Showing posts with label Dennis Cooley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dennis Cooley. Show all posts

Sunday, October 1, 2023

rob mclennan : An interview with Dennis Cooley

 

 

 

 

 

Q: I’m wishing to better understand how it is that you write, and put manuscripts together. Both body works (University of Calgary Press, 2023) and The Muse Sings (At Bay Press, 2020), for example, incorporated poems originally published in your Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) and Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), with further pieces from this latest collection from Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996). What does this mean for you in terms of composition? Are body works and The Muse Sings manuscripts that you’ve been slowly picking at for some thirty to forty years, or are they more recent, simply pulling threads from earlier collections?

A: Mostly, almost always, I construct books off material I have been assembling for years. Sometimes that means salvaging something that never got into earlier books. I’ve kept paused or undeveloped material that was part of earlier mss. So, I’ll have swatches of residual work from most of the titles, especially those from the last 20 years or so. They might involve pieces that are nearly “done” when I remove and take them into a new ms. More often, they will contain scatters of notes, strings of cognates, quotations, references, research data, rhymes, phrasings, research informationreminders, remainders, and even drafts of poems. I keep them in a few identified folders, and will move them between folders, knowing I might use them somewhere or other. The gathering helps me find something that I likely would forget, and that I might one day run with. It’s banking. A lot of it is goofy and outlandish, but mostley it amuses and impels me.

The two books you specifically ask about have drawn on what I’d been pecking away at for years. Some of it developed in extensions on earlier publications. body works continues a history that started at least in 1987 with the publication of soul searching. The title led some who had heard of the book but never read it mistakenly supposing I was a believer in angels. The book pretty much sympathized with the body and lamented the imperialism of angels and snobs. Years later I wrote departures (2016), based on a few weeks with a ruptured appendix—more appreciation of the body. body works became the latest incarnation of the concern. As I was assembling it I wrote a lot of new pieces, but what I had learned and what I had done in the earlier books didn’t disappear. I looked back through them, found a few pieces that would fit, and brought them, revised, into it. I’ve often reviewed related writing and revived it within a new field. Part of the impulse is to “save” the pieces. Some of them come from out-of-print books, and from books with limited exposure. A saving from being unknown; that's the hope, at least. If I am justified in my belief that I have improved any of them, or at least altered into new understandings, it can be a saving from being unrealized too—in the original piece and in the accommodating text too. The threads seldom consists of particular passages from earlier publications, but the spirit of earlier books continues.

In the case of body works I had already assembled a lot of material in notes and drafts. Once I had identified the focus of a collection I worked quickly and put together a manuscript within a year or two. The folder-keeping functions as a preparation, even when there is no discernible subject in mind.

I also gather in a more focused way. For years I have kept sites for particular projects that I’m keen on. The most dramatic version of the practice must border on lunacy. As you know, I have been labouring on a ms, love in a dry land, for a long time. I can’t say exactly when I conceived of it as an actual project. But it did begin as an attraction for the characters in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House. I am speaking here of my interest as a poet, I had always found the novel powerful and moving—poetic, I'd say. I am unsure about when I started writing, but it would have been 1989 at the very latest. I have worked on it ever since and it grew and grew. I wrote and revised year after year. Two books, country music (2004) and the bentleys (2006), and a chapbook, the bentleys (2006) have come out of it. In addition to what mostly went into those mss., I have ended up with far more than 700 pages of other poems, and hundreds of pages of notes. I have just now, in the last week, finished two new manuscripts from that larger file and submitted them to publishers. One of them, I am proposing, will be called love in a dry land, the title that supervised the decades of work.

I have simply shed hundreds of pieces but many of the deletions I have already begun assembling as part of another, quite different ms.

And there's the Germany book that has had little if any distribution. Almost nobody in Canada has ever seen passwords.

Q: I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that you compose manuscripts that large, excerpting, as you suggest, into manuscript lengths more palatable in size for potential publishers. Is there a difficulty in conception between the singular project and the excerpted-manuscript? How do you pull such threads out of a tapestry to find self-contained book-length works out of such largess?

A: Funny you should ask.

