The years are piling up like Appalachian snow but I still feel sad that David Berman is dead, a long-burning suicide born of addiction and despair after recording a final album that is maybe not great but glows with an effortless, sanctified radiance. By then he was legendary in several underground ways, a post-punk icon obsessed with rabbinical inclinations and untamed guitars, though to my mind his signal achievement was writing the best book of poetry every authored by a rock star. “Self-Portrait at 28” is a beautiful ode to the sweet, ironic transience of Wordsworthian hipsterdom, while We are ranking the great shipwrecks is a line worthy of a forearm tattoo. Sure, there are better-known competitors for the title, from Jim Morrison (please) to Patti Smith (A for effort) to Leonard Cohen (for heaven’s sake) to the host of chucklehead celebrity popstars and whatnot with their stray collections of semi-coherent verse, pet marvels of awfulness. To be honest I don’t understand why, if you are rich and famous—like Drake or Meghan Fox—you want to slum around in Poetry Land. It’s a weird neighborhood and a bad job and the status is as dubious as it is anachronistic. We denizens can take solace in their projected magnification of our worth, I suppose, but we need not accept these annoyingly arrogant trespassers at face value. I am not a barber even if I sometimes trim my own beard. My wife is not a singer even if I once took a video of her at karaoke night that she has long sought to destroy. Shooting a few hoops in the driveway does not make you a basketball player—Michael Jordan is a basketball player. Meghan Fox is a movie star. Eddie Perreira was my barber until he retired at eighty-two to move in with his daughter in Port Charlotte, and even though the world races madly past every mile-marker of our grief I still miss him, as I miss David Berman, a poet and a rock star, which was not enough to save him.