ESCAPE WHISPER VALLEY HIDDEN OBJECTS HOW TO

ESCAPE WHISPER VALLEY HIDDEN OBJECTS HOW TO

I find the book at the top of one of my bookshelves, and I flip to a dogeared page, and I read this poem, and I laugh a little to myself, and I moan some long moan of sorrow, and I wonder and I grow curious, and I finish the poem, and then I do it all again.Īnd I think I’m reading this poem over and over again because, in part, I’m rethinking how to approach my own act of writing poetry, and reading Berman feels almost exhilarating. Īnd so I’ve been turning to today’s poem so frequently lately, and I don’t know why. Oh, I said in the back of my mind - that’s Merwin. I caught myself just as the last few words slipped out. I said the poem in its entirety, almost out of reflex. I recited the latter poem to my fiancee the other night, as we were getting ready for bed and turning each light off. Or I think about Louise Gluck’s “Telemachus’ Detachment,” which reads, in its entirety: The entirety of Jamaal May’s Hum, or Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead, or Linda Gregg’s All of It Singing, or anything by Steve Scafidi. I kept The Selected Levis in a stack on my desk, and whenever I felt anything - literally anything - I turned to the page where that stanza was, and I read it, once again, to feel. I wondered what it meant when Levis wrote that someone might “finally play.” I wanted to know what it might be like to play a piano in that way. I was maybe 24 or 25 when I first read that stanza, and I thought of the whole thing like a short story. The first poem that did this for me was “The Double,” by Larry Levis, which fit the entirety of all-the-feeling-I-could-muster into one stanza that read: Maybe you have poems like this, maybe sometimes? A poem dog-eared so frequently that the triangle on the top corner of the page has lopped itself off, and left the page fragmented, missing one small corner of itself? Not necessarily about this poem in the specific, but about what makes a poem something that one turns to. And this poem - “Classic Water” - is my most turned-to poem in Berman’s book.Īnd if I could, I’d like to talk a bit about that turning-to.

And now, my copy of Actual Air sits on this strange pedestal of books I keep on top of a bookshelf, sandwiched between Thomas Lux’s collected and another James Tate’s The Government Lake.

But a latecomer - sometimes, and often gratefully - still arrives. When he passed a few years ago, I was not an avid listener of Silver Jews, and I had not really heard of Actual Air - his only published book of poems. But I am a latecomer to David Berman’s poetry. I am writing this in the midst of a slightly groggy (though I like to say froggy) haze in the aftermath of a Covid booster, so I apologize if nothing I say makes sense. No one deserves to be called what’s-his-face. To apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are: I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer endsĪnd I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriendsĪs what’s-his-face, which was wrong of me and I’d like Or how it felt to have your heart broken. Talking about the paradox of multiple Santas Those summer evenings by the government lake, Sometimes I’m awakened in the middle of the nightīy the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty. She was destroyed when they were busted for operatingĪ private judicial system within U.S. Like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz. “all water is classic water” and shyly turned her face away.Īt volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers On what we should do next and the time she said I remember how she would always get everyone to vote That the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams. I remember being in her father’s basement workshopĪnd the night we got so high we convinced ourselves “think of me as a place” from her sleeping bag The consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach. I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for

Escape whisper valley hidden objects