I met Jane Cooper once in my life, white light of the afternoon pouring through the
windows of her upper west side apartment. It was late afternoon, spring of 2001 and the
sound of the earth moving beneath us seemed at last obvious. Jane moved very
deliberately, performing each activity: opening the cupboard, taking out cups, pouring
water into the kettle. Not one thing was a hinge moment, a transition from one thing to
another, not one moment was Jane performing two tasks at once; each moment belonged
to itself.
Which is to say, when she looked at me she looked at me. When she spoke to me she
spoke to me. The space between two figures in the painting in her hallway, the space
between the word she spoke and when I heard it and then the next word. Her body existed
in that room, in that space, at the beginning of another era in our history, but that moment
when it still seemed we might move towards peace, might move away from what now
seems an inevitably impending endless war.
In her prose poem, ?The Past,? Jane writes of being treated as a child by a doctor whose
uncle fought in the war of 1812. The poem concludes, ?And how do I connect in my own
body?that is, through touch?the War of 1812 with the smart rocket nosing its way via
CNN down a Baghdad street? How much can two arms hold? How soon will my body,
which already spans a couple of centuries, become almost transparent and begin to shiver
apart??
Cooper held the mortal moment?the moment of the body?s failure?as close as she held
the breath in the heart of her poems. Also in between her poems? lines was that pause of
silence between one thing and another, a moment that acknowledged bodies? separation
from one another, the compassion they owed one another as mortal objects. I think if
there is anything political in Cooper?s work?she is the most political of poets after all?
it is the mere recognition of this compassion, a compassion that requires a principled
opposition to all violence and war, a commitment to work towards other solutions.
By the end of her life, affected by illness and removed from New York City where she
mainly made her home, Cooper?s body would?like all of ours eventually?shiver apart,
like a treasure of the earth, dispersing its passions to those connected to her only
briefly?including me, a lonely schoolteacher who knew very few poets at all, writing to
her out of the blue, in need of hearing any news at all of the earth?s survival, anything at
all, asking if he could come and visit. Her published work?four short books written in
the second half of the twentieth century collected with some previously uncollected work
in The Flashboat?seems work that transcends time and ages. If in a hundred years future
generations want to know what it felt like to be alive and human through war, bomb tests,
genetic engineering of the food supply, the dehumanization inherent in the spread of
global capital, other legacies of the twentieth century, one can only pray that among the
poems in the time capsule are hers.
It?s a panic, I admit?that the individual?s body doesn?t mean anything in the face of the
machinations of the state, or more likely in the present age, the corporation. That to be an
individual at all, with one?s own perceptions, hopes, and compassions is political in the
extreme. To refuse cruelty?to refuse to participate in the machine of production and
consumption that global capital both enables and requires for survival?is practically
unpatriotic. One has to talk about politics when talking about Jane Cooper because her
concerns are human?individual and human?and so wedded thus as a conscientious
refusal of what might otherwise seem the inevitable advance of ?civilization,? which is
anything but ?civil.?
In an early poem called ?Letters? Cooper presents an idea of the individual body fluidly
woven into the fabric of time, the surrounding world, the processes of aging and decay
inherent in life. In the first section of the poem she writes:
That quiet point of light
trembled and went out.
Iron touches a log:
it crumbles to coal, then ashes.
The log sleeps in its shape.
A new moon rises.
Darling, my white body
still bears your imprint.
When the log succumbs to its natural process?not burned here but rather ?touched? by
the iron?it does not disappear but ?sleeps in its shape.? The new moon rising is an
image of presence-by-absence?a moon real and extant but completely invisible. The
speaker herself at last appears as the body that appears in the final couplet?a body that is
also the log, the ash that remained, also the moon in the sky, also the quiet point of light
of the first line. These are all things in the world that disappear and even after their
disappearance have a life by what remains of them.
The second half of the poem closes this theme neatly:
Wind chewed at the screen,
rain clawed at the window.
Outside three crows
make their harsh, rainy scraping.
Autumn has come
in early July.
On the ground white petals:
my rain-soaked letters.
