Matthew Cooperman
Pages from Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems, specifically, Olson mapping the planetary and tectonic swirl of North America, “astride the Cabot Fault.”
Readings
A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how that has shifted or remained constant for you over time
Theodore Enslin, Then and Now: Selected Poems (The National Poetry Foundation, 1999)
I’m not sure I can locate when exactly I felt legitimately to be “starting out,” but I’ve always believed that one’s reading is necessarily ahead of one’s writing, and the things one finds exciting to read take a long time to show up as practice. That was and continues to be the influence of Theodore Enslin upon my work. His name popped up occasionally in Black Mountain annals, and I had purchased Then and Now: Selected Poems, sometime during my PhD. But it wasn’t until I was in Provincetown, on a fellowship at the Work Center––the year after I finished my doctorate––that I really read him. And it knocked my socks off. First, there is the serial practice, and the more one leans into Enslin, the more profound the daily undertow. He wrote over a 100 books, and some of them––Ranger, Sequentiae––are 700-1000 page volumes. And they find their stride in the way they repeat, mutate, notate, evolve.
Second, his musical training––he was a composition student (alongside Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland!) with Nadia Boulanger, so the real deal. And it shows in the musical structures of his poems, from the early “The Diabelli Variations,” to Music for Several Occasions to the multiple volumes that employ cantus firmus, to the extraordinary late book Nine, which combines nine chapbooks into a reiterative structure that––in the number of lines in each poem, and in the number of poems in each volume––is divisible by three. A kind of prime of Nines. And all of this counting and containment manifests in these sonically gorgeous echoic poems that seem absolutely free, a kind of singing. It's really extraordinary.
The third thing I learned from Enslin was his habit of daily writing, or daily writing generated by walking. In that way Enslin’s work participates in the great tradition of walking literature, from Basho to Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara to Brian Teare. And he used his walks to count his poems, a proprioceptive generation. I had this elaborate theory of his “walking” habits, and I presented it at the National Poetry Foundation’s “Poetry of the 1960s” at the University of Maine. I was well into the paper when an éminence grise (it turned out to be Albert Gelpi) asked, “Well, Ted, whatcha think about this guy’s walking thesis?” From the other side of the room a wiry Santa Claus-y man stomps a walking stick (he made his living partially by making them) and says, “I write while I walk, I cut the cards to size.” He gestured to his shirt pocket, where sure enough a stack of card like paper sat. In other words, the paper and the shirt size and the walk all corresponded, created a kind of physical limit that replicated itself each day.
I had the extraordinary opportunity to visit Ted that summer, with Jonathan Skinner and Michael Kelleher. We walked around his blueberry farm (his other employment), and he showed us his writing studio. I learned so much from Theodore Enslin, mostly my disposition toward serial poetics. It’s a pattern I’ve engaged in in every book I’ve written beyond my first.
A singular book of poems from the last ten years
Jennifer Scappettone, The Republic of Exit 43: Outakes & Scores for an Archeology and Pop-up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016)
One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last ten years is Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43: Outakes & Scores for an Archeology and Pop-up Opera of the Corporate Dump.
It investigates, documents, collages, filters, excavates, repudiates, remediates, and sings to a decommissioned copper mill and the Syosset Landfill, and through a chorus of voices, guided by Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The landscape is adjacent to where Jen grew up, just off the Long Island Expressway. The book’s part docupoetics, part postmodern masque, part activist punk pastoral. Jen’s exhumation of the landfill is a kind of underworlding; she sings to it, baffles it, anodynes it—a childhood adjacency that’s also a Superfund site. Unfortunately, the dump is also the carcinogenic agent in her mother’s unsuccessful battle with cancer. So a deeply moving conflation, a site-specific investigation of one’s childhood nemesis, and also a metaphor for America’s toxic ecology that turns out to be anything but a metaphor. It’s really stunning, as much a visual collage––Scappettone is equally a visual artist––as a book of poems. And it’s an Atelos book, super high production value, four color printing. You experience the dump as a collaged stratigraphy, the primary colors or toxins, or in blurred strips that resemble passing the dump at speed. Exit 43 off the LIE, a “third landscape,” to use the term of Gilles Clément, that you try not to see. And yet the horror show makes a beautiful book. So the very thing is a physical manifestation of the “digging,” a counterweight if you will. And a kind of ecopoetical intervention that odes and elegizes the lost––the Pop-Up Opera––while also using the skills of archival research to unearth poisons, reworld place.
