When I heard that David Berman had died at 52, I felt like I'd lost a whole alphabet.

If you're lucky you've been spared these conversations, but there are entire groups of mostly sad people who speak to one another only in Berman lyrics. So Wednesday evening there was nothing for me to do except to find another one of those people, play some darts, drink a few beers, and swim through a few of Berman's albums, including the six he recorded with the Silver Jews from 1994 to 2008, and the one he released last month under the name Purple Mountains.

There are many different kinds of genius in songwriting, but Berman's genius was the kind a writer envies. Not in a weird way or anything. It's just that nearly every line in his best songs hit you in the gut like a good joke. So good it made you want to stop the track and hear the line again so you could recite it at the bar later, but then he'd deliver the next one before you could even hit rewind. So as a listener you were just stuck there thinking, "Damn, that's a good line. Damn, that's a good line. Damn."

Berman did not to me seem larger than life because he was so thoroughly of it, or at least the kind most familiar to me growing up in small-town Missouri. His indie rock/honky tonk songs made me feel as if the universe's great mysteries could just as easily be mined from the cashier's desk at a brick pharmacy in Roanoke as they could from any trust fund apartment in Brooklyn. I counted that as a service in a cultural world where it felt like nothing happened unless it happened in New York City.

Berman was also one of two big-time musicians who could write a good poem on poetry's own terms. (Leonard Cohen was the other one. Now there are none.) Actual Air, one of the best books of poetry written last century (and one that people actually read), influenced a slew of contemporary poets, including Mark Leidner, Heather Christle, and Jaswinder Bolina, just to name a few off the top of my head.

As a poet, Berman mastered the opening line, the surprising image, the lyric narrative, the warm abstraction, and the crucial skill of knowing when to use the Latin word or the German word. The real joy was his sentences, which sounded as if they were written by some hick philosopher who listened to a lot of Stephen Foster. If you don't believe me, read Imagining Defeat, The Charm of 5:30, or Self-Portrait at 28.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Not everything Berman said or wrote down had been lifted off of bathroom walls, but the wry, casually profound songs and poems he leaves behind come pretty close to answering that Austrian philosopher's famous call.

The Stranger's former arts editor, Sean Nelson, talked to Berman in 2008 during his tour for Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. In that interview Berman said, "There is that desire to not want to heap more bullshit onto the world and, to the degree that you are, to make it quality bullshit." In that spirit, I'll close by dropping a few of my favorite songs here.