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DAVID
BERMAN

interviewed by Kathleen Rooney

from Redivider, Spring 2003

He is “not a cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden’s mirror worlds.” He thinks that “if you laugh out loud at Shakespeare’s jokes….you’re trying too hard.” He “can’t remember being born,” and he is not willing to reveal his middle name.

He is David Berman, lead singer of the Silver Jews, former roommate to Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, and author of an acclaimed and eminently readable first collection of poetry entitled Actual Air (Open City, 1999). He describes his poems as “psychedelic soap operas,” and in them he name-checks such pop cultural icons and brand-name products as Judas Priest, Visine, Woolite, and Elmer of Elmer’s Glue, all without diluting his wry sense of wonder at the mysteries of fin-de-siecle American existence.

Well before putting together said collection, Berman released three alt-country-inflected indie-rock albums—Starlite Walker, The Natural Bridge, and American Water—on the Chicago-based label Drag City. His fourth, Bright Flight, followed in 2001. Thus—not unlike, say, Jewel—Berman is that rare well-established singer/songwriter who’s been able to write and release a successful collection of poetry. (Open City reports that Actual Air has sold 10,000 copies so far and is about to undergo a fifth printing.)

Quite unlike Jewel, however, Berman has received well-deserved, widespread, glowing reviews from The New Yorker, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, and Spin, as well as high praise from James Tate and Billy Collins. In fact, “Snow,” the opening poem of Actual Air, appears on Collins’s Library of Congress Poetry 180 project. It seems especially fitting that a man who understands that:

“If you were cool in high school/you didn’t ask too many questions./You could tell who’d been to last night’s big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the hallways./You didn’t have to ask and that’s what cool was:/the ability to deduce,/to know without asking./And the pressure to simulate coolness/means not asking when you don’t know,/which is why kids grow ever more stupid,”

should be featured on a web-site designed to deliver a poem a day to the nation’s high-schoolers.

Something of a deliberate outsider, Berman has published in relatively few journals, among them The Baffler, Purple, and Coe Review. He lives in Nashville in a white house with a yellow door. Here, Berman talks laconically and via email with the BSR’s Kathy Rooney about the difficulty (or lack thereof) of shifting gears between music and literature, his forthcoming second collection, and his dismay at poetry’s having fallen relatively recently into the hands of a bunch of uncharismatic nerds.

KR: What does the ‘C’ stand for in “David C. Berman?”

DB: A middling, popular, suburban cul-de-sac name sometimes given to boys in the 1960s.

KR: How do you spend a typical day these days?

DB: I try to write for two or three hours a day. I put this off for as long as possible—playing with the dog, reading, doing something I call half-sleeping—until I can no longer avoid the frigging desk.

KR: What’s your dog’s name?

DB: Miles.

KR: And what kind of dog is he?

DB: He's a gay homosexual Buddhist Republican. The kindest creature on earth (excepting his politics).

KR: I realize that you don’t have a dog in order to inspire you to write poetry, but do you find that having a non-human personality around provides good fuel for your work? (For instance, is Miles the model for the dog in “Self-Portrait at 28,” “running through the tall grass/like running through the tall grass is all of life together,/until a bird calls or he finds a beer can/and that thing fills all the space in his head?”)

DB: That was my old dog, Jackson. We rented a farmhouse outside of Charlottesville for two years. It was actually owned by the painter Steve Keene. The backyard was a little over five acres with brush and a collapsing barn and sawgrass scraping your boots. Jackson and I used to play back there. That’s what’s going on in the last moments of “Self-Portrait at 28.”

KR: How long have you been writing seriously, which is to say with an eye towards either publication in the case of your poems or inclusion on an album in the case of your songs?

DB: Since 22 with regard to poems. I think I wrote my first worthwhile song when I was 24. If I get strict with the word “worthwhile” I'm gonna have to say more like 25. The first listenable song was “Trains Across the Sea.” The second was “Advice to the Graduate” or “New Orleans.”

