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Introduction: By Word of Mouth: An Introduction to Dennis Cooley’s Poetry
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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ix Introduction By Word of Mouth: An Introduction to Dennis Cooley’s Poetry1 “Cuz it’s always gotta be blood.” —Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer More and more, when teaching poetry, I find myself defending difficult poetics, those unique and complicated aspects of language that encourage readers to believe in the White Queen’s “six impossible things before breakfast ” (Carroll 101).2 I accept that students (especially with a final exam approaching) want to know that they know what they know. But as Dennis Cooley remarks in a 1987 essay on the line break: “formal departure disturbs readers” (“Breaking and Entering” 79); indeed, departure from inherited forms does nudge readers to stray from their chosen comfort zone, to try, at least, to believe one or two impossible things, perhaps by lunchtime. So what—or where—is it, exactly, towards which this poet nudges readers? Poetry, says Dennis Cooley,“becomes vigorously rooted—in our time and in our place” (The Vernacular Muse 182). That the “our” changes as constantly as the times and the places proves his point that the Canadian canon is ever versatile, ever affected by its involved readership. Our place, our bodies, our language. By not simply writing poetry directed towards what modernist poet Laura Riding calls the “plain reader” (Riding 218), Dennis Cooley changes and changes the rules, shifting all his readers towards an engagement with poetry as an act of capricious rebellion: through excessive attention to the line break, or to a word, or by sowing words across margins.“One of the consequences of scattering words on the page,” says Cooley,“or not offering a certain kind of pact through a text, is that it will give your readers a lot of permission but it also puts a lot of pressure on them” (Prairie Fire 49). Dennis Cooley flirts with the reader, teases the reader, invites his readers to share in the fun. For Cooley, innovation means breaking away from established literary conventions, or traditions. Stuttering, stumbling, sprinkling a plethora of line indents and breaks, tripping over confining institutions, ruled corridors, imprisoned language, barred windows, falling out and falling away, fracturing the old, landing prairie-flat on his face, hesitating, hobbling through the ruptures, limping towards a new rhythm. now our blood stirs at this curve’s list this slug slung in gorging weight. (Leaving 7) The poem doesn’t fracture so much as it engorges: collapses and swells, curves the line with little regard for the metred, measured stanza, for verse conventions , or the crescendo enjambment (the body jammed up, the body’s limbs striding forward and returning, the poem’s lines kissing and parting and kissing again). But “falling away” from poetic conventions doesn’t mean the poet has abandoned standards or principles or even poetic customs. Here, for example, is what Cooley asks of contemporary verse: “what has been happening to poetry that it should have been brought to such a state—past metre, past rhyme, and (here’s the crux) largely past metaphor and grammatical phrasing” (“Breaking and Entering” 79). Here’s the “crux”: how do strategies of writing make room for a poet such as Dennis Cooley to challenge conventional wisdoms, to write against the power of the norm, to break with potent tradition? To bleed words all over the page? To defy sanguinity, yet refuse sanguinarity as he delivers the poem? And how, asks Dennis Cooley, do we recognize its bloody afterbirth? Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has examined the claims of mid-nineteenthcentury Parisian artists and poets who insist they invert the dominant economic and cultural values of the bourgeoisie. His assessment has not been favourable, pointing out that such inversions merely reinstate the hierarchy, though tipped, now, in favour of art and decadence over upper-class refinement and status. But rather than the wild Bakhtinian carnival that reinstates the father/king at the very moment that it crowns the jester/son, Cooley looks to less venerated classes for heroes: to Jack Krafchenko, an immigrant and a criminal; to Irene, a mother and a woman with cancer; to Dracula, and to Sinclair Ross’s Bentleys, literary characters whose fictional lives plague poetry. Cooley writes of loss and mourning, of astronauts and poor self-trapped Mrs. Bentley. And all the while, this poet is consistently willing to make mistakes , to embrace them, even. To cultivate flaws until the flaws themselves generate novel lines, invigorated stanzas, the embodied codex. In Cooley’s books, bodily sensations of place and belonging, of...