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Sarah Osment on David Berman ("Governors on Sominex")
2k Plays2 years ago
I talked with my friend Sarah Osment about "Governors on Sominex," a poem by David Berman. In addition to being a poet, Berman was the frontman and lyricist of the band Silver Jews.
Sarah works in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses in Media Aesthetics. She has devoted her intellectual energy to more public-facing projects since earning her PhD in English from Brown University in 2016: she is the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, an online magazine devoted to smart words about sad songs and the reasons we cleave to them. Sarah's own essay for Hyped—on Wilson Phillips's "Hold On" and much else besides—is here. She is also co-editor, along with David Hering, of a recent cluster of essays on the poetry and music of David Berman published at Post45.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm really happy today to be talking to my friend Sarah Osment about a poet
00:00:16
Speaker
David Berman, who has meant a lot to me in lots of ways, as I'll bet he has to many of you listening now, and as I know he has to Sarah. The poem that Sarah has chosen for us to think about today is called Governors on Somanax. And as always, there will be a link
00:00:38
Speaker
in the episode notes so that you can look at the poem if you'd like to look at it.
David Berman's Poem and Recording
00:00:42
Speaker
We have the good fortune to have a recording of David Berman reading the poem, so in a few minutes we will get to listen to him read the poem. And so I look forward to that and I think Sarah was the one who had
00:01:00
Speaker
alerted me to that link. So I'm very grateful to her for getting to share it with you here.
Sarah Osment's Academic Background
00:01:08
Speaker
Let me tell you more about Sarah before we get to David Berman. Sarah Osment works in the writing program at the University of Chicago.
00:01:19
Speaker
where she teaches courses in media aesthetics. She also works as an editor and indexer of academic books and probably other kinds of books too. It's the academic books that I know about because
00:01:35
Speaker
I have to say I can attest to the excellence of Sarah's work. She's helped me with an index and with other kinds of editorial work, and I'm just really devoted to her attention in that way.
00:01:50
Speaker
But let me tell you more about her now. Since earning her PhD in English from Brown University in 2016, she's devoted her intellectual energy to public facing projects.
David Berman: Poet and Musician
00:02:04
Speaker
And I can tell you about two of them in particular, which are maybe particularly relevant to the conversation we'll be having today. So
00:02:14
Speaker
She's the co-founder of Hyped on Melancholy, which is an online magazine that features smart words about sad songs and why we cleave to them. And I'm a big fan of Hyped on Melancholy. I'm going to talk about it a little more in a minute, but even more relevant to the conversation that we'll be having today,
00:02:38
Speaker
Sarah is the co-editor with David Herring of a recent cluster of essays, which were published at Post 45 on the poetry and music of David Berman. So as Sarah will, as we'll talk about in a minute or two,
00:02:59
Speaker
David Berman was a poet, recently passed away, but was a poet, but was perhaps, probably know perhaps about it, even more well known as a musician. So David Berman was the lyricist and the sort of leading figure in the band, the Silver Jews, and
00:03:24
Speaker
And that's something that we will surely want to talk about here.
Essays on Berman's Art
00:03:31
Speaker
The cluster of essays in Post 45, which I think were sort of prompted by, at least in the first place, by a kind of effusion, a feeling that many of us who are devoted to Berman's art felt upon hearing of his untimely death. And then as Sarah and David
00:03:53
Speaker
describe in their introduction to the essays, that in that moment, as they sort of looked around, they realized, you know, there hasn't really been a place where, you know, there's been lots of writing on Berman's music for sure, and also some on his poetry, but there really hasn't been a place that has sort of thought about his artistic production taken all as one kind of
00:04:20
Speaker
of, and so there's a real need to produce it. And Sarah and David have collected essays from really fine scholars and critics, and in one case a friend and bandmate of Berman's as well.
Exploring Berman's Themes
00:04:40
Speaker
Some previous and future podcasts guests, I should say, are among the roster of contributors to that cluster of essays. Here's something that Sarah and David say in their introduction.
00:05:00
Speaker
So this is a quotation. Berman often found sublimity in the mundane. His work offers the kind of cracked sincerity that marks contemporary art at its best.
00:05:11
Speaker
I love that cracked sincerity. It's just perfect. It's just a perfect phrase for describing what is so special about the experience of listening to a song by David Berman or reading a poem like the one we're going to talk about today. Sarah and David talk in that introduction about how Berman was kind of a poet of, and this is another quote, a world in disrepair.
00:05:38
Speaker
In Hyped on Melancholy, Sarah is not only one of the co-editors and founders of that magazine, but contributed an essay to the first, I think it was the first number in it. Her essay is on the Wilson Phillips song, Hold On, but it's on so much more than that too. It's an essay that's just incredibly moving and I'll offer a link to it as well. It's an essay that's about
00:06:06
Speaker
car rides that Sarah took as a child with her mother. It's an essay that's about being, and this is another phrase of Sarah's, about being held by pop, what that feels like, what goes into that and what it means. It's an essay about Niko Case's citation of the Wilson Phillips song, we think, or Sarah thinks and seems plausible to me.
Nostalgia and Personal Connection in Music
00:06:33
Speaker
And above all, it's about what Sarah calls the brutal archive of messy attachment that she hears. And Sarah's sort of siding and riffing on Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism.
00:06:51
Speaker
The brutal archive of messy attachment that Sarah hears in the song itself. She ends that essay, or these aren't the very last words of the essay, but it's just a sentence so beautiful that I had to write it down and I want to read it to you. She ends with this, which I just find an incredibly moving account of what it's like to live with a song.
00:07:13
Speaker
quote, there is something holy melancholic about returning to a song with this kind of renewed clarity. So, you know, sorry, this is me now. But, you know, one thing Sarah is doing in this in this essay is to sort of think about what it was like to listen to the song as a little girl, and to have it mean one thing to her. And then to hear it again, as an adult,
00:07:36
Speaker
and to start thinking with all of the apparatus that an adult has at her disposal, Lauren Berlant, Nico Case, whatever else, about how the song has changed for her over time. So okay, I'm going to go back to what she says here. There's something holy melancholic about returning to a song with this kind of renewed clarity.
00:07:57
Speaker
Unlike the mourner who successfully grieves her lost love object, the melancholic finds pleasure in casting that loss inward so that holding on starts to feel like being held.
00:08:13
Speaker
Um, that's so great. It is great. Made me want to cry too.
Berman's Dual Identity and Impact
00:08:19
Speaker
Makes me want to cry right now to read it out loud. Anyway, I don't, I don't want to start on a terribly melancholy note, but, um, Sarah, um, Osment, how are you doing today? How are you feeling? Well, I'm on the verge of tears, but no, um, I'm, I'm very happy to be here. That's right. Uh, no, I'm, I'm, I'm super happy to be here and very moved by your introduction. Thank you for both.
00:08:43
Speaker
Well, thank you for being here. And you were one of the people where before even the podcast launched, I think we had exchanges on Twitter or wherever else about, oh, you'll have to be on. So start thinking of a poem or a poet. And life got complicated. And so it's taken us a little while to arrange for the conversation.
