PicoBlog

If you know David Berman, you almost certainly know him as a musician and songwriter. And for good reason: the man once wrote, “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” a line that seems to captivate anyone who hears it, even those who use music as background noise. His work with the Silver Jews has a seemingly permanent position in the indie music canon, which is as nebulous and impenetrable as any other; I can’t go more than a day without seeing an outpouring of love and gratitude for the band’s 1998 album American Water somewhere on social media. In my observation, Berman’s musical fingerprint is a series of cavernous grooves that cannot be denied by any serious indie geologist. 

None of this is why I love David Berman. (And this is coming from someone who cannot, no matter how hard she tries, push The Natural Bridge from her top ten.) No, it’s Berman’s literary work, that strange and complex twin of his lyricism, that does it for me. 

It’s possible that Berman was a prolific writer, but he was not a prolific publisher: he has one collection of poetry, Actual Air, released in 1999 and, at present, only accessible through a posthumous reprint by Drag City. There are dozens of other verse and prose fragments floating out there, but Actual Air is his most complete work, if not necessarily his best. It opens with “Snow,” which can only speak for itself:

“Snow” hinges on questions; not only the questions that the speaker’s brother Seth asks, but the questions that run through a reader’s mind. The one that always occurs to me is: “What the hell is going on here?” I don’t mean this in a flippant way—there’s just so much going on that any inquiry that is too formal or too specific will miss some significant detail, some light that Berman shines out over “the wide readership,” as he calls it. Still, I can’t help but prod: Why the lack of question marks? Why are the stanzas so distanced? Why were they on his property?

In “Snow,” the natural world is filtered through eyes entrenched in modern society. The lake is a house, the ice a photograph, and falling snow forms a derelict room. For Berman, nature is sublime not because it differs from the world of man, but because it reflects it, though in ways not altogether obvious. 

In the poem’s scenic interjections, I find a literary subconscious: Berman’s speaker abandons the opening conversation to better establish his setting, but his brother is so insistent in his curiosity that he bursts across time and space and into this outdoors-room to ask his next question. Of course, we aren’t provided with an answer; Seth’s curiosity transfers over to each reader, never to truly dissipate.

In these sixteen lines, Berman manages to capture his unique voice, the wonder of childhood, and the sensory effect of winter, all while crafting a creation myth for something as ubiquitous as snow angels. And this is just the first poem. 

Throughout Actual Air, Berman plays with diction, tone, and even ineligibility, but he never loses his voice, at once dry and sincere, hyperbolic and inward-focused. With each poem, he crafts a new set of relationships: between characters, between the material and spiritual worlds, and between himself and the reader, taking them for a ride that is sometimes confusing but never boring. It’s this variety, this constant rehashing, that makes Actual Air so compelling. Looking for some deadpan sci-fi humor? Try “The Spine of the Snowman.” Love sequences that build maddening, fantastic universes? “From Cantos for James Michener: Part II” is among the best. 

“Cassette County” is among my favorite Berman poems, despite its incomprehensible message; for me, it’s a poem that relies on feel, on the rhythmic succession of each line and the texture of each image or new-born idiom. Whenever I need a tender bit of motion, these lines always satisfy:

There are a half-dozen thoughts here, and they bleed into each other as if Berman’s chosen medium is tissue paper. Somehow, there’s a charm to this blur; it encourages careful attention, but doesn’t require it. Personally, I almost always opt to let the poem wash over me like a cool autumn rain. Who needs a deep dive when the surface is this gripping?

I don’t mean to suggest that Berman’s poetry is all about clever turns of phrase and interfering with the reader’s expectations. Actual Air contains countless moments of unadulterated beauty, appearing often where they are most unforeseen. In “April 13, 1865,” Berman recounts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from the perspective of a Ford’s Theatre audience member.  The poem closes with this image:

Berman removes all historical noise, and places himself and the reader just on the edge of the action, where the impact of the instance is not in Booth’s gunshot, but in an overlaying of nineteenth-century stagecraft and the slowing of time induced by shock. Here, reality itself is liminal: Berman presents the inherent excitement and loss of this episode as surreal and dissociating, as it very well might have been. He pulls something hyperreal from the mouth of a great American myth. 

“April 13, 1865” is followed by “Self-Portrait at 28,” perhaps the best example of Berman’s poetic voice. “Self-Portrait” is an epic of observation, a contrapuntal of wry cynicism and meditative romance. In the poem’s six sections, Berman contends with the whimpering dreams of his dog, our “irrepressible advances,” the redundant thrum of celebrity deaths, and the view out his window, which he casts in a gorgeous cataclysmic light: 

It is a passage that begs to be reread, each detail deepening and refocusing Berman’s prismatic vision of the end. Berman layers the collective and the individual; one can imagine each of the world’s “five-billion minds” emitting their own love for a certain hill or valley as the sun sets on a world aching for rest. There is a casual intensity to it, as if he saw something reflected in the loblolly and goldenrod of his hill and, releasing a gentle “hm,” poured the entirety of the human experience onto the page. 

Yet “Self-Portrait” is very much a work of its time, a quality that could render it dated but really just makes it more honest. The isolated communal psychosis of the above stanza seems more within reach today, but it would be less meaningful written from our perspective. Maybe that’s the magic of it: Berman could only have created something so arresting from his particular time and vantage point, a truth he must have understood. 

And if Actual Air is about any one thing, it is this: understanding, self-consciousness, and an internal monologue that never stops noticing. Berman has a startling ability to look at something—inanimate or not—and get into its head as a way of getting into his own head. Not one of his poems is without this process. In “Snow,” Berman doesn’t just ask, “Why is my little brother so curious?” but also “What about his curiosity captures me? Why do I care? Why should anyone care?” He searches unrelentingly for answers, knowing full well that they will fracture into further questions, on and on and on. 

When you read Actual Air, you are a part of this search, more an animated conversation than a guided tour. There is a hidden second-person perspective in Berman’s work; he never stops speaking with the reader, even as he’s speaking with himself. With each teasing-out of an idiom, with each ultra-specific setting, Berman says “I hope you’re seeing what I’m seeing.” It feels more than genuine, like the hand of a trusted friend resting on your shoulder. 

In “Tulsa,” Berman’s speaker imagines what his fiancée must think of him: his occupation, hobbies, and plaintive nature. This could be a place for narcissism or fear, but instead Berman demonstrates the honesty of this couple’s bond, recognizing that small anxieties and intense love are two sides of the same coin. And he does it like this: 

David Berman is a mind reader who wants us to know he is reading our minds. And really, that’s a comfort. 

Note: David Berman passed away in August 2019. I write about him in the present tense here because, in my view, his work has such endurance that it demands an “is” rather than a “was.”

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