I invariably build up an enormous pile of material. Some of it becomes well-developed and builds in pieces toward a book. A lot sits in another location as patches or drafts that may or may not go further. An awful lots gathers in notes that i constantly transpose from hand-written scribbles into a cache kept on the computer. Sometimes i simply addend stuff at the end of the digital file, or drop it into particular spots. The ms that I have identified as the project proceeds through addition and deletion and emendation and repositioning. The related cache develops along a crude parallel and includes stuff that has struck me as possible or promising. The files grow at the same time, never equally.

I seem unable to call it quits on either front. I will also be developing in other files stashes I may take up for other projects.

There are these heaps, and what to do with them? Where to take them? And when? So long as the impulse to write persists I keep writing. The winnowing is exhausting—because there is so much to process and because I persist in changing texts, inserting others, writing more. I plunge on, often with no end in sight. The poems evade me.

The extracting is exhausting because I always feel there is more to do, you can never be done. I always quote the line from Mallarmé (or Auden as I first encountered it): A poem is never finished, it is abandoned. But it’s hard to let it go. I find it painful to pull out what I find attractive, and I discard it, or set is aside, with reluctance. I keep a lot of the excisions for other possible use, and will sometimes open a new leaD using what I have withdrawn, though the impetus will spill out and mutate into its own direction. (seeing red derived from work I had been doing for goldfinger.)

I try to choose what I think are the most interesting pieces and the most accomplished ones. I want language that is alive and am quick to drop what seems to me ordinary and flat and uninspired. I am also looking for pieces that “fit,” whatever that might mean. I’ve a pretty liberal sense of coherence, and cogency, but I do remove what I feel does not belong, even if I like it. What I end up with undoubtedly will be marked by features that a reader would identify as mine, but  I also look for variety and range in the selections. Though it is probably true that for at least chunks of writers’ lives they go on writing the poem that is their poem, I don’t want to write one in small variations on it.

Not much of an explanation, really. It’s a long and exhausting job. The two newest mss that I have sent out only a week ago came out of months and months of shaping what must have mounted to a thousand pages. As I focused on the new collections I assembled preliminary piles, then worked toward a difficult disposing and including that constantly moved.

Q: So then: when a published collection emerges out of a mound of such largess, how do you consider it? Do you see that as the finished work, or as a thread of a larger project that might never see the competed light of day? Or of multiple collections out of a single work? Do they exist as titles-in-sequence or pulled threads? I suppose my real question, here: is the project the process or the completed, published book or books?

A: I don’t know how to answer. What I am inclined to say would not be very satisfying. I don’t make a distinction among the options you raise. I guess I’m unsure what you might mean by “pulled threads.” For starters I’d say that the published collection is never a finished work. It exists in its own right, but what’s there is never settled in what I have done or might do. If I understand your terms, I’d say that the work is always product and always process, and I would think of it as as lurching back and forth. The work generally would might remain in process for any number of reasons, most of them predictable. There's a sense that the ms is unrealized or inadequately realized; a failure of energy or attention; a sense of nerve or failure; a redirection in priorities; simple distraction; the want of a magazine or publisher; a desire or need to continue on a project. I always revise and redirect, even with published stuff.  I welcome the opportunity, as in, say, bringing into body works the residues you have found; or more dramatically in developing what is almost a second edition of Bloody Jack. Things could be made better, or different, or newly functional. The texts don’t close for me.

Again, my response may not answer the question.

Q: Well, I describe as “pulled threads” because I don’t know how else to describe a manuscript of one hundred or so pages that would emerge out of a larger manuscript nearing a thousand pages. How else would one describe the process of pulling out poems to shape something smaller in scale? And I’m curious as well about the process of you returning to and adding pages to Bloody Jack: were these pages that were originally composed during the period you were putting the first edition together, or were they newly-written pieces?

A: The work is getting a fair way off by now. I do remember that I wrote a new conclusion the second time around, “at the bridge, Penny.” I also added some “cinematic” pieces that I had already written but not in time to include in the first Bloody Jack. I removed at least one part from the original. I am attaching a graphic of the file listing “new poems, added.” I’m not sure how complete that is, but it would give you some idea. Also: “jail break,” some “cunning” bits, a score for “by the red.” There are probably others, and likely lots of little changes, but these I can’t remember. There probably are traces of them in the material that remains from working with U of Alberta.

