What if every time someone had something to say about culture, they had to use words that included a silent e. Because the connecting tissue of culture is “silent” or abstract or pervasive or “you know it when you know.” Culture is assuredly run on invisible mechanisms. But for those times when you need culture for word making, the silent e makes the point in a very cultural way. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to put poetry and culture together, because poetry is insular. Poetry is like the endocrine system that inputs into the circulatory system so the body can make minor adjustments. It’s the quieter things any of us feel inside our bodies. How do you compare that to a culture that’s very loud?!
But for Dupuis, culture is a part of life. She’s literally in a band. She tours. And whatever the glamour people assume for that lifestyle, she’s in it. You could say Cry Perfume is an impressionist portrait of the self bracketed by glamour. It’s a catalogue of all the intersecting affect theories that go with “being in the band.” Dupuis is the image of the rock star on stage. She’s whatever a woman lead singer is supposed to be for fans who want to fuse the woman with the music they know her for. It sets the poems, then, to be public deflections, cool posturing, and also internal, intimate responses to whatever it is you’re doing as the coolest person in the room.
Like these are the monologues when you barely have time to think. Because the glamorous life is always pressing in on the self. So if the world is on fire, as people like saying on social media, Dupuis, the lead singer, is expected to have an improvisational stance towards the world. In a public way, many of her poems could translates to: “Nothing’s great, and everything’s likely to get worse.” But is that really what she believes? Or can she phrase that so it’s just Sadie Dupuis, lead singer, speaking. And she can believe it another way as Sadie Dupuis, woman who has to keep up appearances for the sake of the lead singer part of her? And is there a Sadie Dupuis who ever gets a break from all that? This tension among her selves can be seen most pointedly when a poem juxtaposes the private to the public. A lot of the book is involved the affected image-consciousness necessary for navigating through the glamorous life. But then there’s a poem like, “My Saturnalia,” where two different she’s appear. Both of them I read as Sadie Dupuis.
How is anyone supposed to keep living through this? How does Dupuis do it in her poems? She makes an elongated present tense. Even though it’s parsed out in phrased fragments. It reminds me a lot of Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle (see REVIEW: Synthetic Jungle (Curbstone Books, 2023)) It’s a poem that merely visits with resonance before moving to the next one. Because that’s one way to just say a thing. And then that thing just happen to have resonance with the general culture. I’m not entirely sure there’s ever concrete events I’m supposed to connect these poems to. Maybe a break-up in “Steal My Sunshine.” Maybe a press conference in “Hold Presser.” And so the book feels to me like an impressionistic portrait of the late 2010’s. The poet exists. The culture exists. And when these two facts exists there is a chemical solubility that can only be captured by poetry!
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.