We?re immediately, in the second section, in the world of humans: inside a house
protected from the howling elements that both ?chew? and ?claw?, the wind, the rain, the
crows. It?s an unseasonable climactic shift in this short poem about mortality and
endings, bodies becoming not what they were, Autumn appearing two months early. The
?letters? on the ground are gorgeous??white petals? and ?rain-soaked? but also heavy
with meaning?they are communiqués from the speaker, things dropped on the ground,
what remain after life, but also letters as in elemental parts of the communication itself. A
body does not disappear but unravels itself, sheds its meanings into the earth.
Cooper writes here a poem about death and the changing of the seasons and ends it with
letters dropped on the ground, the tree?s white petals?images of beauty and
transmission, in short what you would normally think of as life itself. It would be a
mistake though to think of her vision of death as purely optimistic or needlessly
sentimental. In an early masterwork ?The Weather of Six Mornings? she comments on
the possibilities of communication and transference with a little bit of starker tone.
When I see her spare couplets I remember her moving around the kitchen slowly,
deliberately, doing one thing and then another?warming the cups with hot water,
pouring the hot water out, placing objects on a tray: the cups, a sugar dish, a creamer. The
body determines how one experiences the actual world and so much also impact that
shape of poetic form and how it tries to transmit experience. Cooper?s poetic lines build
themselves across the page in couplets, first one line then the other?you have to hear the
line and the space around it:
Sunlight lies along my table
like abandoned pages.
I try to speak
of what is so hard for me
—this clutter of a life?
Puritanical signature!
But in each of the six short lyrics that make up the poem cycle Cooper does not try for a
?resolution? at all, rather each poem, loosely arranged, arrives at a failing point?a place
the poet stops pushing against the ineffable. In this way, across the poems?not an ?epic?
at all, but a form of ?serial lyric??small epiphanies accumulate into a quieter, more
quotidian wisdom. The little creatures of the natural world here, ?insects,/pine needles,
birch leaves//make a ground bass of silence/that never quite dies.?
As these leaves, creatures, needles on the ground?as the letters from the previous
poem?create a silence, the speaker hovers in the face of it, wondering what is the
appropriate response. Moments of anticipation govern the couplets of the following
section:
Treetops are shuddering
in uneasy clusters
like rocking water
whirlpooled before a storm.
Words knock at my breast,
heave and struggle to get out.
A black-capped bird
pecks on, unafraid.
Yield then, yield
to the invading rustle of the rain!
Her fear of expressing herself is contrasted with the unafraid bird, but it is not purely
oppositional?even the trees in the earlier couplet are shown to shudder. It?s interesting
that the action of yielding to the rain, an acceptance of the world?s actions as superior and
more important than the human struggle to communicate, finishes the piece. It is not
really a sublimation of the self to nature but rather a release of the individual ego into the
fact of larger existence. Against the Platonic ideal of man as measure of the universe,
Cooper situates not as an individual body/spirit responding to a Creator, but rather as a
constituent part of Creation.
Though Cooper yields to the rain here, in the following poem she finds that ?a man?s
voice/refuses to be absorbed.? The distance of her friend?s death is incomprehensible and
though the friends ashes ?float out to sea,? Cooper still hungers for ?some marker.? We
want to know that the human body, the individual person, will still be remembered, still
matters in some way. Burning of a body to ashes and subsequent dispersal of those ashes
is the deepest form of metaphor for the soul?s ultimate anxiety: that it is mortal, that death
is eternal, that the self is annihilated upon its separation from carnate matter.
This anxiety plays out in seven lines of conditional clause in a mere ten line poem. ?If the
weather breaks/I can speak of your dying,? Cooper reasons, but after five more lines she
says also, ?I can speak of your living,? grammatically equating the two actions as the
same action.
Once again Cooper does not come across as optimist. It?s the disappearing friend, the
parting of the two that preoccupies her:
Now all the years in between
flutter away like lost poems
And the morning light is so delicate,
so utterly empty?
at high altitude, after long illness,
breathing in mote by mote a vanished world?
The dissolution of the physical association of the two made by the friend?s departure, the
dispersal of the years into wind and light, the empty light, the subtlety and quietness with
which these images are drawn all serve to create a tender emotional mood in the final
line??mote by mote a vanished world??with the final ellipsis drifting into silence.
Again the white light is filtering through the curtain windows, Jane is putting the cup
down into the saucer with the lightest clatter. I?m sitting back in the cushions, feeling
unkempt, clumsy, too loud whenever I try to answer one of her questions. Why do I go
back to this one afternoon? I sent Jane poems after that and she wrote back to me several
times. We tried a few times to meet again before she left New York City but didn?t
manage it. I lived with her words in my mind though, and would often guiltily swipe up
any used copies of The Flashboat I could find?guiltily because I was denying other
poetry-lovers the chance to find this book, but it is the one book I continued to give as
gifts to anyone I needed to. I would have a stash of them on my bookshelf just to give
away. When I couldn?t explain poetry or why I write it to myself or anyone else, I had
this book.
When I was working on final versions of my own poems for the publication of my first
book The Far Mosque, I always held the last poem of the sequence ?The Weather of Six
Mornings? in my head. To be specific it was the final three lines of the poem:
Rest.
A violin bow, a breeze
just touches the birches.
Cheep?a new flute
tunes up in a birch top.
A chipmunk?s warning skirrs?
Whose foot disturbs these twigs?
To the sea of received silence
why should I sign
my name?
What?s resting in the line can be the poem itself, all creation, or that violin bow. A bow at
rest on a string is preparing to make music or has just completed it?either way the
music?s silence resonates like the breeze, the baby bird in the tree, the chipmunk. After
all the animal speech?a noisy poem after all?the presence of a human foot on twigs
seems unbearable and unnecessary, leading to the stunning final question. What reason,
then, Cooper asks, to add anything at all to silent sound of creation? It is a similar
question that Adam Clay asks at the conclusion of his book?better not to ?sing along?;
better to stay attuned to the ?radio of eternity? he says.
But that stunning question of Cooper?s?made more magnificent by its publication as the
closing poem of her first collection?is not meant to be rhetorical but real. She does not
leave it hanging in space, but spends a career at the liminal edge of silence negotiating
the relationship between in an individual and corporeal existence and the fact of creation.
The poetry may seem spiritual but it is precisely the border between the tangible body
and the ineffable nature of the spirit that Cooper seeks to know and understand.
Like many writers who came of age during World War II and its aftermath, Jane
Cooper?s first work engaged humans in a landscape of war. As with all her work, she was
unable to prevent her primary concern with beauty from entering the poems. ?I never
could get over the peculiar beauty of a bombed out landscape,? she writes of her
experiences in Europe after the war, though conceding she only saw them ?once the
worst had been cleaned up, once the summer field flowers?poppies and fireweed and
ragwort?had seeded themselves and started blooming over the rubble.? Nor could she
forgive herself for ?guilt because I found the desolation visually beautiful.?
Additionally, after writing an entire book of these poems?which would have been her
first collection, a book she referred to as a ?woman?s experience of war??she stopped
writing and never tried to publish these poems. She engages the question of why she
stopped writing in her long essay ?Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This
Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread,? which she has
reprinted in each of two books following her debut collection. Two concerns come to her
mind, first that, as Grace Paley suggested, ?men?s lives seemed more central than ours,
almost more truthful.? It?s true that Cooper most frequently positions herself in these
political poems as a witness, an observer, someone who exists in the war only
peripherally, not implicated.
It is only until much later, in poems like ?Clementene,? and ?Hotel de Dream? that
Cooper explicitly confronts her own complicity in oppression and the war that a position
as bystander or witness to atrocity encompasses. In Cooper?s case it is her ?sensuous,
precious, upper-class/unjust white child?s past? that she must come to terms with. In
?Clementene? Cooper writes of her shock as a young girl when she learns that one of the
tailors who worked for her family had been passing for white. ?Why, if I was not an
accomplice,? Cooper wonders, ?did I feel?do I feel still?this complex shame??
Despite feelings of guilt from necessary implication in the forces of history?for example
every one of whether we support war or not is contributing nearly 55 cents from every
single one of our tax dollars to the US military budget, the highest percentage of the
overall national budget than any other nation in the world?Cooper does, in the
remarkable poem ?The Flashboat? that takes place as a dream, describes the challenges of
stepping out of the role of ?witness? and into the role of actual participant in the world.
In the dream, a ship is sinking, a bell is ringing, the ice around the ship is breaking apart.
In this dire situation, one of the ship?s officers??my torturer who assumes we think
alike??is interrogating Cooper. ?Are you a political activist?? he asks. To which she
replies, ?No, I?m a teacher.? It?s the wrong answer?he confiscates her passport and
locks it away. ?Was I wrong to declare myself innocent?? she wonders.
