Friday, April 2, 2021

rob mclennan : The Bestiary, cold-press moon and The Muse Sings, by Dennis Cooley

Dennis Cooley, The Bestiary
Turnstone Press, 2020

Dennis Cooley, cold-press moon
Turnstone Press, 2020

Dennis Cooley, The Muse Sings
At Bay Press, 2020

 

 

 

I know it isn’t impossible for a poet to publish three books in the same calendar year, but there aren’t many who see three poetry titles appear in the same season, let alone two with the same publisher. Winnipeg poet, editor, critic and teacher Dennis Cooley’s work has long been expansive, exhaustive and far-reaching, stretching across years and manuscript pages, and the second half of 2020 saw the publication of his collection of poems around prairie beasts, his collection of pieces reworking myths, fables and well-familiar stories, and his collection of poems around the idea of the muse. Cooley is a poet in constant motion, yet one that also doesn’t seem to publish much in journals, especially given how much he has produced. Cooley is infamous for working on books for years, extending poetry manuscripts some six to eight hundred pages in length, before excerpting threads for potential book publication, and simply to look in the acknowledgements of each of these collections, spare as they are, is to begin to understand the length and breadth of some of these works. For example: one of the first Cooley titles I picked up upon arriving in Winnipeg in 1997 was goldfinger (Winnipeg, MB: Staccato Chapbooks, 1995), a chapbook of prose poems reworking fairy tales, a collection that is woven into cold-press moon. Until now, goldfinger did seem as an odd self-contained prose outlier, set as a cornerstone of this particular collection. One of but a small handful of credits for The Bestiary includes STANZAS magazine, my long-shuttered long poem journal, as he appeared as issue #45 back in April 2006. The Bestiary also includes a credit from his correction line (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 2008), potentially extending a particular thread from that earlier collection. It has become clear that to see any small work by Cooley out into the world is to suspect that there might be a full-length manuscript he’s sitting on that will eventually emerge, even if that might take some twenty or thirty years. He might be in constant motion, but he also doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. In this way, there possibly isn’t anyone else working in the way Dennis Cooley works on poems or poetry manuscripts. Stretching an idea into multiple, accumulative poems that is then carved down, or even selected, into a full-length collection. How, then, is the through-line of any Dennis Cooley poetry collection determined?

The Bestiary is exactly what one might suspect it is, a collection of poems on prairie beasts. Set into themed sections—“‘A Prairie Boy’s Eden’,” “THE FROGS,” “THE CROW,” “THE SPIDER,” “ARKOLOGY” and “THE BIRDS”—Cooley composes a lyric in constant motion, play and wit and bad jokes, a lyric that refuses stillness; even while describing stillness, merely a pause before the poem turns, and darts away. “an old hen   /barred / rock they called Hetty,” he writes, to open the poem “Hetty,” “Ms. Hen Rietta Lamour / and she was slow and lame // also dingy among / the persnickety birds / the hennaed chickens / that mince & fluff / in near disdain pick over the jewels [.]” Exploring his list of prairie beasts and childhood attentions and recollections, his lines bounce across pun and play, allowing the motion of language to propel where it might next land, bouncing off an idea or a fragment or a word stepping forth. The poems in The Bestiary are securely placed, set in prairie locale and language, among the sounds and stretched-out silences of the long prairie grasses and ahems, the patters of Cooley’s speech. “ttsskk tskk a grim taskmaster,” he writes, as part of the poem “is a victorian schoolmater,” “brisks to the ledge / one swift pass / sideswipes winter / / swipes the board clean [.]”

crow creates earth

scans the mud
she will call earth
wherever she spits

saliva glistens & pockmarks

crow watches the caribbean turn electric blue
tilts on her toes tints the days vermillion
smears them in chartreuse in cyan in rust

fills in cobalt & ochre indigo & goldenrod
adds woad & madder slate & ruby

daubs cadmium & manganese blue in burnt umber

in the coal-blue cold crow compresses until
her heart becomes so clear it cannot be
         
marked & will not break

         
gulps the raw new light
         
flings the stars over her shoulder

         
pins them onto the pewter moon

          cries out when she turns
         
back hears the spinning
         
gasps when she sees the blue

         
& white world for the first time
         
so bright & wetly shining

Cooley takes an idea and runs with it, writing out any and every possible thing, exhausting every facet, ever play and pun through poems, eventually compiling and excising the excess into serviceable book-length form. My impression is that Cooley doesn’t build up into a book as much as pare down, pulling out from the larger structure the threads that make up individual book-length structures. One could think of his work-in-progress, “love in a dry land,” a collection first referenced through poems appearing in his Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) as well as in “the Dennis Cooley issue” of Prairie Fire magazine in 1998, a series of poems based on Sinclair Ross’s first novel, As For Me and My House (1941), composed from the point of view of the character of Mrs. Bentley. To date, the manuscript appears to have emerged not only as The Bentleys (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), but of the collection published prior to that, Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004). Might there be further collections that emerge from that particular manuscript?

