Dennis Cooley : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Finding readers. A lot of poetry seems to fall into a big fat wide silence. 

50 years later 
                                       he sends 
             out words &
     they   barely come back
                                   no answer   no other

        words   only a    small voice
                  small & dampened
                                             talking to itself 

An almost bewildering number of writers appear by the day. Sites such as the ones that rob mclennan runs produce torrents of new writing. The wide and growing activity has got to be heartening, yet where are the readers? How to respond to the writing? Who can deal with the enormity? 

Dennis Cooley : part four

Why is poetry important? What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I find it hard to say, though I feel strongly that poetry offers experiences that other forms seldom can realize. I am struck by what Isobel Cunninghamm has said: “It lets air in between the dense and sometimes heavy ideas that are in the world.” 

Here’s what I wrote a couple of years ago in “19 Questions”:

But poetry. Poetry above all. Forget the embarrassing sales numbers, disregard the avowed aversions, set aside for the moment your own panicked flight when you were caught unsuspecting at a poetry launch. Poetry's the lucky terrain of what-ifs and just-supposings. It's in poetry that we speak most urgently, most eloquently, most pointedly, most succinctly to our unspoken selves. It is there that we happen upon anticipated or forgotten lives. When you fall in love you want a poem, you might even steal one and hope it will find favour, or at least speak for you. Else why the booming business for greeting cards? They perform a useful function, sometimes skillfully, but they are so generic that they immediately and everywhere become everyone's poem. Sometimes we want more, better songs to sing. When your spouse dies only a poem will do, and you wish you could find one or write one—a good one that says what for the rest of the time you cannot quite say or know how to say or bring yourself to say. No ordinary remembrance will do. You want, at least for yourself, a poem that can give contours to your loneliness and sound to your yearning. A poem to speak in wonder of what might touch you, or delight you, or bewilder you. In reckless moments you might even welcome a poem that challenges your understanding of what language and knowledge is, jolt you open to what strangely has been made and laid before you. You would like something to surprise you, with the sting of a mosquito bite, perhaps, to tip you into intimacies you had not quite realized were yours. When that happens you may feel a small shiver: yes, that's right, that's how it feels. Sometimes poems tell us what we don't know we already knew, and there's that rush of pleasure. Though you might not have said so, you have been waiting for a poem whose wit and rhythm rinses you with newness. You want lines, you hunger for lies, clever and unusual lies, that do not take as irrevocable what at our most tired and resigned and obstinate we suppose is the real and only world. When we are looking for something adequate to our desires we know that literalness and acquiescence won't hack it. We want to be alive to the world and stirred into something more. It's a more expanded and a more charged world we hunger for, even when we don't know it. That's why we secretly want the intensities and misadventures that we call poetry.
https://www.turnstonepress.com/aotm-author-of-the-month/aotm-dennis-cooley.html

Dennis Cooley : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I was mature when I started seriously to write. At that point I had read and taught and read about and written about a lot of poetry, especially twentieth-century poetry, so I was exposed to much that had been done or was being done. Since then I’ve developed a stronger sense of the page as a graphic surface, the letters as scores, the text as digital creation. Poets have lived at the membrane where poetry follows the ear and the eye into music and graphic art. New constituencies have proliferated in the literary world, following their own aspirations and strategies.

There are new opportunities too. The interent has opened exciting new opportunities to do dazzling new things, or things that once could be done only at great expense and effort. In a split second you can reach audiences and in ways that only a few years ago were virtually impossible. That is really encouraging. 

 

Dennis Cooley : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Everything is unfinished. It always is. I remember being outraged when learning that W.H. Auden said, or what somebody called Mallarmé said, a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. I took that to be an excuse for something worse than slovenliness. I've since come to agree with what he was saying.
In the practice of writing, or in at least one theory of language, you never can 'finish' a poem, if by 'finish' we mean fixed in place, once and for all, as if it had found an ultimate achievement beyond which you cannot possibly go. But you can never be done with the words and the shapes. I've come to think of the poem as something that is open and unrealized, immune to completion and  resistant to perfection. I believe in trying to polish them, making them shine, but they're never finished, as in done and totally sufficient. I never feel that what I have written cannot be improved, or altered into another no-less accomplished version. It could always take a small or even large swerve in another direction. The sense of the poem as a done deed doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
So when are you “done”? The limits often are practical. You get tired; you haven’t the energies to take it further. You haven’t time: the editor wants, the publisher insists; you yourself have to get on with the quotidian pressures of your life; you have run out of ideas, words, impetus, inspiration, models; you have other things to write; nobody in her right mind (or a mind to her bank account) is going to publish your 2,000 page poem; you lose oomph, purpose: the damn thing wears down your hopes and spirits; you are depleted mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically; you are discouraged, defeated, can do no more; you are elated with what you have done, or at least pleased, you want to find a reader you have an idea what sorts of editors may wait lovingly or unlovingly on the other side of the door, readers too; what it is they will bless or curse? 

You aren’t writing to god. You are a suffering, flawed mortal with your own dreams and limitations; you work in the sublunary world. You have to let it go at some point. You may have to learn to let it go.  

These words at the end of my book Country Music:

                                   I've done my best
                       no no   there's no need for thanks

        it is the least
                          i could do
               it's not as if i thought
         it was done
                                                           or anything
               that there could be no more
            not in the least

        what can i say
that's the way things go
whether or not they are finished

Dennis Cooley : part one

For decades Dennis Cooley has been active as poet, editor, teacher, critic, mentor, publisher in Winnipeg. He has published thirty books, including Bloody Jack, Irene, The Bentleys, seeing red, and The Home Place (a book on Robert Kroetsch’s poetry). the muse sings, cold-press moon, and the bestiary have appeared in 2020. 

Photo credit: Diane Cooley

What are you working on?

I have been working with the photographer, Michael Matthews, on the gibbous moon, a collaboration that is nearly reader for the press. Michael has produced a large number of stunning abstracts and I have provided the poems. Another collection, body works, which plays with ideas of the body and human mortality, is in submission with another press. I intend soon to return to one manuscript, 1931, concerned with the Estevan miner’s strike, which has been lying in wait for many years. I have on the go half a dozen journals that I have kept and edited over the years, and a collection of travel poems related to the journals. The most ambitious project, love in a dry land, has been on-going since 1989 and has grown into a comically large ms, which I am starting to shape for submission.