Q: How easy or difficult was it for you to re-enter a published work after that much time?

A: Easy for me. Easy, and enjoyable.

Maybe because the book in the first place was an exercise. I had early on conceived of it as a loose drama, an assembling of many different styles and voices (somebody else’s in a way), a compendium of widely varied forms. It was a rough drama and a half-assed encyclopedia, I thought. When Kroetsch showed up in the middle of the writing, he gave me a copy of something by Bahktin, and I realized, that’s it, I’m writing a Menippea.

The book was not particularly personal, so I hadn’t a lot of emotion invested in it. I was able to come back to it not having much of that attachment, and so felt free to change it as a lucky second chance. The whole thing was a gift—all that wild material around the Krafchenko story, and all of the formal possibilities.

Q: You mention that almost no-one saw passwords, a collection of journal entries from your time teaching in Germany in 1980. Wasn’t there another journal entry you published, I think part of Sunfall: New and Selected Poems, that was composed from your hospital bed after your appendix burst?

A: This stuff became a basis for departures, the book that ambled around the ruptured appendix. As I remember, you found that book strange and hard to centre. I thought that the material in sunfall was a mix of prose and poetry. Maybe not. I say this without reviewing it, but that’s what I had supposed. I always work with a loose sense of what counts as poetry, and what I’m willing to call poetry. Often, I work with intergeneric stuff. The journals exceed any ordinary definition of the form; they’re bulging with crazy rhymes and the words of people I encountered and jokes and fantasies and parodies and rapid shifts in voicing and ironies and eruptions of sounds and rhythms, lyrical outbursts and elegiac moments,  patches of nonsense —the sorts of stuff that would violate the truth-telling function of the journal. I think of the journal as a place where I can let go, and let in. I think I mentioned something about wanting language that is demonstrably alive. I think of what I do in journals in much the same way. I often play and invent and reach for something more than sober recordings. Quite often they include passages marked with ragged right margins and a lineation that in almost any other context would announce they are poems; or think they are; or would like to be considered as poems.

Q: I’m wondering at your use of the prose journal over the years. Given your suggestion that you publish far less than you produce, is the journal form one you utilize often? What prompts you to compose a journal over, say, working on a poem?

A: Almost entirely circumstantial, that and the excitement of trips. Many of them included family and friends and colleagues. I kept only one journal before the summer of 1990. And I have kept journals when I was travelling for a long stretch and then usually under literary or academic circumstances. They took a lot of time and energy, all the way into keyboarding and editing. The first journal, which I have taken to calling “Travels with Dave,” came from May, 1978, when he, Daniel Lenoski, and I were in Lahr, Germany, were ending up our teaching for a first-year English course for the Canadian armed forces and their spouses. And then a series of others in 1994, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002—all from visits to Europe. I kept notes by hand, and increasingly by keyboarding over the years. After I got back to Winnipeg I keyboarded everything, sometimes within months, sometimes over several years. I always edited them, trying to make the writing more vivid and fresh, and more detailed too (no way could I have entered many of the passages right there on the spot amidst workshops and visits and talks and classes and presentations and travel and you know what this is like). I invariably arrived home with dozens of notes on scraps of paper and napkins and coasters, including names and addresses that sometime bewildered me: who was this? Why did I write this down? The keeping was a nuisance sometimes, and often inconvenient, but i enjoyed it at every stage. There was always the old writer’s pleasure in fitting a word.

The journals enabled me to remember. And to construct a record of cultural events. They also helped me to pay attention. Without the alertness that a journal requires, I would not have noticed all kinds of things. And I would have lost a lot of memories that I have turned, and hope to have turned, into poetry. When reading the 2001 journal, for example, as I am doing now in response to your email, I feel a pleasure in what it has kept for me.

Q: Have you considered attempting any further journals into print?

A: I have, yes, but I’ve made no attempts so far.

Love to find a place for something.

 

 

 

                 - see rob mclennan's reviews of Dennis Cooley's three 2021 poetry titles here.

 

 

Dennis Cooley is retired and living in Winnipeg. Recent titles; gibbous moon and body works.

Photo credit: Jan Horner

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan will probably be in Winnipeg on October 21, launching World’s End, (ARP Books).

Sunday, July 3, 2022

Dennis Cooley : Monty Reid’s Flat Side

 from Report from the Reid Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

          Flat Side brims with humour and bereavement.

          The humour is everywhere evident and invigorating, and it can be laugh-out-loud entertaining. It is always fresh, and it flirts with the absurd and the macabre. Endowed with Reid’s folksy and extended personifications, things dwell in very human ways on their prospects and their successes. Curling rocks aspire to what they suppose are their fitting places on the ice. They watch with apparent dismay as other uppity rocks arrive at more satisfactory sites, “whispering their thank yous / and condolences.” Telephones abandoned in an orgy of new technology wait in storage with their wires and diaphragms to hear despondent messages and faint greetings. The telephones, rendered obsolete, speak only in murmurs and whispers.

          The book is full of such whimsy, but it also treats the comic scenes as occasions of pain and loss. The telephones never connect, not really, not in any sustained way at least, and they are “depleted to the heart.” Even the smart-alecky pun that accompanies the telephone story registers a sudden sadness at having lost what most matters: “they can no longer remember what it feels / to be held in someone’s hands.” The zucchini, “bruised souls,” who in another poem drag themselves cumbrously across the dirt, feel “nothing more / than . . . left behind.” It’s a playful notion, the race of the zucchini, but the zucchini who languish in disappointment have in some way to make up for their defeat. In the poet’s mind that means learning “how to / imagine themselves as something else.” The eventuality is realized in “Flat Side,” which outlandishly announces that the poet is transfiguring into a flat-sided man. In free-roving gests and meditations the poet tries out the permutations. The flat-sidedness, we soon learn, can be accounted for within scientific discourse. The terms that abound—”interstitial fluids” and “thermal gradient” and “laminar passages” and “the bonds dissolute among the spicules / and microscopic cavities” and “aggregated molecules”—seem to be based in firm no-question understandings. They also sound like a mad parody—a voice that is too much of, too satisfied with, such authority. In any event the poem does not settle for the jocularity or the erudition it enjoys. It arrives, like so many poems in Flat Side, at a quiet wisdom: We “release and spring back resolutely,” because “we are only remembering / the persistent order of ourselves.” Though “unbalanced,” our identities are “persistent.” And so the poet can ask the question of the day that defines our lives: “is it also not misshapen / but ours nonetheless?”.  How like are we to the curling rocks that risk a long and precarious way across the ice: “now that all of those who promised / to come with us are gone / how will we return?”. How are we to deal with such loss? How are we not to see ourselves in the rocks and the telephones, their yearnings and disappointments?

          The book attends to what for Reid abides beneath, or within, the world’s satisfactions and vexations. It thinks of the self as variously necessary, mislaid, unfound, or unrealized. Though the guffawingly funny “Atkinson’s Ghost” laughs at a dotty spiritualist, it acknowledges “the unfinished part of everyone, the surplus aura that every host leaves behind.” In another poem “the most necessary / version of ourselves is always brought back to us,” even “when we thought / we could let it go.” Another poem, “Near the Beisecker Bio-Medical Waste Incinerator” hears in the steam issuing from the windy “throat of the world,” and from an incinerator that is spilling sooty particles into the air, “some music that really did call the presence of each / living thing onto itself.” The poet does not turn from the dreck of the facility, or the horrific details of an illness, or from his own pain in losing something of his son into the fire. In a religious vocabulary distributed across the poem—”retributive,” “innocence,” “ceremonial,” “snake,” “ritualistic,” “cask,” “cairns,” “cadaverous,” “smoke,” “fire”—it names the mutualities of life. The experience culminates in the intimate terms of personal loss. The skinny bewildered son who has died beyond the reach of the father’s arms is held in the poem “as if love is always the knowledge / of what it has not accomplished.” The sacramental sense is powerfully realized, no easy matter, here and elsewhere (as in another poem the family gathering around the table, say).

          The world, we see, may be renewed in the seasonal turns which we experience in simple concrete words: the trees will “stir with the first warm rains.” There are returns, there are recoveries. There are discoveries. Many of the poems end on a high note. This is especially true of “Previous Owners,” a brilliant comedy about visitors who arrive unexpectedly on the poet’s doorstep. Their incredulous stories about the house’s remakings and occupyings gather force until the current occupants are swept into a fervor of renovation. “We restored,” “We planted,” “We made.” The latest effort is so determined and so thorough it is almost laughable. In a bout of enthusiasm the new occupants “scraped down / through . . . through the coral and lime and cream, down through / the undercoat”—all the way through the flotsam of earlier inhabitants—until at last they reach “the original wood, and / started over again.” They reach bedrock, Reid might well have said. The repetitions in grammar (we did, we did, we did) and in preposition (“through” and “through” and “through” again) draw out the undeterred force of their intentions. We feel amused at their susceptibility to the story, but we see that the stressings also articulate a reaching for something else. They bring the almost dottering gestures of those who had once lived in the house to a poignant connection. They are portrayed as silly in their ardor, true, but they are construed as sympathetic too in looking toward a larger life: “trying to remember / What it is they left behind,” where “they had penciled in / the small additions of their love. Elsewhere a strange woman, who impossibly sees a new-born or unborn infant as “crying down towards the earth,” decides “there must be more of you somewhere / . . . left behind, or escaped.” Here, as so often in Reid, the route to meaning lies down and through. The trajectory is strongly felt in a line that fuses the natal and the Edenic: “And then you fell alone into the dilated world.” Loss and jeopardy permeate Reid’s book. He searches for meaning or a smidgeon of innocence to help when you are “out here on your own” among “old messages, unlisted.” Wisdom lies in the forgotten or the not-yet perceived. The stance is certainly elegiac for Reid, but it is never regressive. In his writing we live uncompromisingly in the present.

          It may seem surprising to lean that Reid’s world—crammed with its obdurate materials—is not untended. But in unperturbed moments we do see that “the stars twinkled their / inevitable advice towards us” when we are born, and that “switch after switch of starlight / blinks on as if it would light the way” for the zucchini going to who-knows-where. The speaker in these lines smiles in small equivocation—Is the twinkling for sure “inevitable”? and is the perky intercession of the stars only an “as if”?—but the caring, frisking lights do turn on. From even the bleak and dispiriting incinerator (“paid for by my tax dollars” Reid dryly notes), which consumes remnants from human bodies, the steam “falls tenderly / upon us all.” And so, he measures the ordinary and extraordinary world in ceremonial ways. For all the mockery and all the mad inventiveness in the book; for all its erudition; for all the wonderful vital and parodied voices (think of the confiding, hectoring, ingratiating mother in “Lost”) Reid’s poetry lays itself in simple risk and hope before us. The earnest and perplexed visitors to the poet’s home, who see and do not see, in the visionary terms that end “Previous Owners,” are prepared to step

over the threshold, with all their dates mixed up
and still, as they enter the persistent light
of this old house, they say they

recognize everything.

Staunch though the poems may be, they invite us into tenderness and a quiet hope that we might invent, if not come upon, glimpses of a fine and beloved place. They do so in simple words and in rhythms that are almost iambic.

          About the long poem. Reid loves the form, as we can see and he attests. He uses it well to expand and to enrich a site. The term is handy enough to allow a large latitude in subject, treatment, and instance. Most of Reid’s long poems in Flat Side might be usefully called “serial.” Four of those included (“Flat Side,” “La Gunilla,” “The Shale Disparities,” and “Near the Beisecker Bio-Medical Waste Incinerator”) seem to be directed by personal and perhaps professional narratives, and to stretch out alongside the rest of the book in comparatively flexible, expanding, and frequently redirecting forms. The other pieces (“Burning the Back Issues,” “Lost,” “Previous Owners,” “Atkinson’s Ghosts,” “Five Smaller Dreams,” “Draw Weight,” “Migration of the Zucchini,” “Learning to Play ‘Blackberry Blossom’,” and “Phone Lesson”) appear to have been created within a serial mode. Their numbering of subsections does not by itself distinguish them from the other ones, which observe the same practice. However, what is set within those numbered parts is different. The most obvious instance probably comes in “Five Smaller Dreams,” whose parts seem almost nailed together. The dreams are tenuously related and only loosely gathered under the topic. And under the assurance that there are five of them. The whole poem that includes but never subsumes the five dreams is structured upon addition: here’s one, two (a spectacularly funny and alive piece, by the way), and a few more. The strategy could carry a poem indefinitely as a series of variations on a theme.