At the end of the poem, the ship is sinking, the crew are making ready the lifeboats and
she is offered either a space on a larger, comfortable boat with the other women, and the
captain in charge, or a position on the smaller ?flashboat? which will require everyone to
row, to lead the way to rescue. ?For a moment, I hesitate, worrying about my defective
blood,? she writes, but then, ?My voice with its crunch of bone wakes me: I choose/the
flashboat!//work,//the starry waters.?
That mention of a voice with a ?crunch of bone? is wonderful and ominous and it also
signals the breaking of the poem from prose paragraphs to three verse lines at the end, the
final two indented for added emphasis. Of particular subtle effect is the comma following
the word ?work? which changes its meaning from a verb into a more powerful and
ongoing presence as a noun. The idea of ?work,? the rowing of the flashboat, is also
equated with the starry waters themselves, making action of any kind not a transitive
condition leans from a beginning to a desired result, but rather a fixed quality of motion
in the world, an eternity of breath, a body that exists, a universe that depends on inflow
and outflow, perpetual ?action.?
She does therefore ?implicate? herself as a positive agent, whether she was a ?bystander?
or not during the war years. She goes on in the essay I mentioned earlier the real reason
she feels like stopped writing: she ?couldn?t face out the full range of intuition? the
poems revealed. Even in her writing about war and bodies in a general sense, she was
facing the more frightening subject of liminality between the life of the body and its
death, the sounds of the world at peace and war, and their cessation. There is after all,
something truly horrifying about the silence at the end of bombing, the silence at the end
of a storm, at the end of the bomb tests. ?Why did I feel the need,? she asks herself, ?to
write about the holocaust almost more than individual human relations, or to disguise my
purpose to myself?? She goes on to realize, ?In any case, by 1951 the war had begun to
seem like a mask, something to write through in order to express a desolation that had
become personal.?
So for Cooper to pose the question in 1969 ?to the sea of received silence//why should I
sign/my name?? is to ask of herself a real question past this question not just with a
spiritual dimension referring to the problem of the human body within the matrix of
creation, but another question with real material and political consequences: how can one
write about the body as it exists in the world, remaining true to the individual life but
conscious of the problematic dehumanization the twentieth century seemed to be
engendering? Her answer to both of these questions simultaneously was a stunning series
of poems written in the last two decades of her writing life, many of which never saw
print until the 2000 publication of The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed.
Did the poems feel too personal, too hermetic? Did she see them as primarily building
blocks representing hinge moments in her poetics from period to period? At any rate they
are charged with energy and space, dynamic and alarming, they now feel like essential
documents anticipating in many ways the space-laden, fractured yet intensely personal
lyrics of many younger poets such as Saskia Hamilton, Julie Carr, Lisa Fishman, or Juliet
Patterson, to name only a few.
Cooper wrote her way out of her earlier more formal work. Large spaces began opening
up in the poems, silences not only literal, but silences of energy, much the way large flat
color panes rise out of and interrupt the otherwise frenetic energy of Hoffmann?s
canvases. Her poem ?Messages? answers back?in style at least?to the delicate couplets
of ?The Weather of Six Mornings? or ?Letters?:
Ragged and thrashing
the road between me and the ocean?
I trip on stumps.
A gull flies over:
Guilt! guilt! your father is dying!
The woods are studded with poisonous berries.
The energy is very different here from the quiet and deliberate lines of the earlier poems.
Lines are interrupted and the couplets themselves are split in action between the first line
and the second line. As the speaker trips, the bird flies over but does not speak until the
first line of next couplet. But the second line of that couplet does not complete the
thought, rather moves on into the landscape. Besides the quick shifts in energy, the
tripping both of sound and speaker, the poem introduces an idea of opposition, things that
can be one thing or another:
a few stars telegraph:
Go back. Or else welcome.
These ?Messages? are very different from the communiqués of ?Letters? where the
speaker felt herself dissolving into creation, participating in, dropping her letters down as
leaves or petals fall, part of a natural dissolution. The speaker here is troubled, resistant,
unsure how it is one is able to send her message?rather than delicate and rhapsodic
couplets, a seamless communication, the later poet is anxious, frustrated, and finally
communicates the only way she dares?in bits and pieces, not like a letter at all, but
closer to the telegraph communication of the stars:
Approaching my life I am terrified.