The ways in which Cooley constructs a book around a subject or idea does seem a bit more expansive than in previous collections, but that could easily be something that has developed over his decades of book-making, from his long poem about his late father, Fielding (Thistledown Press, 1983), writing outer space and astronauts in This Only Home (Turnstone Press, 1992), writing his late mother through the poems in Irene (Turnstone Press, 2000), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and other vampire tales in seeing red (Turnstone Press, 2003) or the physical bones and lines of the prairie in the stones (Turnstone Press, 2013). And of course, there was his expansive writing and reworking of the histories and legends of Manitoba outlaw John Krafchenko in Bloody Jack (Turnstone Press, 1984; University of Alberta Press, 2002), a collection influenced, in part, through his experience with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (House of Anansi Press, 1970). Bloody Jack is also a book that Cooley famously reworked and rewrote for the updated edition with University of Alberta Press, including returning a number of pieces and pages originally removed by editor David Arnason from the original publication (the difference between the 138 pages of the first edition, and the 280 pages of the second).

a lyric moon
clear as acrylic

the stepmother moves like wasps wraps the children in
wire ties up the tongues she warps and ensnares them
they can hardly walk barely talk their father does not

know what they say they are mute fall down without
reason the father tries to warn them warm them with

his voice she is taking away the words taking them
under her spell children children speak to me the father

is nearly worn out fears she will draw them in they will
stumble back into infancy into the forests dead to the

father and he pleads for them come back come back to the

house
where their stories are stacked like blankets they
can wrap around themselves but now they drag animal
shouts through their throats under the big O that rolls

overhead in circles and circe howls

          Asks of frogs in spandex swimsuits
         
they snap at their waists
         
proud of their wars and waterlines.

         
Dunno, dunno.

Nope, no kids round these parts mister. Yustabe but no
kids no more. Nope. (“THE FOREST,” cold-press moon)

cold-press moon works through well-familiar European stories and fables to classic monsters, writing stepmothers, Hansel and Gretel, The Brothers Grimm, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As the end of “The Forest” writes: “he hollows out a space in his heart for the words his chil- / dren carry in their pockets to warm all the stories they / ever heard or told [.]”

Cooley has a way of arriving at the bare bones of a story, of an idea, writing landscape or folk tales of lost children and stepmothers, and what moves out beyond the shadows. He even includes a sly reference to his friend, David Arnason, who wrote out two volumes, subtitled “fractured prairie tales,” of own short stories reworking fables and myths, both of which appeared through Turnstone Press: The Dragon And The Dry Goods Princess (1994) and If Pigs Could Fly (1995). As part of the piece “THE FATHER CONFERS WITH THE QUEEN,” a poem composed as part of a stretch of lyrics around the fable of the princess and the frog, Cooley writes out the queen, who speaks: “No, I simply will not hear this. That wonderful / Mr. Arnason know who knows all about these things from his / days at Gimli says he’s quite remarkable at the pool, a fine / young swimmer. A natural. And that is the end of it. I / will not hear another word.” There is something so compelling in the way his poems push, propelled by sound, ideas and image, endlessly pushing alternates and versions, such as the poem “GARRISON MENTALITY,” the first poem of the section “Rapunzel,” that begins: “awful the way you keep me // waiting why lady chat / elaine why do you do this / you into your curds & why // i send my feathered love / the shafts of light shift & sing / they ring & splinter against / your bedroom door [.]” Cooley writes so much around the core of a story, weaving an endless array of other threads and thoughts, composing poems as fragments, facets of the whole, set entirely in tandem with the rest of the collection, potentially incomplete outside of the larger manuscript.

always the blue mirror the Queen leaves behind
knows she will leave behind
her beauty squeezed like a lemon
 

The mirror is an egg, gold-framed. It could be a compact
the Queen opens to catch or chalk her face. The hinges
shut with a chunk like a per cutter.
 

