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Where To Go, What To Do, When You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography
Book by Schevill, James
339 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
11 people want to read
About the author
James Schevill
40 booksJames Erwin Schevill was an American poet, critic, playwright and professor at San Francisco State University and Brown University, and the recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships. He wrote more than 10 volumes of poetry, 30 plays, many essays, a novel, and biographies of Bern Porter and Sherwood Anderson. His plays include Lovecraft's Follies (1971) based on the life and work of Providence horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
He was visiting Freiburg, Germany in 1938 when the Kristallnacht riots occurred, and the experience led him into writing and poetry.
In a 1950 letter to Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, he refused to sign a loyalty oath, at the time a prerequisite to becoming an instructor at the UC Berkeley. Instead he went on to teach at California College of Arts and Crafts and San Francisco State University. In 1981 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art. He died in Berkeley, California in January 2009.
He was visiting Freiburg, Germany in 1938 when the Kristallnacht riots occurred, and the experience led him into writing and poetry.
In a 1950 letter to Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, he refused to sign a loyalty oath, at the time a prerequisite to becoming an instructor at the UC Berkeley. Instead he went on to teach at California College of Arts and Crafts and San Francisco State University. In 1981 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art. He died in Berkeley, California in January 2009.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 20, 2017
Recruited by the U.S. Govt, physicist Bern Porter was one of those scientists whose work built the first Atomic Bomb. The scientists were working assembly-line fashion, compartmentalized, working on their own specialties. Porter and his colleagues were far removed from Oppenheimer's leadership. The speculated that what they were working on was beneficial to man, a source of power that could replace coal and oil. They did not know that they were working a weapon capable of awesome destruction.
When the bomb dropped, Porter felt immensely guilty. By doing this work, he had contributed to the slaughter of a city: women, children, old folks, babies. He quit his government work on the spot and didn't look back. This decision would impact the rest of his life. For decades the U.S. Govt security apparatus looked askance at Porter, building a file on his activities, barring him from work, studying his artistic output.
Because yes, in addition to this, Bern Porter was an avaunt-guard poet and artist. In his mind, science and art should be one-and-the same: Sciart he called it. Most of his art was harvested from the world around him, forms that he called "Founds," objects turned on their end, mounted or juxtaposed with others to create something new. He also composed "Found Poems" pulling from the cultural detritus of advertising, magazines, print products and arranging them away from their orginal context.
He tried other jobs: he was involved in the creation of TV, figuring how to coat a cathode ray tube so that it could reflect images. He thought that TV would be used for educational purposes and was crushed when it was turned over to advertisers.
By the 1950s, Bern was fully committed to his art. He lived meanly. His eccentricities isolated him from mainstream America. The files on him grew thicker. What Bern realized is that the government's security apparatus was wholly undemocratic. That in order to be "safe," the United States had abandoned its core principles. This is still happening.
By his old age, Bern was living at the poverty line. He ate charity meals. He still made art. He lived his life without compromise. Not many people know who Bern Porter was. He really should be more famous.
When the bomb dropped, Porter felt immensely guilty. By doing this work, he had contributed to the slaughter of a city: women, children, old folks, babies. He quit his government work on the spot and didn't look back. This decision would impact the rest of his life. For decades the U.S. Govt security apparatus looked askance at Porter, building a file on his activities, barring him from work, studying his artistic output.
Because yes, in addition to this, Bern Porter was an avaunt-guard poet and artist. In his mind, science and art should be one-and-the same: Sciart he called it. Most of his art was harvested from the world around him, forms that he called "Founds," objects turned on their end, mounted or juxtaposed with others to create something new. He also composed "Found Poems" pulling from the cultural detritus of advertising, magazines, print products and arranging them away from their orginal context.
He tried other jobs: he was involved in the creation of TV, figuring how to coat a cathode ray tube so that it could reflect images. He thought that TV would be used for educational purposes and was crushed when it was turned over to advertisers.
By the 1950s, Bern was fully committed to his art. He lived meanly. His eccentricities isolated him from mainstream America. The files on him grew thicker. What Bern realized is that the government's security apparatus was wholly undemocratic. That in order to be "safe," the United States had abandoned its core principles. This is still happening.
By his old age, Bern was living at the poverty line. He ate charity meals. He still made art. He lived his life without compromise. Not many people know who Bern Porter was. He really should be more famous.
June 18, 2008
Bern Porter led a big American life: Maine potato farmer turned Ivy League physicist, unwitting worker on A-Bomb, then TV and Saturn capsule researcher, achievements debouched into footlong security file, an Iliad, of mid-American repression and fears. Porter turned his wasted career into a searching aesthetics of waste—Mail Art, “Sciart” (Science + Art), and a remarkable series of “Founds,” tight Cornell-boxy collages of ads, data tables, and sly consumerist come-ons that ensure his place as one of America’s Yankee secrets, jeremiads bright as fireflies. Schevill’s got the only bio in town, but read this and change that. We can’t afford to lose our Berns.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews