An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper
Posted on November 7, 2007
Filed Under Poetry, Reading |
The poet Jane Cooper died in October of this year after a long life in poetry. Her first book came out the year I graduated from high school, I think, but I didn’t become aware of her work until about ten years ago. She was a “poet’s poet,” one supposes, who won prizes but didn’t have nearly so high a public profile — if American poets can be said to have a public profile at all — as many of her male teachers & contemporaries. She strikes me as a consummate artist. In my own work & as a teacher I love physical detail & plain speaking that “blossom” into emotion. Cooper’s poem “Rent” is exemplary:
If you want my apartment, sleep in it
but let’s have a clear understanding:
the books are still free agents.If the rocking chair’s arms surround you
they can also let you go,
they can shape the air like a body.I don’t want your rent, I want
a radiance of attention
like the candle’s flame when we eat,I mean a kind of awe
attending the spaces between us–
Not a roof but a field of stars.
Both the James Wright poem I wrote about earlier (linked above) & Cooper’s poem have similar structures. Though genre boundaries are notoriously complex & contested, I think it’s fair to say that each poem employs a lyric structure, gathering details toward an insight delivered as a punchline. What I admire about Cooper’s poem is its lack of special pleading: it is dry, while Wright’s poem is unpleasantly moist.
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3 Responses to “An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper”
You may have set a new metric in poetry: the moisture scale. Is the poem pleasantly moist like, say, San Diego — or do you find yourself swim-walking through it like an Orlando summer?
Enjoying the recent flurry of poetics posts.
FREEDOM
He had one of those lets-get-rich-
while-we-pay-the-workers-shit jobs
counting objects in stores
in the middle of the night
just back from Iraq he craved
amnesia and the solitude of rows
cans and boxes piled like stones
to be labeled and accounted for
the life of a hang-nail itching
to be bitten off and the whole
point so he could be trapped
inside the changes he can’t control
dreadfully renegotiating the route
back to childhood’s abandoned no.
Peter, that’s pretty exemplary, too.