A poet you discovered for the first time in a literary journal
Joan Naviyuk Kane, from “White Alice Changes Hands.” Colorado Review (44.3, Fall/Winter 2017)
A poet I much admire––Joan Naviyuk Kane––first came to my attention over the transom at Colorado Review, where I am one of the poetry editors. An Inupiaq descended from King Islanders, her poetry traces the narrative of native relocation from the radical edge of the far north, mapping the legacy of colonialism in a remote place where it has not often been represented. Her northness, or “hyperboreality”––her third book is called Hyperboreal––manifests in spare, elemental poems, almost lithic at times, artifacts in a winter landscape. Her latest, Dark Traffic, explores this northness through the lens of the White Alice Communications System, a U.S. telecommunications network of over eighty sites built in Alaska during the Cold War. White Alice is ghost of environmental destruction in Alaska; White Alice is a story of deracination and diaspora through the forced removal of Inupiaq children to American Indian boarding schools. The same in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the same up north.
Reading her, discovering her early in her career, and supporting her work, was a real pleasure of editing. And I got to push Colorado Review editor Stephanie G’Schwind a bit with it as some of the poems are written, or “mirrored,” page to page, in Inupiaq.
Writings
Transport
after lava
before glacier
once covered
by a sea
the ore as carrier
in others
right
into the blood
visible transfer
venous
and arterial
through the canals
rains rain
and bring it up
from down
azoic life
from not life
the water table
set for lives a granite
slab a gate
a gage from core
ardor falls
in iron
a liquid bar beneath
the trembling sea
•
agate stone my own
I take from you Lorine
this chalcedony shine
on a creek October
near another explorer
Humboldt––
no Radisson
though we stayed there
named as complicit
on a different shore
of ore
as complicit
the circuit in the blood
the same question
again and again
how molybdenum
or resin or tannin
––word work
the stain flushed
to the surface
of the hands
•
“we are what the seas
have made us
longingly immense”
Christian Reorientation
Yule is an ancient festival of Germanic origins
dedicated to the Wild Hunt, a common motif
in northern European cultures involving the chase
of mythological figures (golden stags, chthonic babes)
escorted by hunters (ghostly dogs), lead by generally
Odin, a psychopomp of first order who dwells
in the liminal space between afterlife and souls,
crows, vultures, owls, things inhabited at every
level of immanence and connected at the core
to stars, seasons, gravity, the turn of the earth
on its celestial pole (Jul, Julblot, Jólblót, Joulu)
that becomes the log, the Christmas cake, a cross
strategy for souls of non-Abrahamic faiths
or cults to turn to sugar, sanctioned forms (see
the Venerable Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum) in the recognition that people were
easier to convert if they maintained the patterns
of their lives (earthly dogs), while changing the
object of belief, sly shift (see Pope Gregory), the re-
interpretation of sacred sites, cups, meta forms,
renaming of cities, symbols, recasting of calendars,
feasts and saints, the abundance of examples a practice
we simply call culture, absorptive singularity, turning
turning upside down the world tree of Yggdrasil.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), as well as Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions, 2016), the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, w/Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis, 2013), Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath, 2011) and other books. Cooperman received his BA in English from Colgate University, where he worked with Peter Balakian, an MA at CU Boulder, where he worked with Ed Dorn, among others, and a PhD from Ohio University, where he worked with Wayne Dodd and Robert DeMott. Currently a Poetry Editor for Colorado Review, and Professor of English at Colorado State University, he lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.