          Others of this sort are more strongly focused on a site. “Atkinson’s Ghosts” portrays a series of hilarious anecdotes which concern a professor recently arrived on campus, a recently departed professor, and an interloping spiritualist. “Previous Owners” provides the buoyant histories, story after story, that gather around the poet and his spouse’s understanding of their own occupancy. In composing the poem Reid must have been asking what other stories he might remember or invent. “Lost” assembles seven bizarre parts that circle stories of the narrator’s infancy and bits of his later existence. And so on. The most focused of the serial poems, “Burning the Back Issues” (a facetious play on one of William Carlos Williams’ poems) renders the act as a witty and troubling comedy which passes through many shifting voices.

          Reid’s poems rustle with rambunctious humour and large shifts in tone and register. In some ways they are also unperturbed. Many of the poems, especially the serial poems, are visually organized within neat shapes. The stanzas in those poems tend to replicate one another, sometimes in small units of two lines, or in larger units that in size and shape are close to one another. They also observe left justification and fairly consistent right margins. Cumulatively they create an impression of steadiness, as if the expansive imagination and the anarchic energy so characteristic of Reid’s poems were somehow managed or at least lessened within them. The clear and frequent spaces that open between the stanzas and the numbered sections allow a reader to ease across the poem, a chance to come up for air and to regather in brief repose.

          The point may seem more cogent when we consider the topography of those poems that are not so modally organized. Take “Flat Side.” The eight subsections in it feel more destabilizing, though their parts are comparable in bulk and so, we might suppose, comfortable in their own skin. What happens within them represents a drastically different cast of the horizontal. The lines stretch far across the page to create a strong sense of fullness, as if whatever impels the words needs more room, perhaps as if there is lesser room (physiologically) for the reader. The effect is intensified by irregular and sometimes large indentations that fling us off the margins. The fissures imbue the text with torque:

            Or there is the alternative
possibility that we sleep this way because so many others have
and we are only remembering

                                                
the persistent order of ourselves
which is both out there and within us.
 

Have you not also
                             
felt it?

The pages persist margin to margin, and they open gaps dramatically within themselves. The results are compounded by a high level of abstraction, scientific vocabulary, and latinate diction, the work of an erudite poet who releases the philosopher in him. Compared to the more symmetrical and briefer parts of the serial poems, they show strain and require effort. Even their stanza- or sections-breaks feel less self-sufficient.

          These poems, too—all of the poems—flash with humour and invention.

 

 

 

 

Dennis Cooley’s latest book is Gibbous Moon with At Bay Press. Body Works is forthcoming at University of Calgary Press. Photo courtesy of Pat Sanderson.

 

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

Monday, November 9, 2020

James Lindsay, Dennis Cooley, Gerald Hill, Paul Pearson + Carrie Hunter : virtual reading series #21

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

James Lindsay : “Tinnitus”

James Lindsay is the author of Our Inland Sea, the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!, and Double Self-Portrait. He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing. He lives in Toronto.

Dennis Cooley : “the prairie muse explains her role :” from The Muse Sings (2020)

Dennis Cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and has lived most of his life in Winnipeg, where he has been active in many parts of its literary life. Latest books include departures, the muse sings, the bestiary, and coldpress moon.

Gerald Hill : “Brother B., Order of St. Benedict, Monk,” “Page of Train” and “When I Become Poet Laureate, Part the Last”



Gerald Hill just published his 7th poetry collection, Crooked at the Far End, from Radiant Press. A two-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry, he was Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan in 2016.

Paul Pearson : “The Assayer” and “Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences”

Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Carrie Hunter : 3 poems from Vibratory Milieu.

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press, and was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books. Her forthcoming book, Vibratory Milieu, comes out January 2021 with Nightboat books, and she has two previous full-length collections, The Incompossible, and Orphan Machines, both with Black Radish Books. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.

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