The poet, translator, and editor Brian Henry (MFA '97) reminded me of this 2012 conversation between David Berman (MFA '95) and James Tate; it's quintessentially both of them. David Berman passed away August 2019; James Tate passed away in July four years before. This conversation was originally published by the Academy of American Poets. David Berman's is a one-of-a-kind voice in music and in poems; his book, Actual Air, published in 1999 by Open City Books, has been and is avidly and faithfully read and loved. In 2009 Drag City published The Portable February, Berman's book of pictures and words. Grove press has just released a new edition of Actual Air.  So often someone who otherwise claims disinterest in poetry tells me David's poems took hold of them, and have held on ever since. If we're lucky we'll see a posthumous book before too long. David's poems name what's completely real in their unutterable, mysterious, paradoxical ways; his work never forgets the circumstances in which we're born, live and die, elemental, stark and singular. –Dara Wier