The Spoonlight Institute is Bernheimer’s first book to appear in over a decade. The volume compiles new poems with selected works from the past quarter century, and includes his play “Particle Arms,” first written for, and produced by, the San Francisco Poets Theatre in 1982.
Born and raised in New York City, Alan Bernheimer graduated in 1970 from Yale University, where he studied with New York poets Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl, and Bill Berkson. In 1976 he moved to San Francisco and spent time with other young writers such as Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten—a group who would soon become known as the San Francisco Language poets. Bernheimer also wrote and performed for Poets Theater and produced and hosted In the American Tree, a radio program of new writing by poets on KPFA. He translated Philippe Soupault’s Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. His most recent book of poetry is From Nature.
Adventures in Poetry began publishing in 1968 as a mimeographed “little magazine,” and continued through 1976 with individual pamphlets, featuring work by Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, and many others. After a long hiatus, it began publishing books by established and new innovative writers that are available exclusively through Zephyr Press.
