[New-Poetry] Well put: Bill Berkson

[JforJames at aol.com]

Both  painting and poetry occupy fictive spaces in the physical world. But, 
then  again, it may be because poetry and painting are more incomparable to one 
 another than to the other arts that their affinity is sealed. [14]
--
 
You  can do a lot with educated eyes. What I mean by “educated” is simply 
how  pictures, among other things, can teach you about how to see, and what’s 
visible  when you look hard enough or most openly. At a certain point, past the 
shock of  seeing, you want to do something about it. That’s what makes an 
artist begin  being an artist in the first place. At one time or another you get 
hit like with  a rock. I have a theory that the course of anyone’s artistic 
life is determined  largely by the attempt to retrieve that original rock, or 
what the painters used  to call The Dream. [14]
--
 
There  is an “everything” principle—the universal “everything” principle—
that poetry  and painting share. It has to do with including. Fairfield Porter 
says, “There  is an elementary principle of organization in any art that 
nothing gets in  anything else’s way and everything is at its own limit of 
possibilities.”  [15]
--
 
Wonderfully,  there is no logic why poetry and painting should meet at all. 
It is not poetry  dressing up to be “like” painting or painting being pro- or 
anti-literary. Those  comparisons are really speechless. I sometimes feel 
called upon to write a whole  other lecture entitled “Why I Am Not A Painterly 
Poet.” The real connections lie  elsewhere, with materials which criticism is 
ever hard put to recognize, because  criticism most often doesn’t, as art will, 
talk about everything all at one.  [23]
 
—Bill  Berskon, “Poetry and Painting,” Sudden Address, Cuneiform Press  2007
 
--
Kenneth  [Koch] was, and continues to be, central to my education. His 
conception of  poetry as a form of nearly materialized, physical excitement made me 
see not  just poetry but the world in and outside poetry differently. Not only 
did he  encourage me in my writing but without proselytizing he revealed how 
being a  poet could be a sensible pursuit—sensible in every respect—for a 
grown person.  [94-95]
--
If  poetry and art have any assignment it is to make up the universe each 
time from  scratch, hoping to uncover some plausibly declarative thread with 
enough  connective tissue and shine to put it across. 
--
“We  poets know nothing,” sang ancient Hesiod, “only what the muses tell us.”
  Modernity’s default muses have been private sensibility, abstract forms, 
and  general culture made manifest as what we now call “media.” [102]
 
—Bill  Berskon, “‘The Uneven Phenomenon’—What Did You Expect?,” Sudden 
Address,  Cuneiform Press 2007



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