Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07

Hopscotch

Silver Jew writes golden poetry

I never hesitate to admit that I don’t spend a lot of time reading poetry, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone make me feel ashamed of loving rock ‘n’ roll, but there is something slightly embarrassing in reading poetry written by rock ‘n’ rollers. Honestly: there should be a special, extra-marked-down remainder section for volumes of verse by rockers. (Is there any greater piece of evidence that the world’s completely fucked than the fact that Jewel is the best-selling poet of all time?) Yet having said all that, I’ve never met an exception I didn’t like.

I got into Silver Jews with 1996’s The Natural Bridge. I’d read some review saying it was some sort of marriage of Pavement and Leonard Cohen and figured it must be for me. One purchase later and I became a shameless fanboy. I experienced that rare sensation of discovering a piece of art that feels made specifically for you. The spare, eccentric, largely hushed manipulation of American folk conventions, the weird repetitions, the monumentally dry humour and that voice—low, laconic, sometimes barely singing, unspoolling tales of science classes for ghosts, rejected robots, murdered prototypes of mankind and elephant custodians. And the albums just get better from here.

The owner of that voice, and mastermind behind the whole deal, is David Berman, now 40, a guy who grew up in Texas and Virginia. He’s got some issues with performance: he toured for the first time ever last year. The act of going to see him—I caught the Jews in Chicago—was like a pilgrimage. It didn’t seem quite real, like going to a Thomas Pynchon book-signing. Berman seemed shocked to discover he had fans and looked out on the crowd with genuine fear. But whatever anxiety he suffers in no way compromises his innate sense of showmanship, something that comes across on paper as much as acetate.

Let me get to the point: Actual Air (Open City, $20.95). In the very first poem, “Snow,” Berman dissembles his own process of bullshitting, forcing himself to expand on what in countless Jews tunes might stand as a one-line non-sequitur. He’s walking through a snowy landscape with his little brother, points to a place where kids had made snow angels and tells little brother that a troop of angels had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground. Little brother asks who shot them and he tells him it was a farmer. Later, they’re out on the ice, and “the ice looked like a photograph of water,” and little brother asks him why the farmer shot them ... and it just goes on, to the point where we realize that for this kid, the world is being translated and contextualized through the prism of Berman’s impulse to poeticize everything into spectacularly bad jokes, and that with this impulse comes unexpected responsibilities. Under these poems is a minutely monitored struggle between memory, time, despair and willfully distorted perception, and it’s a struggle no one is eager to see concluded. Here’s some of “Classic Water”:
I remember the night we camped out and I heard her whisper / “think of me as a place” from her sleeping bag with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father’s basement workshop / when we picked up an unknown man sobbing / over the shortwave radio / and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves / that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

Berman’s also consistently preoccupied with a peculiar vision of Americana that informs not only his musical themes but his use of history. The bizarrely misdated title of “April 13, 1865” goes unexplained as John Sleeper Clarke gives a chilling description of his response to the shot ringing out across the gas-lit enclosure of Ford’s Theatre. There are poems about James Michener, New York and Tulsa. Even when the culture being evoked is from abroad—Isaac Asimov, Iron Maiden—there is something distinctly Southern to the way it moves through Berman’s imaginative filters.

These pieces largely date back to long before the Silver Jews’ latest and greatest, which just leaves me hoping Berman’s still writing poetry. But even if young adulthood was the only period he ever decided to chronicle through verse—which, hey, would still give him an edge on Rimbaud—the small body of work would still stand as something I’d call remarkable, a stunned stumbling upon the development of a singular voice and its power. Here’s a bit of “Self-portrait at 28”:

I walked out to the hill behind our house / [ ... ] I was with our young dog / and he was 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.

You see, / his mind can only hold one thought at a time / and when he finally hears me call his name / he looks up and cocks his head. / For a single moment my voice is everything. V

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