Living the glamorous life in Berkson’s ‘Since When’

“SINCE WHEN: A MEMOIR IN PIECES” by Bill Berkson (Coffee House Press, 288 pages, $18).

There are more poets in “Since When” than any book you’ve ever read. Hailing from a time when you couldn’t swing a copy of “Leaves of Grass” in Greenwich Village without hitting a master of the quatrain, “Since When” is a pleasingly scattered series of reminisces, interviews, lists and character sketches by Berkson, who hung out in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s with scads of poets, artists and other creative types — so many that he can credibly list “that interesting subset of poets who were born in 1934.”

Among his poet peers, who included Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson is probably the least known and, as dozens of photos attest, most handsome. Berkson died in 2016 without ever seeming to have needed to earn a living and he can be obtuse about his privilege, as when he blithely asserts that none of his crowd became soldiers because they weren’t into war. But he has stories about all of the names he drops, ranging from Judy Garland to Larry Rivers (who sketched Berkson) to Leonard Bernstein, and the name-dropping never seems clubby or gross.

Somehow, when Berkson obliquely references, for instance, “the accident that resulted in [O’Hara’s] death,” with no context whatsoever, he makes us feel like he doesn’t need to explain because we’re all in this awesome group together, listening to Judy sing at a party, lunching with Allen, bemoaning Frank’s car crash or delighting in our fabulous, artistic lives.