KR: How did you come by your interest in poetry and music—were they part of family life or did you discover them on your own?

DB. I think all my ancestors have been businessmen. I wrote some love poems in high school, in the antique style. I didn't know any better, nor probably did the girls. I remember getting stoned at lunch and back in class writing, “Cartoon lake, wolf on skates.” That's were it started I think.

KR: Who did you study with when you were at the University of Massachusetts? Did you study with James Tate?

DB: After college I was living in New York and working as a museum guard at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I was just standing there writing all day (not to mention learning time compression techniques to make the day go faster). Charles Wright, who I'd taken poetry workshops with at the University of Virginia, would stop in once a year to check out the art. He said, “You should go study with James Tate in Massachusetts.” It was good advice.

KR: What did you get out of studying with them?

DB: Out of Charles Wright and James Tate I got to meet grown dignified men who play with fucking words all day. They gave me the permission to believe I could try for that life.

KR: How do you feel your work differs from Tate’s? I’ve noticed that while you tend to use a similar plain-spoken surrealism in your work, you seem substantially more concerned with form than he does.

DB: Honestly, I don't know anything about form rhythm or meter, but I guess it shows up by accident or instinct very occasionally in a poem. I think of Tate’s poems as lead cartoons and mine are more like psychedelic soap operas.

KR: So what’s it like being both an indie rock hero and a critically acclaimed poet?

DB: You can’t really expect me to answer that question, do you Kathy?

KR: Not really. But is it difficult to balance the two? Do you see any substantial difference between them?

DB: I used to say there was no difference, but now I believe otherwise. It takes me a longer time to shift gears between the two as I get older.

KR: Which of the two do you currently feel a deeper commitment to?

DB: Zero to three drinks, poetry. Four-plus drinks, music.

KR: And what kind of reception do you find yourself getting—from fans, readers, critics—in terms of your decision to pursue both music and poetry simultaneously? Do you think you’re taken any more or less seriously as a result of your split efforts, or do people even pay it much attention?

DB: I think each is taken a little less seriously because each field just thinks I’m moonlighting in it.

KR: As far as the process itself is concerned, how often do you write poetry?

DB: When I’m working hard five days a week for two or three hours.

KR: How do you know when you sit down to write if what you’re about to work on will be
a song or a poem?

DB: It’s the other way around. I sit down to write a song or I sit down to write a poem, and what I write hopefully becomes that song or that poem.

KR: Perhaps I’m just acting out of a natural compulsion to look for connections between seemingly similar things, but the poems in Actual Air remind me of the work of 20th-century South American poets like Octavio Paz, Jorge Carrera Andrade, and Jorge Luis Borges. Do you count any of those writers among your influences?

DB: Borges. In high school. We had a 69-year old English teacher from West Texas. He wrote fuck on the chalkboard on the first day of class. And then just leaned back against the desk and smiled at us. We read Ficciones and A Clockwork Orange that semester. Beyond that I never did more than read the top ten of South American lit (Hopscotch, 100 Years of Solitude, etc.).

KR: Whose work, if anyone’s, are you influenced by? Who do you like to read?

DB: The books I took the most from were Henry Miller’s Nexus, Sexus, and Plexus when I was a 14-year-old. It gave me permission to enjoy life. He was filled with praise for the universe and scorn for suckers. After that, I’d say Robert Stone, especially Dog Soldiers and a short story called “Helping.” Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Melville’s The Confidence Man had an effect on me.

KR: I can’t help but notice that you don’t list any poets among your chief influences—are there any poets (or, for that matter, songwriters) whose work you especially enjoy or from whom you draw inspiration?

DB: There are hardly any great poets from the last 50 years. Poetry has been taken over by uncharismatic nerds who use the word “desire” pointlessly and “absence” as a noun even more pointlessly. That being said, the poets that kill me are, Kenneth Koch, and.....Kenneth Koch. After that it’s Michael Burkard (who I can’t figure out why he’s so amazing), half of Franz Wright, Robert Frost, and, big surprise, Wallace Stevens. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is like the “Stairway to Heaven” of 20th-century poetry.

