Bill Berkson, Jim Carroll, Anne Waldman: October 10, 1974

The Poetry Center presents Bill Berkson, Jim Carroll, and Anne Waldman, reading their work at San Francisco State University. Introductions are by Poetry Center director Lewis MacAdams, who notes that Waldman is being added to the program as originally announced. Berkson, as editor of Big Sky magazine and books, one of several small poetry presses out of Bolinas, CA, was a publisher for both Carroll and Waldman. Both from New York City and the scene around The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, they were living briefly in Bolinas, the small coastal town north of San Francisco that from the mid-1960s on attracted a good number of poets and other artists. Berkson and MacAdams were each more long-term transplants, also via New York, to Bolinas.

Note: brief portions are missing from the original recording, due to video-reel changes, in the midst of Carroll's reading, and at the opening of Waldman's. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
1974-10-10
Event Run Time
01:48:05
Contributors
Lewis MacAdams
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Bill Berkson (00:29:18)

Bill Berkson reads "In From the Edge," "Negative," "Light in Dark," "Vibration Society," "Dark cloudy sky...," "Tastes," "Blue Is the Hero," "Light," "Wake Up Call," "The Universe Reinvents Itself Ceaselessly," "Roots," and "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams." From Hymns of St. Bridget, written in collaboration with Frank O'Hara, he notes, in 1961, he reads "St. Bridget's Neighborhood." He then reads "Lines from 1962," "Election Day Fog," "The Manhattan Project," "Hotel Lux," "Ives," "For Robert Smithson," "Camera Ready Like a Dream," "Methadone Theory," "Domino," "Anti-Poem," "To Lynn," and "Parts of the Body."

Jim Carroll (00:39:13)

Jim Carroll begins with "a very old poem" he says he wrote at age "15 or 16, I think," titled "The Crucible," then reads "The Calypso of Eucalypti," "For John Wieners," "Poem for Man," "Some Fears," "Andy's Daughters," "Home," "Working," "Kitten – Self Pity," "Poem for Edmund Joseph [Ted] Berrigan," "A Piano Solo at Carnegie Hall," "Living at the Movies," "Crossed Wires," "Leaving New York City," "To a Poetess," "California Poem," "Midnight," "Prell," "Back Home," "Love Story," Chelsea May," "Savage Bubbles," "Paregoric Babies," "Highway Report," and "An Apple at Dawn."

Note: brief interruption mid-reading due to video-reel change.

Anne Waldman (00:36:35)

Anne Waldman (entering in medias res due to video-reel change during recording) reads "Virgil Variations," "Malachite," "Survival," "Spiritual Poem for Jim" (opening with a citation from one of John Keats' letters), which she notes is "a birthday poem for Jim Carroll," "In Ruins, a Dream," "Balzac," "Blues Cadet" (for Lorenzo Thomas), and closes with "Light and Shadow." 

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