She begins to feel she is limestone.

Mirror mirror she says who is and who is not the mirror
the minor who in all the land is? Who the most of all?
She has made a compact with someone on the other side

of silver, whose light & shadow move quick as spiders.

There, the mirror should have said.
Look into the mirror.
It is you. (“MIRROR,” “Snow White”)

There are such lovely flows and subtle shifts, from writing “lyre lyre pants on fire,” or even the title of the section that fragment rests within, the tenth and penultimate section of cold-press moon, “By the River Sticks.” The final section, also, including the delightful fragment: “you say what i say / is what i say you say // till everything is /rubbery from talk” (“IT’S OUR SLINKY WAY OF WALKING”). I am curious as to the final section of the collection, “Once Bitten,” that writes around Bram Stoker’s Dracula, especially given Cooley dedicated an entire poetry collection, seeing red, around the same character. One might ask what ground he would consider left uncovered from that prior collection, but, knowing a bit about Cooley’s work, I would wonder, instead, if that project prompted this (or vice versa). It suggests, possibly, that seeing red and cold-press moon are either sibling collections, or even part of the same larger project. “once bitten by poetry,” he writes, as part of the poem “LISTEN,” “your whole neck / aching with effort [.]” And why are so many of the lyrics of this cold-press moon populated with frogs? He hints at multiple, sly princes nestled across his fabled prairie, all of whom are hidden in plain sight. The poem ends:

you want to say some thing
your throat is shouting but
           
you do not know

     
what to do
               
there is no

     
one to listen to
one to care

The idea of the muse is something that has cropped up in numerous pieces of by Cooley over the years, writing poems around the act of writing as well as directly to the reader, so it is curious to see a full collection moving through those ideas in The Muse Sings. As part of such, two-thirds of the acknowledgments for this collection emerge from prior collections—his travel journal Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996) and poetry collection Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987)—seemingly pulling earlier of his own poems out of one context and setting them down into another. Or perhaps, instead, and again, these are jumping-off points, allowing him to further explore what he had merely touched upon in those earlier works. The Muse Sings is a collection of poems for and after other writers, writing almost as an extension of the work from his Dedications (Thistledown Press, 1988), writing out those in his reading and writing vicinity. As he writes to open “the poet loves her machines,” a poem “for Nicole Markotić,” “loves the way / the printer / clicks in dismay or in pleasure moves / its arm / seeks permission [.]”

poetry: the ins and outs of

have added glowing rubrics
and placed in the margins
small and exquisite notes

a red letter day

in strange languages
something shows through
to put a shine on
 

who’d have thought
would be our undoing
houdini inside the lines

drawn in ropes and chains
incandescent with moving
 

would surely have listened
and spoken with the dead

The poems of The Muse Sings examine the act of writing and how poems emerge, moreso an act of creation from within and surrounded by the tangible offerings of a community than the invisible hand of any of the nine Greek Muses. As he writes as part of “Dear Dubé,” a poem “for Paulette Dubé” thar references “Our Lady / of Perpetual Help Pool Hall,” “i want to be part of the thousand / shocks flesh is err to / that pool of help & forgiveness // exactly when, their lines true, they clear the table / with all the joy & clatter they can muster [.]” He writes of his muse, his musings; of friends and influence, astonishments, hopes and disappointments, even as he dedicates the collection to Mnemosyne: the Greek goddess of memory, and, according to Hesiod, the mother of the nine Muses. Cooley muses, and offers this to that which has prompted, influenced, and even amused, fueling his own ongoing works. And then, of course, another reference to David Arnason, in the poem “world of reference,” which is dedicated to him. As the poem ends, Cooley writing out the place where the two might still be able to meet, in the space of the written and printed page: “the long path our words follow / through swinging gates / we are paging one another [.]”

These three titles, read and published simultaneously in the same publishing season, present a curious triptych of Cooley’s range and stretch of concerns writing out the prairie landscape, memory, breath and perspective. He writes in the tradition of the Canadian long poem, but one that is presented as accumulation and exhaustive study through the form of a prairie lyric engaged with play and pun, propelled by sound, meaning and language, and set squarely in a blend of the real and the mythic prairie. Cooley has, over the years, composed prairie lyrics less a sequence of book-projects than a prairie life-long lyric; what bpNichol termed a ‘poem as long as a life.’ And one might suspect that this lyric will long outlive him, also. One might even suspect there will be far more to see.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com