00:09:10
Speaker
When you told me that you were thinking of David Berman, there aren't many people whose musical tastes I value more than yours. And then having read the cluster of essays, I thought, oh, well, this is wonderful. What could be better than this?
00:09:34
Speaker
So I guess, you know, as in the spirit of this podcast, I like not to assume that our listeners share, you know, particular reading histories or tastes or whatever. So, you know, for me and maybe for you Sarah, like David Berman's poetry, like
00:09:56
Speaker
showed up on our consciousness with a certain set of associations, perhaps already in place, but maybe that's not true for people who are listening to the podcast right now. So could you tell us a little bit about who David Berman was and maybe about like how you came to care about David Berman's art, whether his music or his poetry or, and I know he did other things too, so any other aspects of
Silver Jews and Indie Rock Scene
00:10:22
Speaker
his art. What should we know about him?
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, so he, Berman was, as you established in the introduction, both a poet and a musician. He was also a cartoonist. He was very prolific in various media and we can talk about like, if and how we should think about that as a continuous project.
00:10:46
Speaker
He, as you, I think noted in the introduction as well, he's most famous for being the front man in a band called Silver Jews with two friends of his, Stephen Malcomus and Bob Nistanovich, although others joined the band later. Those were the sort of core three. They were a really important band in the 90s alt indie rock.
00:11:15
Speaker
Um, you know, people describe their sound differently. Sometimes it verges on, um, honky tonk. Like, you know, it's sort of like drawing from lots of Americana influences, but absolutely in the kind of nineties, uh, indie rock scene. And, um, so they were, um, but what's important, I think to know about them is that they,
00:11:41
Speaker
had incredibly devoted fans, but they didn't tour very much. And they were also kind of, I think in many ways, like the, I mean, so they were related to pavement because of Stephen Malcomus and Bob Nastanovich, but they were not at all as well known as pavement was. They didn't tour, they didn't like
00:12:06
Speaker
they weren't on MTV. I think the people who got me into them, I mean, one of the allures, I can't speak for everybody, but the thing that was compelling for me is a person who
00:12:25
Speaker
as a younger person than a teenager, like kind of consistently for various reasons hung out with people like four or five years older than me, always kind of like aspired towards their tastes and their senses of humor. And, you know, like they passed all of that generously down to me. I don't know why they put up with me, but they did. And so like I got pavement through those people, right? And, and, um,
00:12:54
Speaker
I remember getting a silver juice, I can't actually remember which one it is and I've been dying to remember, but a silver juice CD from a friend's older brother and thinking
00:13:12
Speaker
Oh my God, this is like pavement extended universe, you know, which is very unfair to silver Jews because they're their own thing and they have their own brilliance. But I mean, Malcomis does like sing on a lot of the songs. And so and again, they're all friends. And so it just felt like this extension of this kind of cool
00:13:31
Speaker
you know, to me, like vaguely, you know, unknown thing. I mean, again, most people- And the fact of the not touring maybe made it seem more kind of secret or private. Yeah, and it's like, you know, we're, you know, mid 90s, like we're, or like mid to late 90s was a very different moment with the internet.
Berman's Poetic Education and Influences
00:13:56
Speaker
You know, you couldn't just look
00:13:58
Speaker
up a band and get their discography immediately, you couldn't find out, you know, the whole history of things you had to kind of like work. And, you know, I mean, I think some people like fetishized some of that too much, but the sort of free internet fandom, but it did at the time feel like
00:14:16
Speaker
this object that helped me unlock a little bit more of the world. It just felt like, how cool. It felt a little bit like an open secret, I guess. And so I came to Berman's work through
00:14:36
Speaker
the music, and then when I was older and started studying poetry in college, another friend's older brother gave me actual air. And I didn't actually- Which is the, I don't know if we've said this, have we? Oh yeah, sorry. The title of his one book of poems, yeah. That's right, that's right, yeah. Which is, I believe, I should know this, 99, yeah, he got a 99.
00:15:06
Speaker
And Berman was
Balancing Songwriting and Poetry
00:15:07
Speaker
born in 67. So he was, well, I don't know when in the year it came out, but whatever. He was in his early thirties, let's say, when that book was published. Okay. He was. Yeah. And he'd been writing poetry since he was a teenager, as far as I know. And as early as like 1819 was already being recognized as a college freshman by people like James Tate.
00:15:35
Speaker
Like they were already like, wow, this kid's got something. So there's something interesting to me. I mean, we can talk about this later, but part of the question about, you know, his unusual talent or how, how we can think about him as a musician and a songwriter and as a poet and whether those things are comparable. I, I kind of want to insist on like,
00:16:04
Speaker
I mean, it's one thing to say that his song lyrics are poetic and I think that's, I understand, I think what people mean by that, but he was also like a poet's poet, you know, like people pretty quickly, like I think people that studied, that he studied under recognized this voice that wasn't, you know, fully developed yet, but was like, I think probably kind of,
00:16:33
Speaker
I mean, I don't know, you know more poets than I do, and probably more personally than I do, but it seems to me to be kind of a rare thing.
00:16:43
Speaker
to be 18 and already under the wing of someone as brilliant as James Tate. Yeah, and you can hear the... I mean, it's funny. I don't know the story well enough to know what's influence and what's just a kind of serendipitous
00:17:08
Speaker
overlap of sensibilities. But it makes sense that he and James Tate would have had an important relationship that they would have gotten along.
00:17:20
Speaker
James Tate's not a poet that we've covered here yet on the podcast, but we should do an episode on Tate, too. He's great. Yeah, so I think, as I understand the story, Berman studied with Tate at UMass Amherst, right? Yeah, so he studied poetry initially at University of Virginia, and then
00:17:43
Speaker
did his MFA at UMass Amherst. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, so, so yeah. And the, you know, the question, um, like we should talk about this, I guess once we have, um, I mean, I don't want to, um, get totally waylaid by these, um,
00:18:00
Speaker
albeit very fascinating questions about the relationship of song lyrics and to poetry and so on. But I think what I'm hearing you say, Sarah, and I want you to tell me if I've got it right, is that on the one hand,
00:18:15
Speaker
you are committed to this idea that there is a real kind of sense of continuity between the different media that Berman worked in. And it would be interesting maybe later in this conversation or now or whatever to hear more from you about
00:18:39
Speaker
what the signs are to you of that continuity. What would it mean, for instance, to look at, I mean, let's pick things that are even further apart, to look at a drawing and then to listen to a song and to think, oh, it makes sense to me that the same person made those two things. There's a shared set of interests or a way of looking at
Continuity Across Berman's Art Forms
00:18:59
Speaker
the world or whatever it is. And maybe what we're describing here is a kind of style that can exist beyond
00:19:07
Speaker
beyond the confines of a particular medium. So on the one hand, you're hearing that continuity.
00:19:16
Speaker
and you seem sort of committed to describing Berman along those terms. But on the other hand, I'm also hearing you want to sort of insist that like his songs are his songs and his poems are his poems and his songs may be poetic, but we shouldn't just think we could like print out the lyrics to a song and have another David Berman poem. Like we'd be making a kind of category mistake if we were to do that. I think so. And like, you know, I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking of like,
00:19:45
Speaker
who we sort of, who else we think about in that way. And I don't know. Almost no one. Well, yeah. And so I'm trying to think of like examples that annoy me, right? Like when people called Bob Dylan a poet, exactly. I'm like, whatever. I don't have a horse in the Bob Dylan race.
00:20:07
Speaker
Oh, I do. I'm happy to talk about Dylan. But I don't. I mean, to call him a poet seems to misunderstand what lyrics are and what poems are. And again, what songs are not just lyrics, but like songs. Right. And there is a shared I think there is a there is a it is a continuous project, but I do think there is something important about medium specificity here. Right. You know, yeah.
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, I can't let the moment pass because I feel like this is the first time we've mentioned Bob Dylan and like I have on any of these podcast episodes and I don't want to give people the wrong impression. I love Bob Dylan. I'm like a total nerd. I mean, he's maybe my truest musical, like oldest and deepest musical love.
00:20:54
Speaker
But yeah, I don't think the songs are poems. I think they're poetic. I didn't even particularly mind, like, I don't mind, you know, we don't have to talk about the whole Nobel Prize thing, which is silly, maybe in like five different ways, but I don't mind thinking of songs as literature either, necessarily.
00:21:13
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure. No, I don't know. You looked skeptical, so now maybe I'm second-guessing this. But I don't think they're songs. Dylan also did write poems, but I don't think they're good. Right. I mean, he wrote things that he called poems. He has. Probably still is.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough. I mean, again, the question is so good and I think we could spend the next like eight hours working through it. And I mean, I guess, but anyway, what you're hearing, you're hearing ambivalence from me and that's correct, which is, yeah, I think they are a continuous project. And I think it would be strange to call his songs poems or his poems song lyrics, like I think. And maybe that's just because of the kind of
00:22:02
Speaker
the divided attention that they've received. The indie rock people know the songs, the poets, and a very select few of academics know the poetry and never the twain shall meet. So part of my- That's us, we're the twain. Yeah. Part of my insistence in the introduction to the post 45 thing is to be like, look, these two conversations are happening. What does it mean to think about them side by side while still trying to preserve
00:22:32
Speaker
Right? Like the kinds of things that come up around conversations in indie rock and conversations around contemporary
00:22:48
Speaker
poetry at UMass or whatever, right? Yeah, I mean it's not just in other words that like formally speaking or intrinsically somehow songs are different from poems but it's also like these songs and these poems have particular histories that like they've been circulated
00:23:05
Speaker
in and received by certain communities of listeners or readers and fellow practitioners, and to alight the difference between them is to disregard those interesting histories in some way. Yeah, I think that's right.
Access to Berman's Music
00:23:21
Speaker
And I think also like, I mean, not to talk about this too much longer, but like, how do I want to put this?
00:23:37
Speaker
Oh, shoot, I lost my train of thought. It's OK. I bet it'll come back to you. So let me say, as you mull, that for people who've never listened to The Silver Jews and after today's conversation want to do that, or to listen to, he put out one more album right at the end of his life, which was in Purple Mountains. Yeah, right. OK.
00:24:05
Speaker
It's as easy as a quick Google search, you know, or, you know, look on Spotify or whatever, and you'll find all of those albums. But I'll make that even easier for you and link somewhere to to Berman's musical output. Sarah, did you remember the thing you wanted to say? I did. I did. So let's hear it. I was going to say just like, yeah, the histories are particular and they're, I think, important to
00:24:32
Speaker
the works, I did want to kind of add a caveat, which is that, and it reminded me of something that Bob Nastanovich said when we were talking about his contribution to the post 45 cluster, which was like, he felt like, and it was a surprising thing to hear him say, but he felt like what was important for
00:24:59
Speaker
them in that moment was that they weren't part of a scene that they didn't seem, they seemed like
Discussion on 'Governors on Somanax'
00:25:04
Speaker
misfits. They didn't belong to any particular scene, which is surprising. If you know anything about pavement or silver Jews or well, old one or any of the music that comes out of UVA or like, you know, after a scene kind of go around them. So I just wanted to add that because it seems like those specificities matter and yet, um,
00:25:29
Speaker
I guess maybe there's something about the work that maybe doesn't depend on like, you know, insular knowledge, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the whole sort of like, I mean, many scenes and subcultures can feel this way, but I know that indie rock can feel maybe particularly to outsiders like, um,
00:25:51
Speaker
Oh, I'm not cool enough to know who that band is or like I like the wrong music or whatever. So it's interesting and gratifying in a way to hear that at least these particular musicians didn't themselves think in those terms.
00:26:08
Speaker
Okay, so I think this is a very interesting conversation. We could just go on talking about music and poetry in general way, but we're here to talk about a particular poem. And so I think let's listen to it.
00:26:24
Speaker
This is a clip you can find on YouTube. I mean, it's just audio, but we can make that link available too. Berman says a couple of words before he begins reading the poem, and then he reads the poem. So we'll listen to Berman read, and then we'll talk about it. So here's David Berman reading, Governors on Samanix.
00:26:53
Speaker
Two days ago, I was at a party where the daughter of the governor of Wisconsin was in attendance. This is no lie. So I feel like I'm going to read this poem, which is called Governor's on Psalmonex. It had been four days of no weather as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors. They closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.
00:27:16
Speaker
The evening edition carried the magic death of a child backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page. I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantel. Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them. The moon hung solid over the boarded-up hobby shop. P.K. was in a precinct house using his one phone call to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light by which he traveled into this and that.
00:27:43
Speaker
And out in the city, out in the wide readership, his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket in the woods behind the Marriott. His younger brother who was missing that part of the brain that allows you to make out with your pillow. Poor kid, it was the light in things that made him last.
00:28:01
Speaker
Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station to relay ideas on a line with the world we loved. The tall grass bent in the wind like to calm her needles and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating the number of the job info line. She hung up and glared at the Kill Buck sweet shop. The words that had been running through her head, employees must wash hands before returning to work kept repeating and the sky looked dead.
00:28:26
Speaker
Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind. A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held. He'd had mouthwash at the end and could still feel the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth. There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understandings against. Through the lanes came virgins and tennis shoes, their hair shining like videotape, seeing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet.
Analysis of Poem's Setting and Narrative
00:28:56
Speaker
Each page was a new chance to understand the last and somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid. All right. So, um, David Berman, governors on Psalm and Acts. Um, Sarah, I always like to ask this question after we listened to her recording, like, what did you find yourself thinking about as you were hearing Berman read?
00:29:19
Speaker
Well, the first like the, you know, the most immediate thing that that struck me was just his voice, the depth of his voice, which I know very well, but always feels very distinctive to me, just the sort of the grain of it as well. Yeah. And I like that he I like the way that he prefaced the poem.
00:29:43
Speaker
Um, you know, um, which is not, it was like a half joke, right? Like it just like a little detail like, Oh, I went to this weird party. Here's this like weird poem that sort of connected, you know, like,
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah. Except they're not connected. Except they're not at all, right? And maybe this is part of the kind of poem this poem is. It's the kind of poem that has a title that feels like a MacGuffin or something, right? Yeah.
00:30:13
Speaker
I mean, so Samanax is a sleep aid, right, or a drug that people take to help them sleep. Sleep does seem important to the poem, and we can come back to that. But it's like the sort of happenstance of the word governors in the title of the poem and the fact that he's at this party. So I'm going to read this poem, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's something sort of like charming about that chance that seems, I think, sort of
00:30:42
Speaker
important to his work overall. But anyway, yeah, it's funny though that the title, when I first, like when I, for the longest time when I read this poem, I didn't know what song, I assumed Psalm-Nex was a place. I assumed it was like Camp David or something, you know? Like seriously, I didn't know that it was a sleeping aid. And so- So it changes the meaning of the word on, right?
00:31:11
Speaker
it does and it also like it just there's something really weird going I mean obviously there's a lot to say in this poem and we can get to it about like sort of commodities and you know commercialized language and you know but um setting is also very very odd in this poem um the way setting is kind of
00:31:33
Speaker
barely established and then withheld and then we get a lot of narrative, but like the sort of the space that we inhabit is very, still very strange to me. So anyway. Yeah, right. Well, there's so much there that's interesting to me, but I'm glad that you've like put your finger on something that I think was on my mind as I was reading this poem in preparation for our conversation, which is that
00:32:01
Speaker
It is like a story poem, or at least it feels like it. And maybe it doesn't feel too different for me. I don't know if this is just, you know, I'm like predisposed to make this kind of association because of all the other things, you know, all the things we've been talking about before it. But parts of it feel to me almost like it could be like,
00:32:22
Speaker
in the way that Dylan has story songs, I don't know, like Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts or something like that, characters who have funny sounding names and are involved in some kind of drama that as a reader, you're not really sure you understand.
00:32:41
Speaker
So there's all of that to it. I want to come back to talk about setting, but maybe before we get to any of that, and maybe in particular for the benefit of people who don't happen to be able to look at the text as we talk about it, they've just heard the poem, but they're not looking at it. Sarah, what seems important to you about like
00:33:00
Speaker
Now, I mean, you've said something about what it sounds like to you, but what seems important to you about what it looks like on the page, about maybe the way it's organized or how that helps you kind of get your arms around it to the extent that that's possible? What should we be picturing or keeping in mind?
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, so we've got kind of four fairly equivalent parts. The poem is in four parts separated by three asterisks each and
00:33:39
Speaker
you know the in terms of like you know the the it sounds like a prose poem but it's you know most of it's in couplet i'm not couplets but yeah most of it's yeah much of it yeah in couplets yeah um
00:33:58
Speaker
And then there are these lines that kind of are hanging out in the middle of nowhere to me at the end of each section. And we can talk about that. Actually, that's not true for the third section, but that is true for sections one, two, and four that seem to be doing a kind of work that's
00:34:19
Speaker
different or potentially at odds with the narrative, the narrative work that you described. Yeah, that's interesting. I know in the post-45 cluster, our friend Andrew Epstein has an essay about aphorisms in
00:34:38
Speaker
Berman's work and as I recall Andrew's mostly writing there about the like the aphoristic style in the songs but maybe he says something about the poems too but that Berman is really good with these lines that sort of feel
00:34:53
Speaker
detachable and memorable and witty. So the first instance we get of that, and I was noticing this too, that is the line that ends the first of the four sections is souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.
00:35:09
Speaker
which is just like such a great line. I know, I know. And then there are others, it was the light and things that made them last, and somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid. So, okay, so that's a useful way to think about the structure of the poem, maybe as a kind of rough guide
00:35:35
Speaker
for ourselves and for our listeners, we can plan on sort of talking about the sections, you know, the four sections one at a time and then think about them all together in some way as we go as well.
00:35:45
Speaker
Maybe we could begin with the first one. So this one, when you said what you said a moment ago about setting, I was thinking of the first two lines, though maybe you meant more than just those. But it's as good a place to begin as any. It had been four days of no weather as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors. I guess I'm, no weather is a funny phrase.
00:36:13
Speaker
to me. And so I'm curious about what you make of this weird inverted relationship between the outdoors and the indoors or the way that sets up the kind of
00:36:33
Speaker
space within which or like the place that the poem happens in or is taking place in. Sarah, is there anything in those first couple lines that you'd want to talk about? Yeah, I mean, I think it's such a strange, it's funny, first of all, right, because
00:36:54
Speaker
what is, what is no weather? What is the absence of weather? Um, but it's also very disorienting because the first few lines, sorry, the first few words, it had been four days or are so precise in locating us in a particular, maybe not a particular like day, but a kind of, you know, they're, they're giving us, they're sort of locating us temporarily, but then sort of like
00:37:23
Speaker
refusing or disavowing the setting, right? So there's a sort of like offer and then withholding that's very playful and funny to me. Right. Yeah. I guess you could say like it had been four days of steady rain or something like that would be a more usual thing to say. Yeah. Um, and it, you know, it's one of the many, I think like moments where it was sort of set up narratively to expect
00:37:52
Speaker
something that is not given to us. And, you know, we could talk about other moments like that later, but it's also, I think, important that, like, weather is something that is very sort of mundane and boring, and is what you read in the newspaper,
Tammy's Role and Surreal Details
00:38:15
Speaker
right? So there's a kind of, like, or what you used to anyway, so. What you make small talk about,
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah. And so there's a kind of like, again, like a sort of gesture, I think, in some ways to that, like, journalistic language. I mean, later in the, you know, in the second, in the second and third stanzas, the newspaper comes into play. Yeah. But again, there's this also like this kind of surreal, like, reversal of expectation, right? No weather. What does that mean? Right. Yeah.
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah, I guess as I'm thinking about what's unusual about that phrase, I'm remembering how people will say, there's this one idiomatic use of weather, where people say, oh, we're about to get some weather.
00:39:11
Speaker
And what they mean by that is like, we're going to get a storm of some kind or something, right? Like there's going to be something unusual happening in the weather. So to say, I think it's much less idiomatic to say of no weather or like to refer to the absence of that kind of thing. But that's what's happening here, right? It's like, there's nothing happening outside. So everything's happening inside instead. And yeah, and it's, yeah, that idiomatic, that sort of like,
00:39:37
Speaker
turn on the idiomatic is absolutely, I think, what's happening. And also there's this sort of inside outside reversal, which you don't have the you don't have it. But he does this in the first so this is governors on Simon X is the fourth poem, an actual air in the first poem called snow. He says, sort of halfway through the poem, when it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room. Yeah.
00:40:05
Speaker
Today, I traded hellos with my neighbor. Our voices hung close in the new acoustics. And then he returns again to this image, a room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling. So again, it's like, you know,
00:40:19
Speaker
locating us interplay between outdoors and indoors is very, is like a reversal that he sort of does throughout this book. And I think we're getting that here in the second line, as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.
00:40:42
Speaker
That's super interesting. That's a poem I know that I've read.
00:40:52
Speaker
And of course, I'm also thinking about just the title of the book, Actual Air, as a way of sort of making material like it's actual air or something, right? Or classic leather, right? Yes, exactly. But there are lots of like...
00:41:11
Speaker
moments in that first section, that first of four sections that seem to like trade on this, or that seem to want to locate themselves on this kind of edge between like the idiomatic and the surreal or something. So for instance, they'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings. And for people who aren't looking at it, that's like capital B, capital S, capital E, Bureau of Sad Endings, as though it were a government office or something like that, right?
00:41:42
Speaker
So I'm noticing things like that. And then I'm also noticing like, I guess we don't get it. I haven't looked in a systematic way, so I might be wrong about this, but just my memory is that, is it true that the only first person singular pronoun, the only I we get is in that first stanza that the rest of the poem feels like it's mostly
00:42:07
Speaker
in the third person. I think there's a we maybe somewhere, the world we loved, stuff like that. But in that first section anyway, there's an I, the I has a wife who's reading the newspaper out loud. I don't know. What kind of expectation is that setting up, Sarah? And why does that stuff never really come back? What's going on there? Help me with that.
00:42:36
Speaker
Do you mean like the the the I and the we? Yeah, because suddenly we're talking about PK and Tammy. Yeah. In the first section of the poem, there's there's an odd there's like it's like a
00:42:48
Speaker
I don't know, it's like a domestic scene or something.
Poem's Ending and Tension
00:42:51
Speaker
My wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud. Then we hear about what's in the paper, which is itself interesting, I guess. I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantel. Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them. I mean, if that was all you had, if you fed that in to chat GPT or something and said, write the rest of a poem that begins this way,
00:43:15
Speaker
You know, you might expect it to be a kind of like drama between the I and the wife. And it's like a suburban poem of some kind of marital whatever, you know, on we. But but we totally swerve away from that. So I guess, you know, I'm wondering, like, why begin or what do you what thoughts do you have about that? About that is a kind of establishing stands or not stanza, but section of the poem to begin with.
00:43:43
Speaker
From like a kind of narrative point of view or whatever. Yeah, it's such a good question. I think I mean, so I think that the scene of domesticity and being indoors with no weather is important, right? But I think it's important also to the poem that we're. Thinking not just
00:44:13
Speaker
about the speaker and his wife, but about them in relation to other people in this community. Like I think there's something about, um, I mean, and this happens elsewhere and I'm not going to do a great job of accounting for it. Although, um, uh, um, Marie Buck in our cluster has a wonderful explanation of this, um, accounting for speakers who like,
00:44:43
Speaker
or like not in poems, not in his poems and suddenly show up narratively or vice versa. So this to me feels just like, it's strange, right? Because you'd think, as you say, like we should sort of get to know these characters more as sort of like who they are, what's going on, but immediately they're, they're jettisoned and they don't,
00:45:11
Speaker
return, all we get, you know, we end the poem with the you, of course. Yeah, I mean, I don't
00:45:20
Speaker
It's like there's a kind of, you know, a speaker or narrator figure who almost immediately gets like sort of swallowed up by the poem and then like the story just gets told or something. Yeah, yeah. But you say it's important to think of them in relation to like a broader or a world, a social world that exists beyond them that what comes through through like the newspaper and the story it tells or yeah.
00:45:48
Speaker
The newspaper, the story it tells, it's what seems to me to happen, like the magic death of a child. And we can think about like, why that magic. But that image seems to me more important and seems to kind of propel us into the next, and the news about closing down the Bureau of Set Endings, that news
00:46:16
Speaker
seems more important narratively speaking to this poem than the eye and the speaker and the wife.
00:46:29
Speaker
Yeah. Should we say something about that great aphoristic line that ends the first section? Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them. I assume that has something to do with what you've been saying and what else you'd want to say about Berman's fascination with commodification and those kinds of issues. But also, he strikes me as a
00:46:59
Speaker
a writer who is often thinking about nostalgia or sort of nostalgic forms of attachment or something. So yeah, it's a really clever line. I don't know. What else should we, what do you think about when you think about that line, Sarah?
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's clever. It's aphoristic, as Andrew Epstein's great essay teaches us. It's portable in the ways that aphorisms are. It also seems to me to be at odds with what comes before it. I mean, the line that before, you know, I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle. So we get this sort of narrative set up for like, why this thought about souvenirs would occur to the speaker.
00:47:48
Speaker
Right. He's got his chachkes on the mantel or whatever. Right, right. But it doesn't seem... And I mean, this is an open question for me and when I would pose to you too. This and other lines, the sort of more aphoristic lines, act a little bit
00:48:09
Speaker
like islands to me, they seemed in some ways to sort of work against the narrative emplacement that we're getting. I mean, again, the sort of question of setting is strange, but then we get these like hyper specific
00:48:26
Speaker
images of a wife sat on the couch reading the paper out loud. We get to see what's in the paper. We even get to picture what's the photo that accompanies the story. And yet there are these weird lines that just
00:48:47
Speaker
they seem to indicate that they're like conclusions to each like section and yet like they're not at all. Almost like you'd expect like a couplet at the end of a Elizabethan sonnet or something like that to sort of sum up or whatever.
00:49:05
Speaker
You know, I haven't thought about whether this would work for the other examples of that feature. But in the first case, as you were talking about it, Sarah, what I was thinking about was like, well, maybe there's something kind of meta or self-descriptive about that line. Because like a souvenir, what it's meant to do is to remind you of your trip to wherever, right? So it's like,
00:49:32
Speaker
It's like a metonymic reminder of that trip, right? It's a little bit of the trip that takes you back to that place. But if all you're remembering is like,
00:49:46
Speaker
oh, this was the gift shop in which I made that transaction, right? Rather than like the trip, you know, like I slipped into the gift shop from like this wonderful trip to wherever, and I'm not remembering the trip, I'm only remembering the gift shop. When I say it's meta, well, maybe like,
00:50:08
Speaker
there's a sense in which the souvenirs have become detached from the trip of which they were a part and like, which they were meant to represent. And the line too might feel like a kind of like, oh, it's meant, it's sort of in a place and has a kind of tone, which makes you think it ought to
00:50:30
Speaker
summarize, as you put it, or contain all in itself as a kind of metonym, the section to which it's been appended, but it's become detached from that context. You're not supposed to look at a souvenir and say, oh, there's a souvenir. You're supposed to say, oh, there's Paris.
00:50:54
Speaker
And maybe you're not supposed to look at an aphorism and say like aphorism, you're supposed to say, oh, here is the wisdom that that conveys and the light it sheds on its, you know, whatever, you get the point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I think that's absolutely right. And I think, yeah, there is a meta,
00:51:19
Speaker
um, quality to these lines, this one in particular, because, um, yeah, I think, I think the poem, I mean, I think the, the
00:51:35
Speaker
the poem knows that this is an easily detachable line. I mean, it knows it because it's literally like detached, right? It's on its own line. And I think Berman also knows, I mean, not to like attribute too much to him, but like fans of Berman's will often like comment, and this happened like after, you know, in the wake of his death, they would just like,
00:52:03
Speaker
tweet out these standalone lines either from his poems or his songs that are so moving and so aphoristic and had so much power. You know, I mean, like you could read souvenirs only reminded you of buying them. That would be like an amazing tweet.
00:52:17
Speaker
Right. Right. Yes. Right. And so, like, and, you know, we don't need to please let's not talk about Twitter, but like, there is something about the exchangeability and portability of these lines that the poem knows and is also sort of uneasy about. Yeah. Because it's because it's connected to this whole business of
00:52:40
Speaker
Commodification salmon X right like stuff that's like easily exchangeable or sort of like right yeah right and it's not just I mean like you know one one might say that what you're identifying is like.
00:52:56
Speaker
plays well on Twitter might otherwise be described as lyric, that it's this sort of suspended, self-isolating, de-contextualizing moment or something. Of course, that opens up this whole other can of worms.
00:53:21
Speaker
No, but maybe to get back to your original question, like the important point about the eye is to get to that. It's a vehicle for that line, right? Once you get to that line, like the eye doesn't.
00:53:35
Speaker
the I and the wife don't really seem to matter anymore. Or they don't come back at least. We launch into this other story and probably we should try to speed ourselves up a little bit. It's fine. I mean, I'm having the ball, but at some point, if we can bear it. We launch into this narrative about
00:53:59
Speaker
PK and Tammy, and I love this idea using his one phone call to dedicate a song to Tammy. It's great. There's something very like touching about that, but also kind of witty and it's like, it's all, I don't know, tongue in cheek is the wrong word for it, but it's all very kind of knowing or something. It's like he's working within a kind of
00:54:23
Speaker
formula or some kind of generic expectation. So yeah, I don't know.
00:54:32
Speaker
You know, Sarah, look at that second section of the poem. And as we get into the story about Tammy and PK, how much does it matter that we have a plot in mind? And if it doesn't matter too much that we really understand what's happening between Tammy and PK and so on, then OK, well, then what does matter and why is their narrative anyway?
00:55:00
Speaker
What are you saying in the second stanza? It's not stanza, I keep calling them stanzas, but the second section. Yeah. I mean, to the extent that like, there is a narrative here, it really has to do with Tammy, right? Like, Tammy is our protagonist. So I think that the second and third sections, yeah.
00:55:23
Speaker
The third one, especially, I guess, right? Potentially the fourth, but yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I also love the detail about, again, we're getting a setting. That setting is like municipal, like he's in a recent house, right? Yeah, good, good. He's using the one phone call again, the sort of like cliche, but then there's the reversal, right? He's not like calling to tower. He loves her or calling his lawyer. He's not calling his lawyer, right?
00:55:52
Speaker
Right. He's dedicating a song. Again, there's this question of like, like the newspaper, there are these like media that sort of bind these people together, right? Like to the radio becomes this kind of, um, yeah. Oh, but you're so right. Also. Yeah. I mean, so I had the silly thought about calling a lawyer, you know, I don't know. I've been watching too much Better Call Saul or something, but, um,
00:56:21
Speaker
Sorry, I'm not gonna say more about that. But no, you're so right that there's something going on here about like, oh, it's this like romantic gesture, but it's indirect and sort of highly mediated. It's indirect and highly mediated. And Tammy doesn't get to hear that she was the light by which he traveled into this and that.
00:56:46
Speaker
Because we do, right? We are the ones that get to hear that. She gets to hear the song that's dedicated to her. Hopefully she hears it. We don't get to know. Incidentally, there's a Jens Lechman song called Viewer the Light by which I travel into this and that. So there's kind of an afterlife of this poem. And it starts with a one phone call. So he's really building on this image here.
00:57:14
Speaker
Sorry, and the chronology of that is the poem is first. The song is an homage to it or something. Yeah, so she's really important, I think. But then again, as soon as we get established with them, we're kicked out and now we're in the outskirts of the city. Again, back to... In the wide readership. It's such a funny phrase.
00:57:38
Speaker
out in the wide readership. The wide readership, are we again, is this a diegetic readership? Are we talking about newspapers? Or is this like a meta? Of course, like, are we part of this world? Right.
00:57:52
Speaker
Obviously it's probably both, but yeah. And then we get that great lion about, you know, his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket. Again, it's not kicking a bucket. Kicking the bucket. It's a sort of like turn on that. In the woods behind the Marriott. Yeah.
00:58:16
Speaker
Right. His younger brother who is missing that part of the brain that allows you to make out with your pillow. Poor kid. I don't know what to do with that, Stan. But I love, I mean, it's, you know, it's. Yeah, I don't either. I mean, I guess, you know, thematically, but this is not a totally satisfying answer. Like,
00:58:34
Speaker
It seems like throughout the poem we're dealing with like intimacies that are strained or incomplete, right? There's the husband, there's the wife reading the newspaper out loud, but the husband has his back turned to her, you know, PK sends a song out to Tammy, but is separated from her and their intimacy is sort of strained.
00:59:00
Speaker
and the younger brother is in even worse shape. He can't do that kind of... He can't even simulate intimacy. He can't even, yeah, right. He can't even pretend. But then, okay, then we got this, sorry, this other very, you know, like beautiful sounding kind of romantic kind of line. It was the light in things that made them last, which sounds also sort of
00:59:30
Speaker
paradoxical or what would that you know because we think I don't know why why do I say that's paradoxical because we think of light as sort of evanescent not lasting or something.
00:59:41
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, and it's another one of these portable lines, right? Like souvenirs, I mean, maybe a little less so, and maybe not, not, doesn't have that kind of meta quality, but it's not funny in the same way. Yeah. Yeah. It's hanging out by itself. It's of course, like kind of, it's, it's obviously connected to, um,
01:00:04
Speaker
what we learn about PK's love for Tammy that she doesn't learn. She was the light by which she traveled into this and that. Even though this and that is so interesting. I could make an argument for that last line of that section being meta, sort of, which is like... Could you? Yeah. Well, I don't know. That line seems to me to be sort of suffused with a kind of light. I don't know. There's something about the kind of isolated,
01:00:31
Speaker
lyric moment that makes it kind of enduring. I don't know. I'm not sure that I'm convincing myself even here, let alone you. I buy it. I think, yeah, I mean, there's a way in which like the
01:00:50
Speaker
the return of that image, even if it's a little different, suggests that it's a lasting one, right? Like we get the light in it in a kind of second appearance. Yeah, I like that. I don't know. So if PK uses his one phone call to call in a song, Tammy calls her caseworker in the third section. Yeah.
01:01:14
Speaker
from a closed gas station to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved. So there's a we, but that seems sort of like, I don't know, like not a very personal we, just like a royal we or something, right? Yeah, I think that's right. Which again is so odd given the hyperspecificity of like closed gas station, right? Or later like the sweet shop or, you know, like there's
01:01:43
Speaker
these moments, I keep saying this, but setting is so odd here. There's hyper specificity, but then there's this attempt to really put us somewhere specific and then
01:02:00
Speaker
wrench us out of that space pretty quickly. Right. The line, the tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles, it's like a really nice image actually. It's the kind of thing where you think like, oh, next time I see tall grass bending in the wind, I'm going to think of tachometer needles. For people who don't know that term, you know what it is. It's the little RPM dial on your
01:02:28
Speaker
car dashboard or something that, you know, that twists as you, I'm gesturing here on my screen and nobody can see it. You know what I mean? Um, right. Okay. And then there's this job info line. So I don't know, telephones have an interesting life in this poem. Telephones. And again, like sort of crumbling or not crumbling, but like weaning bureaucracy, right? Like people don't have jobs, but they have job info lines.
