Poets and Writers Remember David Berman at The Believer

Poets and writers remember songwriter, musician, and poet David Berman, who died last year, for a tribute at The Believer. Contributors include Andrew Leland, Gina Myers, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Becca Klaver, Chris Stroffolino, and more. Klaver had this to say:

BECCA KLAVER: In David Berman’s poem “Cassette County,” there’s a non sequitur repeated twice, so that it becomes a sort of refrain: “anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.” If showmanship is a flair for performance, then anti-showmanship might mean a) refusing to tour, b) declining to self-promote, c) staying in your house reading books for the good part of a decade, or d) all of the above. However much we wanted him to be a rock star, Berman chose the role of anti-showman for most of his life. (I remember a Silver Jews show with a dark mood at the Metro in Chicago, DCB’s back to the audience, me nodding approvingly at this badge of anti-showmanship.)

The anti-showman exists in the same universe as the slacker—which is to say, the dream of the ‘90s and all its nostalgic resurrections. But he doesn’t necessarily slack off; he just spends his time doing things that are considered unproductive—working all day on a single internal rhyme, or spending an evening wondering how to add a joke to a dark couplet. He works behind the scenes, at home or staying local—even, perhaps, spurning access to the spotlight offered by his famous friends.

After reading Actual Air and listening to Silver Jews for the first time in my early 20s, anti-showmanship was the ethos I took with me into my adult life, for better or for worse. It felt like something pure, something only a poet could stand by (we are principled fools). Like many of my fellow Xennials, I looked to Gen X to define cool, which meant our heroes were sarcasm-spewing dropouts who refused to sell out. In other words, they were antiheroes.

Later, this all got more complicated. My veneration of anti-showmanship didn’t help my love life or my career, that’s for sure. And once I began to live into the fact that our culture encourages women, in ways subtle and overt, to take up less space, I wasn’t so sure that my ‘90s indie ethos was really serving me or my art—which I did, after all, want to share.

And yet still I know I can never really shake it off: this is how it goes when a hero’s way of being in the world imprints itself on you when you’re young. Even when Berman disappeared in one final, definitive dropout—there would be no shows, no tour—and the idea of not showing became something else (suicide, alienation, hopelessness), mixed in with my big grief there was a clear-eyed recognition of what he’d chosen: anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.

Read more at The Believer.