By Word of Mouth: The Poetry of Dennis Cooley

Biographical Note

viii Biographical Note Dennis Cooley’s poetry has been influenced by William Carlos Williams, H.D., Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and e.e. cummings. As well, the prairies and Canadian poets such as Eli Mandel, Andrew Suknaski, Daphne Marlatt, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, and Robert Kroetsch have shaped and inspired his poems and poetics. Roaming the page, Cooley insists on disturbing the formal poetic inheritance he both esteems and from which he breaks away. Born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, on August 27, 1944, Dennis Cooley grew up in Saskatchewan and currently lives, teaches, and writes in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is married to Diane, and father of two daughters, Megan and Dana. He has written close to a dozen books of poetry, one literary travel book, a book of essays, and has edited five books. Dennis Cooley has published widely in Canadian literary journals, helped to establish the Manitoba Writers Guild, and was a founding editor of Turnstone Press. A 1998 issue of Prairie Fire dedicated an entire issue to Dennis Cooley’s writing, revealing his passion for writing, reading, teaching, literary dialogue, and his keen engagement with the world around him. His books take on historical and fictional characters— while never entirely curving into narrative—in order to recount the lessheard stories of the underprivileged and the unfamiliar. Writing becomes political when you play with “certain kinds of voices that might enter and might become honoured in a literary world,” Cooley says in Prairie Fire. That engagement with—and ambiguity of—speaking voices invites readers to question authority, to challenge institutionalized privilege. Again and again, Dennis Cooley returns to the prairie vernacular—not to reflect, but to play: “I want reference and I want syntactical surprise and breakage and crazy puns and syllables freed loose and I want emotion and I want parody.” Dennis Cooley earned a Bachelor of Education, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Master of Arts from the University of Saskatchewan, as well as a PhD from the University of Rochester, suny. He is a professor at St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba, where he continues to write and to inspire students with his playful love of language. ...