#thomas devaney

INCONVERSATION BILL BERKSON with Thomas Devaney

Devaney/Rail: Earlier today you said “something something, baby” and were kind of charting a geography of a tone: connecting a sound in Virgil Thomson’s voice, which you said Frank O’Hara was picking up on. Did you know Thomson through O’Hara?

Berkson: Yes, but also through my mother (Eleanor Lambert). It was very interesting to know him. He had such an interesting speech pattern—this kind of Kansas. It was Kansas, but it was your grandmother. Very high pitched. ... And he liked to call everybody baby. And that’s probably what Frank is hearing when he says ”the Brise Marine wasn’t written in Sanskrit, baby.” He’s probably hearing Virgil.

Nat Hentoff photographed by Jill Krementz on April 24, 1974 (NYC). An article I wrote on Nat Hentoff published in Hyperallergic: "Enduring Voices: The Legacy of Nat Hentoff"

“Hentoff's art was to highlight the art of others and he was so successful that he is in danger of being left out of the stories he stepped aside to make room for.”

*

Article on the 215 FEST in The PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER spotlighting Joey Sweeney and quoting me on reading in the fest and the great new art mag GOOD GAME!

I can't get started (PoemTalk #61) Bill Berkson, "Signature Song"

With Marci Nelligan, David Kaufmann, Thomas Devaney

THE IMPOSSIBLE PROSE POEM HAVERFORD COLLEGE NOV 15, 2012 at 8 PM.

In his Petits Poèmes en prose, or Le Spleen de Paris, Charles Baudelaire sketches the elusive lines between poetry and prose and the immense allure of prose poetry itself. Baudelaire writes: “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?”