Stars in the mud trip me up.
Terrified, I lug stone after stone
up the wide, foot-bruising ladder of night.
Stones in a ring can?t define it:
Night. Lake. Mirror. Deep. Only
Needless to say?or perhaps one needs indeed to say it?the last line is a stunner, both in
the context of Cooper?s work, but in the context of the poem itself. It is the breakdown of
the sentence and possibility of meaning, but simultaneously a wholesale trust in language
itself to make meaning. We travel into the atmosphere of the lake, word by word, deeper
and deeper until the final word?a word of singularity, a word of doubt, ultimately a
word of conclusion, but thank god for Jane Cooper?s trust in the absolute energy of
silence to forgo the final period, which if added would have undone the whole motion of
the poem. She is that much a master of sound that a single punctuation mark removed?
or added where it does not belong as we saw in the final moment of ?The Flashboat??
can sound volumes of resonance. She tries here in ?Messages? to begin documenting her
work at allowing the ?received silence??the silence of poetry, the silence after war, the
silence of awe in the soul?into her body, her days, her noiseful life.
?Scattered Words for Emily Dickinson? and ?S. Eliason 66? are companion poems of
sorts, each about a painting by Cooper?s friend Shirley Eliason that depicts Dickinson and
her friend Wadsworth, one of the men speculated to be the recipient of her infamous
?Master Letters.?
?Scattered Words? unfolds in three short sections of lyric writing, narrative description, a
list of ?scattered words,? and a piece of found text. It imitates (and prefigures in the next
poem) Dickinson?s desperate and powerful attachment to Wadsworth, one which like all
of Dickinson?s attachment remained somehow crucially or necessarily detached in the
final account. The body of the poem squirms away from its subject and the energy raised
up has no where else to go but the next poem. An ignorant reader would say a poem like
this is a failure, but perhaps more honestly it was thirty years ahead of its time?Cooper
had to wait a little while for the light inside the text to be seen for what it was: a visionary
explanation of the subject/body?s tenuous relationship to the lyric. A poem that escapes
poetry. Meaning it is still breathing on the page.
The poem?s short first section reads:
Inside the crate, dark
as corn in its sheath sheet lightning
The enjambment between lines and the lacuna in the second line, the wordplay across
that space??sheath sheet??create an intimate and energetic space. One thinks the
painting in its crate, radiating energy is something of a stand-in for the figures themselves
depicted there, their passion barely contained.
at the conservatory door they
start forth
flashbulbs!
ochre orange flame black black white
Their energy is purely transformed by the flashbulb of the painter?s attention, scholars
going through Dickinson?s private letters and speculating about her most intimate
relationships being like paparazzi of the present moving backwards in time. The moment
of the flashbulbs is a hinge between the dynamism of the couple?again unfolding with
unusual enjambment and lacuna?and the ?scattered words? themselves. The energy here
is not allowed to explode out, but rather from the chaotic chain of words, Cooper
introduces found text from the exhibit catalogue:
Brilliant Pioneer Roots and
difficult geography of the face of a friend:
(brilliant) notes from the painter?s (my friend?s) catalogue
(difficult) notes from the painter?s (a pioneer?s) catalogue
With the lovely parentheticals Cooper allows the ?brilliance? and ?difficulty? to be both
acknowledged and unsaid, to be ?background? in the painting sense. She also imposes
her personal connection to the work in the second parenthetical?in the first line linking
herself with Eliason, in the second line crucially linking Eliason to Dickinson herself. She
puts herself in the poem personally, the way Eliason finds herself inside Dickinson. This
occupation of one body inside the other is exactly what was happening in the earlier
poem ?Messages??the body of the poem inside the poem. She?s saying something a
little different about the tangible and ineffable body than is usually said.
The oppositional philosophies of the body and spirit are either dualistic?saying the body
is the mortal part and the spirit is immortal?or nondualistic?saying the body and the
spirit are inherently wedded, one in the same being. Cooper, on the other hand, wrestles
with the separation of writer of the poem and poem, painter and subject painted. These
musings take us back to the initial lines of the first section, which have no immediate
referent until the mention of the painting in the second numbered section. One is
reminded of the poet herself inside the crate of her poem, also of Dickinson, declining to
sign her first letter to Higginson, instead signing a small card which she sealed in a
second smaller envelope to include with the unsigned letter. A body inside a body inside
a body.
