I’m at a very hip book store in an urban renewal part of Chicago. I know the store’s hip by the quantity of ‘zines, comic books and structural theory readers. Plus Angelo Badalementi’s eerie sounds are once more playing the role of atmospheric backdrop. I pick up a copy of Channel Surfing in America edited by Henry Rollins and flip through it, while eyeing the other people who have come to hear David Berman read.

David Berman, the chosen leader of the Indie band, Silver Jews. David Berman, who has written a book of poetry in which the back cover photo has him in a Robert E. Lee t-shirt. A detail I notice, for I attended college in a small Southern town where heritage still flew on flagpoles. The same small Southern town that David Berman was born in, although he opted for The University and is rumored to teach there on rainy Tuesdays. And while David Berman still sings about the birds of Virginia, he is stuck here today, entertaining the Midwest literati without the sounds of nature.

So he delivers such lines as “I suppose a broken window is not symbolic/ unless symbolic means broken, which I think it sorta does,” and causes his fans to nod along as if he’s the rock ‘n’ roll bard come to save them from their top 40 lives.

I try not to make eye contact with David Berman as he lounges in his army jacket and vintage Levi’s behind a rectangular fold-out table laminated in fake wood. Sitting there, is he contemplating why he chose to tell us about his recent flight on American Airlines? Believe we’d profit more if he had a guitar in his hand rather than a legal pad of unaccompanied language? Associate the table with the same kind of table he used to eat countless hot lunches off of in seventh grade? Or is its presence more concrete? Is this the beginning of a new poem? Has a poem about cafeteria tables been written yet?

I’d try. But I can’t seem to find the words which would best suit the orange plastic and fake wood environment. Words which would leave David Berman speechless in their profundity and humor. Words which fail me or I fail them. I accept the fact that I have nothing to offer up to the table. I have only a twenty-something’s idea of what’s cool and what’s not. A twenty-something’s idea of whose table I can sit at and whose I can’t. 20 some ideas. The last poem ends and I am the first one out the door. Words or no words. I am not cool enough for David Berman.