I recently got to write a guest post in The Small Bow, on late poet and Silver Jews frontman David Berman. I’ve always been a fan of a well-done braided essay without realizing that’s what I’ve been wanting to write all along. It’s a common term, but I only learned it a week ago, from Mike Ingram on an episode of Book Fight. Anyway, the piece longer than what I usually write, and it’s been well-received.
I’ve never been much for self-promotion. First, I’m from the Midwest. Second, I was born in 1973, which means I am exactly at the midpoint of Gen X. Third, I’m a goddamn Capricorn. Fourth, self-promotion puts you at dangerous risk of someone telling you how much you suck.
The end result of this stew is that when the Chicago Tribune announced plans to run a weekly youth column in the Tempo section in the late 1980s, teen me was absolutely certain my sample was going to be snapped up, which means I was harboring intense dreams of writing a column that the Trib titled “Whatever”. I have no memory of what my proposal was about, though I have to assume it was full of jokes lifted from Bloom County.
My dream was to be Mike Royko, writing whatever he wanted a couple times a week. He later became a hack with ugly old-guy opinions, coasting through these lazy conversations with himself. He had a fake persona - Slats Grobnik - that he’s faux interview to fill 25 inches with like 400 words about his Chicago youth. (If you haven’t seen a broadsheet in awhile, that’s a lot of empty white space created by gratuitous paragraph breaks.)
My truest, deepest self
Thing is, I had absolutely nothing to say and so little confidence that I knew it. After I flunked out of the science curriculum at University of Illinois, I started writing short stories, but I did not have the motor to keep up with the class requirements, so I’d reuse stories from semester to semester.
I copied a story my older brother wrote, called “Water”, which he later published in a Chicago zine that was seen by a woman from the class, who reached out to him because she remembered me. So she’s somewhere in my brain’s inferior gyrus - where shame lives - along with everyone else who knows the truth about how awful I truly am. When my parents moved out of my childhood home, they occasionally mailed me my undergrad short stories, sometimes with a Post-It attached that they “liked this one”. These, too, were often plagiarized, which was easy to get away with in 1993. I have no memory of workshopping “Spot That Mark Made” or “Not the Yakuza,” but I got A’s, since undergraduate creative writing classes are too low-stakes for anyone to care.
When I did write my own stories, they were high concept things that allowed me to riff. Like: “How about a story that takes place entirely in the Indianapolis Greyhound station men’s room, with roving perspectives?” Or: “OK, so the main character is named Stephen and the story is about his relationship with Jennie in Decatur, but it’s simultaneously set in every Decatur in the United States, each with a different Jennie. It’s called ‘Stephen Decatur’.”
That second idea’s not any higher concept than “Lincoln in the Bardo” and George Saunders won the Booker Prize for that. So I was on to something.
I eventually switched to poetry because I was legitimately moved by James Tate and Philip Levine, but also because it made it easier to hide my complete lack of direction. I was thinking of that tonight because of this poem:
Maria Negroni, from “Berlin Interlude”, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
I’ve been rereading my old poems, looking for the ones that "attain grace with no why” and thinking about how noble that is as a goal, and how I wish I’d written with that goal in mind. When I read my old journals, from when my alcoholism was at its worst, that sense of being unmoored led to panic and an overwhelming need to numb myself. In sobriety, I’m trying to find beauty in being unmoored.
Like how, just in the past week, occasional lightheadedness when I rise or drop too fast has become full-on vertigo, culminating in falling on my ass while transitioning to skandasana in Monday’s yoga practice.
Me: There’s beauty in that, too, right?
Slats: You should probably get that checked out.
Good one Ben. Thanks for sharing. 🙏 I hate falling on my face in Yoga. I hate headstands too. Hate not good in yoga 🙄🤷🏻♂️