the time while I wrote. But I also liked the idea in Cage’s music, particularly those pieces with radios playing, of one conversation or monologue interrupting another—a kind of cross cutting I found very inspiring. At the same time, John Ashbery’s miraculous long poem “Europe” had a huge impact on me, with its flatbed format and sense of each word knocking on its neighbor. Of course John was taking apart his version of the English language, while I was trying to put one together.

MC: To get back to Portrait and Dream, “Start Over” could be said to mark the book’s midway point. You describe the text as “extended prose”—is this a midway point between prose and poetry, or are such locators/labels unhelpful?

BB: Unhelpful to me, although I admit to using that description. I’ve often thought that “Start Over,” like many of the works written in paragraphs at the time, or later, might just as well be reset in lines, but there would be no advantage in doing so. Many poets wrote in extended prose in the 1970s and early ‘80s; perhaps not so strangely, this followed a phase of writing in very short, broken verse fragments. Both turns reflected an urgency about registering the phenomenology of daily life. I know that Robert Creeley’s work exemplified that progression at the time, and I was also interested in how some passages in Charles Reznikoff’s work occurred as both verse and prose—the prose in The Manner Music, for instance—in separate printings.

MC: A couple of your more recent poems are dedicated to the filmmaker, Nathaniel Dorsky, whose work has long been championed by poets. How have his films affected your own decision-making process in terms of what gets put in and what gets left out?

BB: There’s a short poem from the 1980s dedicated to Nick, which was actually composed in my head while waiting outdoors in a movie line; then another I wrote just this year, which is more or less an essay poem involving thoughts he and I have passed back and forth over the years. I’m very interested in Nick’s editing process, his sense of separation among rhyming elements, the suspension of circumstance together with a very powerful way of imagining what this world consists of. It could be true that my writing is affected by these qualities: my new poems seem to be more and more “edited” in their arrangements. I’m always interested in how things fit phrase by phrase, word by word, or shot to shot—not even how so much as that they fit. Poetry to me is often about making clear that such a fabric exists, or facilitating the fitting together of diverse elements, simply connecting the dots, and at the same time keeping those connections in suspense.

MC: One of the real pleasures of Portrait and Dream is its substantial closing section of new and recent poems. With six books published in the last five years, is it fair to ask what might be in the hopper?

BB: Mainly, I have the relatively recent, and rediscovered—or anyway newly reinforced—urge to just write more poems. Partly, because, in the decade or so when I was both writing a great deal of art criticism and also continuing to teach full-time in an art school, my poetry was largely back-burnered. I did an awful lot of art writing. I don’t regret it, but it was very time-consuming and never got any easier. About ten years ago, when I took a sabbatical from teaching, the agenda was to find out if continuing to write poetry was even possible or desirable for me; the news flash was that poetry proved to be the most interesting thing to do. One collection of my art writings came out a few years ago; another, of writings and interviews on both art and literature, needs final editing. Plus, there’s a set of autobiographical writings, called Since When, that I’d like to finish, as well as a book of fugitive writings and art works from the ‘70s and early ‘80s. All that should keep me hopping, as you say, for a while.

Miles Champion’s books include Sore Models, Eventually, and How to Laugh (Adventures in Poetry, forthcoming).His collaborations with artists include Wet Flatware (with Trevor Winkfield) and Providence (with Jane South, forthcoming from Sienese Shredder Editions). His poems have appeared in recent issues of The Brooklyn Rail, Primary Writing, and Shiny. He lives in Brooklyn.