01:02:54
Speaker
Oh man, it just occurred to me the job info line is J-I-L like the job information.
01:03:03
Speaker
It's not an academia joke, is it? I don't think so. I hope not. Yeah. Yeah. I would hope to never find out. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. So slowly repeating the number of, so yeah. Crumbling. Sorry. What were you saying? Crumbling bureaucracies or sort of just like waning, waning infrastructure, right? Like people don't have jobs, but at least they have job info lines. Um, and at least they can just like hang in there. Right. Right. This, this kind of affective,
01:03:34
Speaker
Portrait of government is connected for me to the Bureau of Santa Eddings has closed, right? There's this hint, however, surreal at some kind of infrastructure, but it's not...
01:03:53
Speaker
intact. Yeah. And both PK and Tammy are sort of like have been, I don't want to say institutionalized, but like bureaucratized or something, right? Yeah. He's in the precinct house. He's getting one. So he's been arrested or whatever, right? Right. And she's got a caseworker, right? So like they're both being kind of
01:04:19
Speaker
managed or subsumed by these sorts of bureaucratic offices. And they're subsumed by these lines that again, like, sort of continue to circulate, right? The words have been running through her head, employees must wash hands before returning to work.
01:04:42
Speaker
kept repeating and the sky looked dead. So again, we have this person contemplating this.
01:04:52
Speaker
phrase that is used in commercial spaces. To depersonalize the people who work in them, right? Like, get rid of your germs before you reenter the commerce that we conduct or whatever, right? Right, right, yeah. And so for me, that line, even though it's not the last line of the section, of the third section, it's connected to the other,
01:05:24
Speaker
It works, I think, as a kind of aphorism, or at least it works as an aphorism for Tammy. And I think we're meant to sort of sympathize with Tammy. So I think that the poem wants to kind of think about it as a kind of aphorism or a potential aphorism, even if it's not. Yeah, or like a failed one, like a... Yeah. Right. You know, her contemplation of it.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, I sympathize with Tammy. Yeah, I love her. Also like Tammy is just like, I know. Let's think about names here for a second. Yeah. I mean, I was talking about this poem with a friend who visited this weekend and she was like, what's great about Tammy is that Tammy is not like Ulysses, you know? Tammy isn't proof rock, although there's a nod, possible nod at the end of this poem to proof rock, which you can maybe get to, but like,
01:06:21
Speaker
There's nothing allegorical about Tammy, right? And thank God. She, but I know, I know who Tammy is. Like I totally have met Tammy, you know? And maybe this is one of the, maybe it's one of the more trivial ways, but this is one of the ways in which like the poetry seems continuous with the songs that it's, you know, it's the sort of Americana kind of. Yeah. But, um,
01:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know what more to say about that. I don't know what to do with PK. Do you have any feelings about PK as a name? I don't know. You know, initials are for me like a class. I mean, Tammy sounds like a working class name to me. In America anyway, peak initials often to me do as well. I've never known someone
01:07:11
Speaker
With an APK, but I think there's like again like this kind of world building that happens with these little details That is important to the poem and again, like it's it's important that you know, Tammy isn't this sort of allegorical or like Mythological figure right? She's She's installed in this world Yeah, I'm you don't
01:07:37
Speaker
So, so we're through three of the four sections. Yeah. I mean, not that we've obviously not that we've said, you know, I just mean, that's where we are in our conversation. And, um, and I'm looking at the fourth section and we're remembering now, like, it actually feels to me like it's, um, full of like the aphoristic mode.
01:08:02
Speaker
And maybe also sort of not surprisingly in relation to that or even as like a consequence of it in some sense that the narrative kind of falls away. We don't get. I don't think.
01:08:21
Speaker
Tammy or PK, or for that matter, the I or the wife. Again, we get instead a kind of scene, a new character introduced, a sailor. And then these, they do feel allegorical. And I know the Elliot line, I think you have in mind the virgins in tennis shoes.
01:08:46
Speaker
that sound like the mermaids in Prufrock maybe, right? Singing. And the sea at the end, right? Yeah. To me, I mean, it's weird, I don't know, but like, Berman knows Elliot. Oh, of course, yeah, sure. And so the drowning
01:09:08
Speaker
until human voices wake us and we drown. I've always thought of proof rock as a song, I just Freudian slip there, but it's actually what I was going to say. There's a way of reading that poem as a kind of proto folk song or pop, I don't know, a rock song of a particular kind.
01:09:32
Speaker
I mean, obviously that's getting the influence backwards, but I think it must have been important. And I don't just mean in terms of its style or some of its content, but also the kind of characters, the little scenes and its way of rhyming.
01:09:52
Speaker
But sorry, so let's not talk about proof rock right now. I mean, what I want to ask you, Sarah, is like structurally speaking, you know, we've been working our way through this poem and then we get this final section that feels different from the earlier three. So, you know, like how do you understand its place in the poem structure or like what kind of ending is this for you?
01:10:23
Speaker
It's, um, so again, we get, it's disorienting for me. Um, and I can try to describe that sense of disorientation. We get, we start with a hyper specific image of hedges formed the long limousine, a Tampa sky could die behind. Then we get this image of the sailor who's eating a belt, you know, looking at his reflection in a bell pepper, not an apple, right? Like, but again,
01:10:53
Speaker
We get an expectation that he might be holding an apple, like a shiny apple, but no, it's a bell pepper. Yeah, and then the rest of it, you're right, is all these detached lines. So, you know, the mouthwash thing. It's a great description mouthwash. At the end, it could still feel the ice blue carbon pinwheel spinning in his mouth. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but
01:11:21
Speaker
In the 90s, there were commercials for mouthwash and toothpaste that showed little pinwheels, animations of pinwheels working. So it's like we're no longer in the realm of the real, we're back into the mundane, let's say, or the lukewarm surrealism that we've been getting in Tampa or wherever.
01:11:44
Speaker
Now we're in this hyper commodified, the world of Samanex, right? Like now we're on Samanex or something. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. And it's a kind of commodity mouthwash, especially I guess, if you're conceiving of it. And thank you for reminding me about the commercials, which now I think I'm like vaguely remembering. It's a commodity that you're like ingesting.
01:12:13
Speaker
Or in the case of mouthwash, not quite, actually. I mean, Samanex, I guess, you'd ingest mouthwash, you like take in and spit out. Which is also, I don't know, to me, that feels like an emblematic way of relating to the world maybe for or to the commodification of the world for for Berman, like to be aware of and to take in a kind of mass produced
01:12:44
Speaker
object or culture or whatever but then also to be able to kind of spit it out and to be dealing with like the lingering kind of aftertaste of it. Yeah and I think there is this struggle like in terms of the like so we instead of these chunks of narrative we get so we've left the narrative rule behind now we get these couplets
01:13:05
Speaker
that then by the end are just single lines. So we're entering the world of the commercial again, we're entering the world of the detachable, but there's this like, for me anyway, this sort of battle between the mouthwash pinwheel image and like, you know, the next stanza. There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understandings against.
