Bill Berkson reads Edwin Denby & Frank O'Hara, Wednesday, August 31st

Apart being widely acknowledged as one the world’s best dance critics ever, Edwin Denby (1903-1983) was a magnificent poet. In themselves, his sonnets and longer lyric poems, short plays, libretti (The Second Hurricane, for one, with music by Aaron Copland), many of which remain in print thanks to the 1998 Yale edition of Dance Writings and Poetry, represent that “civilized wonder” Denby himself said that poetry might best aspire to.

Along with the photographer Rudy Burckhardt and the painter Willem deKooning, Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) was one of Denby’s closest friends. In 1957, perhaps acknowledging a prompt toward the immediacy of his own just then emerging “I do this I do that” poems, O’Hara wrote of Denby’s art that it had “the classical gift of giving, in the present tense.”

Poet, critic and Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, Bill Berkson’s recent books include Portrait and Dreams: New & Selected Poems; For the Ordinary Artist; Sudden Address: Selected Lectures; Lady Air; and Not an Exit, with drawings by Léonie Guyer. In 1978, with Joe LeSueur, he co-edited Homage to Frank O’Hara.

Berkson will read and comment upon selections from O’Hara’s and Denby’s poetry and prose, including at least one of O’Hara’s longer poems “In Memory of My Feelings,” a range of Denby’s sonnets both early and late and passages from his dance criticism and the two remarkable essays on deKooning.

Listen to the event...

Disorder mental strikes me; I
Slip from my pocket Dante to
Chance hit a word, a friend’s reply
In this bar; bare, dark avenue
The lunge of headlights, then bare dark
Cross on red, two blocks home, old Sixth
The alive, the dead, answer, ask
Miracle consciousness I’m with
At home cat chirps, Norwegian sweater
Slumped in the bar, I mind Dante
As dawn enters the sunk city
Answer a one can understand
Actual events are obscure
Though the observers appear clear

––Edwin Denby