Then fabulously, what does the poem do with this fever of images, this back-and-forth set
of readings in the first two sections? It moves into a completely unrelated scene in the
third section:
So the stolid-looking veteran
(G.I. Bill, History of the Language)
told me, speaking of combat:
In the least space
between two bodies
there is room
for mystery
She takes us completely away from the painting itself to another figure having a
conversation with her about a different subject. So we are meant to travel some distance
by applying his speech metaphorically the painting we have heard described. His speech
is not reported in a prose line but in beautifully broken poetic lines that really freight the
breaks with space and distance: ?space,? ?bodies,? ?room,? and ?mystery? allowing the
starkness of the painting, the moment it depicted, to fill us at the end of the poem.
It?s the least space between two bodies that resonates the most?between Dickinson and
Wadsworth, between the painting and its case, between Eliason and her work, between
Cooper and the poem. It?s a mystery the last line of the poem tells, it?s ?sheet lightning?
the opening section says, but most of all we end up remembering the veteran himself is
not talking about painting or poetry, but about combat and death.
Is it enough to delineate the tense moment between creator and creation, to point out that
art cannot contain its subject at all or be contained by it, that even?as we know?
Dickinson cannot yet approach Dickinson? Not for Jane Cooper. She proceeds past the
moment of tension into the inevitable dissolution in the next poem, ?S. Eliason 66.? In
this case, one of the dissolutions in a portrait is the death and disappearance of the
subjects of the painting:
She is just leaving the room.
He fades to a china cup.
Subjects having neatly departed the scene, the painter herself, the actual process of
creating the painting, the landscape in which the painting was created are all conflated
into a brief and frenetic stanza. Once the reader is disoriented with this kaleidoscopic
presentation, Dickinson and her life are reintroduced into the landscape, now occupying
the same space as the painter?s own mental processes:
Velocity fraught with gold,
with menace of light, atomic secrets?
An aroused skin opens over the Great Plains.
October leaves rain down.
Corn in conflagration!
The great retreats of the Civil War!
Marriage in conflagration!
I?ve seen the painting she writes about. It was hanging in the room in her apartment. I call
her Cooper in this essay, called her ?Ms. Cooper? in the letters I wrote after our initial
meeting until she, in the smallest, most precise printing I?d ever seen outside of type itself
told me, ?Please call me Jane. Everyone does.? What?s funny is that I remember the
painting itself but I cannot remember where it stood. You would think it a riot of color,
the trembling figures within inches of each other, the space between two bodies
unbearably close, but the strange part is that it?s the space and not the figures I remember.
They are at either of end of the canvas, painted quite stiffly, she in ?her Puritan white
dress? and he ?in his fiberboard suit.? Between: that I remember. A field of luminous
golden light, painted in swathes, smoothly, with white coming through. It?s that immense
space suspended that dominates the vision, crowds the figures themselves nearly out of
the field of vision, echoes with all that was unsaid between the two, all that remains
unsaid.
Perhaps the space also reflects the Iowa landscape in which Eliason was working,
mirroring the private spaces in Dickinson?s mind, the ?desolation? of which Cooper
spoke in her own life. The ?Marriage in conflagration? suddenly seems very ominous,
looming very large?not merely Wadsworth?s marriage itself, but the very idea of
?marriage??of joining between objects and people. The space between the two friends
seems to endanger any possibility of it.
Cooper has a vision of integration past all the space and danger it entails:
Years?an empty canvas.
She scrawls across radiant space
E?I?SON! I made this. The date.
Name within name.
The space then represents not only physical distance but time. One is tempted to misread
?scrawl? as ?crawl??as the letters of Eliason?s name are contained in Emily Dickinson?s
name, one word is contained in the other. There?s suddenly then something comforting
about being sheathed, being contained?to live within another person. Cooper celebrates
Eliason?s transferrance here?from alienation to enveloping within the work of art,
within Dickinson herself. She accomplishes this by the act of traveling across the distance
between artist and art, by claiming it to her. The glyph ?E?I?SON??the scrawl across
radiant space?and the italic of the painter finally speaking for herself, signing and dating
her work all become powerful glyphs of reconciliation with the separated being?such
reconciliation not being a dissolution of one body into another, but the housing rather of
one body within the other, that word ?within? in the final line resting comfortably
between the ?names? of the two women so important to Jane Cooper.
