The Many Berns

Joel Lipman, Professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo, Ohio, compiled this list of the many facets that together represent Porter and his life:

Bern the publisher, with all cost, quality & sales concerns.

Bern the antiacademic pacesetter, Miller, Nin, Patchen.

Bern the gadfly of public entities & community, Mainer, the community planner.

Bern the Doctor, both shipboard & during 1940s-50s science staff writing.

Bern the polymath, autodidact, renaissance man, omnivore.

Bern the appropriator, culler, gatherer of new associations, randoms, founds, artcrimes.

Bern the ladies’ man, postal, home & foundation, raconteur, lover, husband.

Bern the cruise traveler, over & across oceans, datelines & equator, Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva.

Bern the philosopher, the pamphleteer, the photographer.

Bern the salonista, gallery macher, the storefront, the home.

Bern the historifier, the mythologizer of self, the project of scrapbooks, reputation & archives.

Bern the goad, the mentor, the thread for others’ realization, collaborator.

Bern the goof, preposterous, incanting, dressing the part, doodahing.

Bern the graduate, young man, artiste, European white suit, lanky Californ, posed for camera.

Bern the scientist, within government, cathode, space and rocketry, security clearances.

Bern the journalist, masthead associate editor, columnist.

Bern the heretic, iconoclast, edge of respectable custom & theory.

Bern the poet, oral, scribal, graphis, tonal, cut & paste.

Bern the midPacific resider, what happened in Guam.

Bern the pornographer, the cunty letters, slack & erect, literary & back of the yard.

Bern the philanthropist, endowments to libraries, colleges, posterity.

– Copyright, Joel Lipman, 2010