Described by Publishers Weekly as “a serene master of the syntactical sleight, transforming the mundane into the marvelous,” distinguished New York School poet and art critic Bill Berkson will be in this area Oct, 5-7. Berkson, who now divides his time between New York and San Francisco, has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Artspace Award for Art Criticism and GOLDIE Award for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Editor and publisher of books and pamphlets of poetry under the imprint Big Sky, Berkson taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1984-2008.
The Elora Poetry Centre will be hosting two events, a lecture at St. John’s Anglican Church from 7-8:30pm on Oct. 5, and a poetry reading at historic Beaver House from 5-6:30pm on Oct. 6, to be followed by a light dinner with music performed by the Elora Jazz Trio. Berkson will then travel to University of Guelph on Oct. 7 for a noon-time lecture at the Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery.
The subject of Berkson’s two-part talk at St. John’s Church will be the Stein family – especially Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Michael’s wife Sarah – as participants in the Parisian art scene starting in the early 1900s. The first part will be about collecting pictures (Cézanne, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Gris et alia); the second part he describes as being “about how the pictures they were collecting so often––and with all due desperation––projected visions of Arcadia, or the Golden Age, that time when, as Hesiod said, humans lived among the gods and freely mingled with them, before toil, free from strife and sorrow.” A reception will follow.
The Beaver House event, timed to follow the Elora Studio Tour and thus provide visitors with the opportunity to attend a poetry reading and enjoy an evening of jazz, will showcase Berkson’s poetic virtuosity. The back jacket of Portrait and Dream, his new and selected poems, describes his verse as “full of nuance, intensity, and exuberant wit, [engaging] a mix of topics and styles to create a body of work suffused with light.”
Beaver House, home to the Elora Poetry Centre, is located on Wellington County Road 21 just past the Elora Gorge Park. It is an 1832 log house in a park-like setting cascading down to the Grand River. Previous poetry events have included readings by Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Chris Dewdney, the Fish Quill Poets (with the Good Hearted Women Singers), and Elora’s own Peter Skoggard.
Berkson’s talk at University of Guelph has been coordinated by John Kissick, head of the School of Fine Arts and Music. Titled Hand On, Hands Off, it deals with American artists and poets from the 1950s onward and will include “a capsule history of the various modes and players––beginning with the 1957-59 Frank O’Hara/Larry Rivers portfolio Stones––as well as accounts of Berkson’s own and other collaborations with Philip Guston, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Alex Katz, Colter Jacobsen, Léonie Guyer, John Zurier and more.”
Admission to both Elora events will be by donation. For further information, write elorapoetrycentre@gmail.com or visit the Elora Poetry Centre web site at www.elorapoetrycentre.ca or call 519-846-2551.
