Sadie Dupuis, _Cry Perfume_, and David Berman, _Actual Air_

 AS WITH OPTIC Subwoof, I reviewed Cry Perfume elsewhere--although that review I don't think has actually appeared yet--and as with Optic Subwoof I'm still thinking about matters I treated with careful circumspection in the review.

To wit: aren't books of poetry by songwriters better avoided, when you get right down to it? I mean...Billy Corgan? Jewel? Even Jeff Tweedy? Even the absolute greats? Jim Morrison's The Lords and the New Creatures and Dylan's Tarantula did not exactly...add to their stature.

Dupuis is a great songwriter (for indie outfit Speedy Ortiz--also main vocalist and guitarist), but that guarantees nothing. Tweedy is a great songwriter, but his poems were not that interesting. Yet Dupuis's book is good--consistently readable with several gems. And brought out by Black Ocean, no less. Definitely the real thing.

Still you wonder. Can you be on both paths? We might cite Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen...but even in cases like that one wonders how compelling readers would find the poetry if it lacked the aura the two of them possess as performers. Speedy Ortiz is not on the glamour train--maybe more like last-gasp vans headed down the highway to do shows in basement clubs, sleeping on couches, not showering for a week--but still, being in a band has more aura than any AWP conference. Can Dupuis achieve any kind of recognition as a writer that has nothing to do with her fronting Speedy Ortiz?

But maybe things are changing. As patron saint of what may be an emerging new world in which songwriters and poets are all one big happy is occasionally dysfunctional family, let me nominate the late David Berman. Not only were his songs with the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains brilliant and brilliantly performed, but his only book of poems, Actual Air, still delights after all this time (first published in 1999). Berman's poems do not much remind me of his songs, which tend to rhyme and to comment on Berman's own personal circumstances more often the poems do. The poems come from something more like a James Tate world, or the world of Donald Barthelme's early stories, sad and hilarious, immediately recognizable and utterly strange. He's a great songwriter and a great poet. Maybe Dupuis too is one of the early instances of a new breed.