KR: Your work is frequently described in terms of its humor and accessibility. How conscious are you of these characteristics as you’re writing?

DB: I have no idea of how to answer that question. I guess I’m not faking you out when I say I’m just being myself. Sometimes I’m in a joking mood. Other times I’m moved about a friend’s misfortune. This comes out in the poems. Most people don’t walk around thinking in an “inaccessible” fashion.

KR: Do you ever worry about being pigeon-holed as a “fun” writer? One who might not be taken completely seriously?

DB: I’m not concerned. My work will only get more grim as my death day nears.

KR: Who do you envision as your audience?

DB: I really see it as widespread, more so than the Silver Jews.

KR: What do you want the reader to get out of your poetry?

DB: I want them to have the experience of time stopping when their eyes hit a phrase that stops time.

KR: How did you set about assembling Actual Air?

DB: Rob Bingham [the founder of Open City] kept after me. He edited a lot of it. Betsey Schmidt helped me some. Mostly it was barely more sophisticated than 52-card pickup.

KR: And did Open City really launch a book imprint to publish it?

DB: It was their first book. Again it was something Rob really believed in doing before I did.

KR: Were the poems selected from an amassed body of completed work? Or work that had previously appeared in journals? Or work that you felt seemed to go together?

DB: I picked three-quarters of it from completed work and wrote the other fourth with inclusion in a book in mind.

KR: Are you presently at work on a second collection?

DB: Yes. I've been picking up the pace a little bit lately.

KR: Can you describe more specifically how you’re going about working on it?

DB: No. I can’t really describe it. I’m clueless until I get closer to the end. I have to decide how many prose pieces to include for one.

KR: Does it have a working title?

DB: Yeah: Richard Simmons 1950-?.

KR: Will it be thematically similar to Actual Air?

DB: No. I’m 36 now. It will all be in a different register.

KR: Do you have any kind of organizing principle in mind (like, for instance, how in Actual Air you exhibit a preoccupation with non-human intelligences and psychologies, as well as certain pop cultural points of reference, i.e. James Michener, Isaac Asimov, Iron Maiden, etc.)? Are you approaching writing any differently now that you know that you’re working on a book?

DB: Well the first thing is to disinclude all the characters you mentioned. You want to take a different tack. So, for instance I name-drop King Diamond instead of Maiden. Switch out Michener for Steele. You’ve got to keep changing or you’ll lose your what-cha-ma-call-it.

KR: A theatre company, Infernal Bridegroom, has adapted Actual Air for the stage at Houston’s Axiom Theatre. How did that come about?

DB: They wrote me about it a year and a half ago and I forgot all about it. Just last week they wrote back and said it’s running for a month. I guess they took vignettes from the book and added lasers and modern dance. I’m going down to Houston at the end of the month to see it, and also have brunch with Jandek.

KR: You are NOT having brunch with Jandek. Are you? No. Never mind. That’s not a question. Anyway. Do you have any interest in branching out into playwriting, short fiction, or novel-writing in addition to your current pursuits?

DB: Maybe that will come to pass, but I’m mostly interested in working with short forms like poems and songs. I like beginnings and endings.

KR: You’re scheduled to appear as a visiting writer at the University of Georgia, Athens during their Maymester 2003 program, leading a workshop on Poetry and Songwriting; what do you make of Creative Writing MFA programs and their proliferation over the past couple of decades?

DB: I’m glad they exist. Going to UMASS gave me time to develop. I know all the old arguments about homogeneity and MFA writing. It can be problematic, but everything is problematic. Let the kids write. Some of them are bound to blow your mind.

KR: What advice, if any, do you have for other people trying to be poets and/or songwriters?

DB: Dear Lord, could I actually be saying, “Be yourself” for the first time ever?????????????