01:13:30
Speaker
Again, a very pithy, portable set of lines. But then we're back to versions in tennis shoes, a proof rock kind of image, their hair shining videotape. That to me, I can picture it. I can picture the commercial, the sheen.
01:13:52
Speaker
of the VHS tape or whatever. Exactly, yeah. And also the women in commercials who have super shiny hair, right? So it's like, we seem to be sort of like toggling between or struggling between the pithy on the one hand and the commercial on the other and maybe, I don't know, maybe the, yeah. I was just gonna say the penultimate line
01:14:19
Speaker
seems to be about the problem we're having in a way. Maybe the new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understandings against also does it. Each page was a new chance to understand the last. And if you took out the word page and you subbed in line or something like that, you know, maybe we're hearing something here about how things get understood in relation to each other or how we
01:14:50
Speaker
sort of move through a kind of serial form and form a kind of retrospective understanding of where we've been. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but you were going to say something else. No, no, no, I think that's right. I also think that, like, there's this uneasiness. And again, Andrew's essay in our cluster is so good at describing, like, this is a kind of continuous problem for Berman, I think. Right.
01:15:19
Speaker
being able to write these really catchy lines, whether in songs or in poems, and also knowing that those aphorisms, those catchy lines can be evacuated of meaning, could be used to sell sleeping pills or any number of things, right? And so I think, like, to me, I mean, by the end, we don't
01:15:47
Speaker
land on the commercial language, we land on something more poetic if we, I mean, I don't know if we can call it make that distinction, but it sure, it still seems unresolved to me, right? Like how to sort of think about these two very different kinds of on the one hand, you know, employees must wash hands before returning to work.
01:16:09
Speaker
sort of like idioms. And then on the other, like, each page, each page, which was a new chance to understand the last, like, I don't know if those two kinds of language, I don't know. I mean, I actually want to hear from you.
01:16:31
Speaker
Like they can be reconciled because for me, I also, by the way, just quickly like pick this poem because I don't know how to read the ending. Oh yeah, that's always a good, yeah, that's good. And I do know how to like, I have a sense of much of his other work, but this one always puzzles me, so. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean,
01:16:53
Speaker
I feel in a way like I keep offering versions of the same insight here, which I can't tell is that making me think I'm right or sort of worryingly placing me in a kind of loop of some kind. But it seems to me like the problem
01:17:12
Speaker
that we feel ourselves confronting at the end of the poem is that we're feeling a little stupid. Somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.
01:17:29
Speaker
I'm also at the end of the poem I find myself thinking back to the title of the poem and I think I said early on like well it feels like it's a you know like a red herring or whatever it's it's like a joke it's like a throwaway title you know maybe there's a way in which it's like a
01:17:49
Speaker
A meaningfully ironic title, you know, it's a poem called Governor. Let's set aside the ensemble next part for a moment, though obviously that's important. But it's a, you know, the title of the poem suggests that the poem is going to be about in some way.
01:18:04
Speaker
governors, it seems to be about the governed rather, right? And about the governed sort of negotiating or navigating their experience of being governed in one way or another. On Somanax,
01:18:25
Speaker
suggests, and I think this is more clearly born out in the poem, so I keep trying to get a running start to the ending here, but suggests, you know, these people are like, you know, you take Somanex because you're having insomnia, right?
01:18:46
Speaker
Or maybe just because you're maybe not because you're having insomnia, but maybe just because you know, you want to go to sleep, you know, kind of narcotic way or something. So it, it seems like a kind of, I mean, not to offer a really trite kind of language here, but like a
01:19:12
Speaker
kind of self-medicating or a kind of self-soothing or like the poem is coming from a place where that feels needed and required. It seems to be a poem about like, that's capturing something of the kind of difficulty of being in the world. And maybe the various kinds of
01:19:42
Speaker
here's a line, here's another line, here's another line are instances of, you know, the reader and or the poet sort of confronting the kind of unsatisfying, you know, in the way that when if you can't get sleep, you feel like
01:20:04
Speaker
you know, your body's needs have not been restored to a kind of equilibrium state that you're like always feeling kind of behind. And I guess maybe the, you know, what I guess what I'm trying to say here is maybe at the end, the poem is sort of making us feel that way a little bit. I think that's right. I think that's absolutely right. And I also, as you were talking, I just occurred to me that like,
01:20:33
Speaker
you know, again, a sort of meta thing about the last line is I always was thrown by the C part of it. Yeah. But now I'm like, why is the last line, what last word stupid? And it's interesting to me that in a poem full of what are clearly like
01:20:53
Speaker
like framed as aphorisms, like little bits of wisdom, we end with a kind of like humility, stupidity, a kind of humility as something else that doesn't, that feels
01:21:11
Speaker
that feels like a relief. It feels like a break right from the headiness of these lines that circulate and these drugs that circulate and this waning bureaucracy. I don't know. And in a way, like the souvenirs line,
01:21:32
Speaker
I don't know if, are those the only places where we get the second person pronoun, the you, you know, souvenirs only reminded you of that. The C was always there to make you feel stupid. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not somehow the C was always there to make us feel stupid or them feel stupid, which, you know, like would have made just as much sense as the U. But the fact that it's rendered here is a U. I think does have something of that, like,
01:22:02
Speaker
Part of what's so interesting to me about this poem, Sarah, and about Berman's kind of style more generally is the way that it's sort of personal and impersonal at once. So I take the phoning in the song request rather than calling the woman as a kind of paradigmatic instance of that. But that's also a way of relating to us, it seems to me, for Berman. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
01:22:33
Speaker
Well, what a great conversation this has been. I would really appreciate the chance to hear the poem one more time, and I wonder, Sarah, if I could ask you to read it this time. Absolutely. It had been four days of no weather, as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors. They had closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings, and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.
01:23:01
Speaker
The evening edition carried the magic death of a child backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page. I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantel. Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them. The moon hung over the boarded up hobby shop. PK was in the precinct house using his one phone call to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light by which he traveled into this and that.
01:23:30
Speaker
And out in the city, out in the wide readership, his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket in the woods behind the Marriott. His younger brother, who was missing that part of his brain, that allows you to make out with your pillow. Poor kid. It was the light in things that made them last.
01:23:49
Speaker
Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved. The tall grass bent in the wind liked to comment her needles, and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating the number of the job info line. She hung up and glared at the killbook sweet shop, the words that had been running through her head. Employees must wash hands before returning to work, kept repeating, and the sky looked dead.
01:24:19
Speaker
Had just formed the long limousine, a Tampa sky could die behind. A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held. He'd had mouthwash at the end and could still feel the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth. There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understandings against. Through the lanes came versions and tennis shoes
01:24:48
Speaker
their hair shining like videotape, singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet. Each page was a new chance to understand the last, and somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid. Well, Sarah Osbourn, thank you so much for the conversation. I've really loved it. Yeah, thank you. It's just like the most fun I've had in a long time.
01:25:16
Speaker
Truly, thank you so much. This is great. Yeah, it's my pleasure. And thank you listeners for hanging out with us for the last hour and a half. Maybe once you're done with this episode, put on a Silver Juice album and let us know what you think. I'll have another episode for you soon. But until then, be well, everyone. Bye.