Born in New York city on August 30, 1939, Bill Berkson grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the only child of Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service and later publisher of the New York Journal American, and the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert.
Schneeman is known for being one of the most prolific collaborators in a milieu frequently characterized by its collaborative spirit; over approximately forty years, he collaborated on hundreds of pieces of art with, amongst others, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, Michael Brownstein, Lewis MacAdams, Alice Notley, Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Steve Katz, Ted Greenwald and Lewis Warsh.
By the early 1980s, Ratcliffe had begun to read and ‘learn’ about (and from) the so-called Language poets after his friend Bill Berkson, a fellow poet from Bolinas, gave Ratcliffe his set of original L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazines.
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He attended Horace Mann School, and graduated in 1970 from Yale College, where he became friends with poets Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Rodger Kamenetz, and Alex Smith and studied literature with A. Bartlett Giamatti and Harold Bloom and poetry with Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl, and Bill Berkson.
Cuneiform has published over 40 books to date, including titles by Bill Berkson, Johanna Drucker, Alan Loney, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.