She is thus able to find in language itself the space and elasticity to being exploring the
sound and spirit inherent in writing, the vowels and the way they open up spaces in the
body. The relationship between an individual and the community and world around her
becomes then not a space of alienation, but instead the space of possibility, the space of
achieving the state of ?within.?
?Starting with a Line from Roethke? demonstrates Cooper?s far ranging concern with
sound and open spaces in the language. She moves in it from meditation to concrete
observation, using the syllables themselves to create a wonderful music. The short twelve
line poem opens four couplets that mirror each other:
To have the whole air!
To own, for the moment, nothing.
The purl of a wood-thrush winding down through the blazing
afternoon.
The least flick of leaves.
Sunlight as energy
but diffused until it becomes the soft clang of poems
approaching from a great way off
out of the cave of the past?
The vowels unfold into the air in the first couplet and echo into space in the fourth
couplet here. Between them couplets of uneven line lengths. See how the long line sets
up a series of long vowel sounds and soft consonants, a wind through the natural world
that turns on the second short line and that delicious ?flick.? The couplet after this
reverses the strategy and introduces the unseen bell in the phrase ?soft clang of poems.?
After the sound plays itself through the ?cave of the past? and drifts away on the ellipse,
Cooper closes the poem with an exciting and sensual couplet full of hard sounds, and
then a final couplet in which the still unnamed bell literally rings off across water. Not
since Poe?s ?tintinnabulation? has a bell rung itself through language as finely as the ?soft
clang? of the unmentioned ocean buoy at the end of this poem.:
Frida Kahlo?s exuberant fruit,
hacked open and sexual, or
cliffs ringing with the calm off Tintagel.
Calm off Tintagel.
The poem works sonically from the beginning, drawing the sounds inside itself until the
final enactment of ringing. As such it is as much ars poetica as anything Cooper writes.
The text itself becomes a human body, breathing in and out, living in space, no subject
really, other than itself.
Cooper?s earlier poem ?Waiting? opens:
My body knows it will never bear children.
What can I say to my body now,
this used violin?
Every night it cries out strenuously
from its secret cave.
The body is at once extremely personal and utterly objectified?an object, even if a
beautiful instrument, separate from the spirit?s identity nonetheless. She goes on:
Old body, old friend,
why are you so unforgiving?
Why are you so stuff and resistant
clenched around empty space?
An instrument is not a box.
But suppose you are an empty box?
Suppose you are like that famous wooden music hall in Troy, New York,
waiting to be torn down
where the orchestras love to play?
She allows herself the ultimate question, the one the soul with all of its attendant
anxieties about mortality and permanent cessation with the body?s death never even
allows itself to ask, the question a childless woman (or man!) approaching old age might
wish to avoid: ?But suppose you are an empty box?waiting to be torn down?? Or as
Cooper herself says in a later poem, ?to live to be a hundred is of no importance/This
landscape is not human/I was meant to take nothing away?. Once more she asserts the
sublimation of the human individual to the larger force of creation, going back once again
to her question of 1969, ?why should I sign my name??
One of the most precious things about Cooper?s poetic body of work is that it really is a
body. Not comprised of discrete books published one after the other punctuated by the
occasional ?new and selected? retrospective, Cooper?s books instead accrete slowly, one
after the other, each including work from the book before it, often revised subtly in pieces
and places, three of her five books also including the prose essay we discussed earlier.
The first version of ?Waiting,? published in Maps and Windows in 1974, ends with the
couplet:
Let compassion breathe in and out of you,
filling you with poems
But by 1984?s Scaffolding, Cooper opts for something a little more essential, a little
closer to the source of poetry than the word ?poems? and closes the poem like this:
Let compassion breathe in and out of you,
filling you with breath
But when Cooper revises all of her earlier work, restoring many previously unpublished
poems in The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed she revisits ?Waiting? once
again. This time, instead of seeing ?breath? as the end result of action, she sees the whole
motion of breath as a process, an action unto itself that doesn?t end, as in ?work, the
starry waters? in poem ?The Flashboat.? Instead of mere receptacle being filled the body
itself becomes the instrument of compassion?she ends the poem like this:
Let compassion breathe in and out of you,
breathe in and out of you
