Dennis Cooley, body works

 

quite the you

quite the me
thod, the art
hritic shoulders

the thud of door—

one big shudder
one bent shoulder

drags the week in & out,
the ends bedraggled

he is a carpet hung from winter
whack whack
an old woman knocking
the cold off course

of course we rehearse
our methods and lists of hers & his
         trionics as they inolve

the bones in a wrist
that spin & threaten
        to pop

Given the ways through which beloved Winnipeg poet, editor, critic, teacher, anthologist, theorist, mentor and publisher Dennis Cooley has worked as a poet over the years, the notion of a trajectory of his writing as seen through a sequence of published book-length poetry collections is less than straightforward; certainly far less straightforward than anyone else I’m aware of. His published work exists as less than a straight line than a complex tapestry, often producing chapbooks and books excised from lengthy manuscripts composed across years (and even decades), offering selected book-sized collections awash with myriad threads, some of which connect to some works over others, all of which spread out endlessly from whatever central point where his work once began.

Cooley’s latest collection is body works (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2023), and the acknowledgments offers that “Earlier versions of some of these poems have appeared in books (sunfall, soul searching, passwords) […].” For readers more familiar with elements of his recent poetry titles—including The Bestiary (Turnstone Press, 2020), cold-press moon (Turnstone Press, 2020) and The Muse Sings (At Bay Press, 2020) [see my triptych review of such here]—it might be less obvious as to the details of these earlier titles, which refer to his poetry collections Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996) and Soul Searching (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987), and his travel journal Passwords: Transmigrations between Canada and Europe (Kiel, Germany: l&fVerlag, 1996). I’ve written repeatedly over the years on the notion that Cooley works up projects into potentially hundreds of manuscript pages before selecting something that might be more of a publishable shape and size, and honestly, there can’t be that many contemporary poets not only working at his rate of production (I don’t know an exact count, but I’d think he’s published well more than two dozen full-length poetry collections since the late 1970s) that are simultaneously working on poetry manuscripts across such a lengthy scope of time. Or is this simply Cooley returning to earlier ideas, and pulling at older threads for the sake of seeing them further? There were pieces published in his recent The Bestiary, for example, that first appeared in print in the 1990s, and one might recall that two of the three acknowledgments for The Muse Sings also included passwords and Soul Searching, which may even suggest he might be working both: extending ongoing threads and returning back to picking up what had long been set aside. Or are multiple manuscripts sitting simultaneously on his desk, allowing him to prod and poke at various at different points of his attention?

Before even seeing the acknowledgments for body works, the poems here did remind of some of the subject matter of passwords: writing on the body and its limitations, as he had been negotiating some health concerns during that time (there’s a whole long stretch of prose journal in that collection composed directly from his hospital bed). As he has done with multiple poetry collections over the years, Cooley swirls his poems around a particular subject or idea, exhaustively writing poems that explore and examine, eventually compiling a manuscript from the excess (other examples include: his 1999 poetry title Irene [see my Globe & Mail review of such, shockingly still online, here], composed around his mother; his 2003 title seeing red, offering Dracula poems; and his 2013 title the stones [see my review of such here], writing poems on his beloved prairie landscape). Set in six sections of short poems—“for the time being,” “disjointed,” “the body abroad,” “the body politic,” “body works” and “the heart of the matter”—body works offers threads of multiple other interests and concerns familiar to even the occasional readers of Cooley’s work, from fairy tale characters to talk of his father, playfully referencing his namesake homonym, coolies, and his descriptive stretch across that familiar prairie landscape. In all, there’s less of a sense of his usual playful lyric bounce across this collection than a selected precision, one that focuses his usual leaps into something more purposeful, deliberate; as though the play is not the thing but, instead, a particular kind of navigation. “where she runs the air is forked,” he writes, referencing a limp in the poem “she pulls up lame,” “and filled with misgivings [.]” In a poetic style that often moves at breakneck speed in one hundred directions at once, seeing a lyric that moves at half that speed in only forty or fifty directions, at least for Cooley, feels akin to slowing down.

Cooley writes of and around the body, utilizing the core of his subject to articulate memory, utilize sound and cadence, all of which is propelled across the length and breadth of his lone and long-standing prairie syntax. Through playful swirls around the subject of the body, there are certainly ways one might compare this particular work by Dennis Cooley to the late Toronto poet bpNichol’s classic Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1988), a manuscript around the body that was only published in full more than twenty years later, as organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012) [my review for Arc Poetry Magazine seems to have fallen offline]. Given some of the poems Cooley wrote in passwords were initially prompted by health issues something that might have prompted Nichol as well? Cooley writes of a limp and even a gouty foot, writing the body as spiritual and physical space in all its glory, absurdities, strengths and occasional failings.

As I’ve writ in other places, Cooley has long constructed poetry collections around a central core of an idea or subject, swirling his lyric around an endless array of fragments, fractals and perspectives, and his book on the body simultaneously and in turn explore the internal and philosophic, the theological and the purely physical. As the back cover offers: “Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect.” This is a collection by a mature poet nearing eighty years old, after all, although it would be curious to understand the balance between the poems first composed during his forties and fifties to ones composed more recently. “its time is done,” he writes, to open the poem “time’s up,” “& from time to time, / yours is too— / right on time, it would seem, / you got off on the wrong foot.” It is curious to see Cooley’s usual wild flurry of energy and syntax slow for the sake of pause, composing a meditative hush held but not overwhelmed by his usual breathless, breakneck lyric speed, one that allows for a lyric of accumulated, sequenced moments of pure, almost breathless, thought. As the second half of the poem “where we unravel,” that offers:

             your bones, my father,
do not fall into meadows of light
nor waters more supple than skin

the Estevan City cemetery the sound
        clay and gravel make
              the scrape of concrete
     [posture is normally upright
      the bright blood broken

  :  :  :  :  :
full fathom five thy father lies
                nebulae & carbon