A Cover: Self-Portrait at 28 – DC Berman

I asked for a copy of Actual Air for my sixteenth birthday, after reading what was probably the only poetry book review to ever grace the pages of Spin magazine. I don’t think we actually had the internet at home then, and I definitely didn’t have a credit card to order things online- but that subscription to Spin was a weird cultural gateway I religiously read cover-to-cover every month. (This, coupled with living in a small town with no music or book stores, led to circumstances like me being really, really familiar with the back catalogue of a band like Pavement, without ever actually hearing a Pavement song until years later.)

So I came to Berman’s poetry way before I fell in love with the Silver Jews. Actual Air was one of the first contemporary poetry books I owned, and was so different from anything I’d had access to until that point. The book is tangential and dryly funny – Berman has this direct delivery that makes his writing really accessible, but still unexpected. I was instantly charmed.

The new year and my birthday often make me come back to Actual Air. ‘Self Portrait at 28′ was the first poem I adhered to when I got the book, and for the past few years I’ve read it aloud on my birthday. It’s just fun to read – a chatty, thoughtful meditation. And it occurred to me that as I’m 28 today, it would be appropriate to revisit it. I made a little recorded cover that you can stream above, and read along with here.

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