INTERVIEW

with DENNIS COOLEY

by John Herbert Cunningham

conducted by email, beginning December, 2008

Dennis Cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan in 1944. His father, Orin, to whom he dedicated his first full book, Fielding (1983), was a general labourer. His mother, Irene, was a homemaker. He dedicated his book Irene to her, published in 2000 around the time of her death. His working-class upbringing has coloured much of Cooley's poetics. He attended the University of Saskatchewan, earning a BEd in 1966, a BA in 1967, and a MA in 1968. He then relocated to New York State, attending the University of Rochester, where he earned his PhD in 1971. He is nearing retirement, having taught at St. John's College at the University of Manitoba since 1976. He was integrally involved with Robert Enright and John Beaver in the founding of Turnstone Press in 1975. Enright went on to found Arts Manitoba (1977), which later became Border Crossings. Cooley is the author of 25 books, beginning with the chapbook Leaving in 1980, to his most recent publication, Correction Line, in 2008.

In your latest book, Correction Line, truly a masterpiece, you speak of yourself as "the second Estevan poet." I take it the first is Eli Mandel. Growing up, were you aware of him?

Actually I speak of Eli as the "first Estevan poet." Where I might sit in that chronology I don't mention.

When I was in school in Estevan I wasn't really aware of him, nor were any of my teachers, as far as I can tell, looking back. I may faintly have heard of him, but I never became conscious of him as an important writer from Estevan until I went to the University of Saskatchewan, beginning in 1962, though as I remember it, it was a couple of years later that his name registered with me. I didn't read much of his work until years later when I was teaching at the University of Manitoba and I was asked to write a review of two of his books for Essays on Canadian Writing: "Double or Nothing: Eli Mandel's Out of Place and Another Time" (Essays on Canadian Writing 10 [1978]: 73-81). After that I got very interested in his writing, and completed a monograph on Mandel for ECW: Eli Mandel and His Works (Downsview, ON: ECW, 1992). I taught a couple of graduate courses on him and had a hand in the Elizabeth Dafoe Library's acquiring of Mandel's archival papers. But Eli was not a mentor. Several people have now told this story and it seems to have taken on a life of its own. I was starting as a writer when I first studied Mandel. Besides, he was off at York and I was in Winnipeg, madly immersed in what was going on at St. John's College--a wild and creative place in those days.

You did your PhD thesis on Robert Duncan. What was it about Duncan and the other Black Mountain Poets that attracted you? How has this influenced your writing?

Duncan was a fascinating writer. I got on to him in a graduate seminar I took in Rochester, and when I went looking for a dissertation topic my supervisor encouraged me to follow up on my interest in Duncan. I was drawn to him for many reasons. His sense of formal possibility was exciting to me, as were his radical politics. This was at the height of student protest over the war in Vietnam and Duncan was addressing those things with a courage and imagination that really appealed to me. At the time I was interested in mythopoetic criticism and Duncan was mythopoetic if he was anything. Then, as I read more and more by him, I was deeply impressed by his intelligence and his eloquence. My god, the man knew a lot! I met him several years later when he came to Manitoba for a week. He was probably the most brilliant person I've ever met. He could talk non-stop about almost everything, filled with erudition and never repeating himself.

What Duncan meant for my own writing was probably providing more a general permission than anything else, his sense, for example, that the poem is a field in which action takes place. My guess would be that he wouldn't have approved of much of my own writing, which is much more materialistic and personal and playful than his own work, and he could be just devastating when he decided you were wrong-headed in what you were doing. He attacked Denise Levertov in ways that she found deeply wounding.

In an interview with David Arnason, it is noted that you did not start writing poetry until you were almost 40 years of age. Why was that? What started you writing poetry in 1980?

A little before then, actually. I was 34. I had for years been doing the kinds of things that, in effect, prepared me to write poetry. I had been studying it, teaching it, writing about it, and then editing it. Working on poetry manuscripts during the first years with Turnstone inspired me, and gave me confidence, too: hey, I could do this. I would add that in the mid- to late 70s, St. John's College, where I was working, was one wild exuberance. There was a bright and ebullient young gang at the College or loosely attached to it, and they were centrally involved in the mad outburst of work in Canadian literature at the time. I got caught up in that too, partly out of a heady nationalism, but also out of the example of David Arnason, whose dazzling intelligence and daring prompted many of us into new life.

You mentioned Denise Levertov. A while back I came upon an article by her that discusses the line break. One of the most important poetics articles I recall reading was yours called "Breaking & Entering" in The Vernacular Muse. Both approached line breaks in different ways and both are a must read for the aspiring poet. I'm just wondering about the parallels between Levertov's and yours.

It's been quite a while since I've read the Levertov piece and I am going on a wobbly memory, but as I recall (as I'd expect at least) she was arguing out of a poetics that drew on Olson's sense of the breath, the lineation observing the poet's breath pauses in sounding a particular poem. I do mention this principle in one of the items I include in the article you mention. I was trying to think of other ways in which a writer might break lines, and to identify reasons for doing so. What might a writer do in poems that were not written within processual principles? Undoubtedly there are more reasons than those I have named, and better ways of naming the options, but that was what I was after--the line as significant unit.

Most of what I came up with, as you've probably discerned, spoke to a play between the line as a unit and the grammatical unit that played within or against the line. What most satisfied me in doing that essay was to mull over why many people (writers as much as readers, maybe even more so) would be opposed to new kinds of lineation. I thought I was onto something in linking that resistance to a deep commitment to metaphor and the traditional lyric.

One thing I always loved in Levertov was the sensory load, the thingness of things, in her poetry.

There are two additional essays of yours that have been highly influential for prairie poetry--a genre you seem to have singlehandedly created. These are "Placing the Vernacular: The Eye and the Ear in Saskatchewan Poetry" and "The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry." Do you still see these articles as relevant to today's writing? How would you change them today?

I have a lot of trouble responding to these questions. They are very good issues, the ones you raise, but I'm at a bit of a loss to answer them in any adequate way. For one thing, there's so much writing out there now, I'd find it a lot more daunting to deal with it, to be informed well enough to say one way or the other. The statements were clearly interventionist at the time they were made, and met with some pretty stiff opposition, but there is now less need, I think, for the kind of intervening I was doing, or thought I was doing, then. I don't know if I'll ever return to those essays or if I would have anything worth saying about the issue now. Sorry.

Your second book, and undoubtedly the one you are best known for, Bloody Jack, was published in 1984 by Turnstone Press and reissued by the University of Calgary Press in 2002. What led you to write this book? What are some of your favourite lines?

I had been working on a series of Billy the Kid poems. I was enormously impressed (and still am) with Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Inspired by that book, I was writing pieces that worked the edges of the Billy material. I had built a small stash of poems (20 pages or so) and I'd got mired, there seemed nowhere to go. I mentioned this to David Arnason. We were having coffee in the faculty lounge at St. John's College, where we both were working (this would have been around early summer of 1982), and he said, what about a local outlaw? Is there anything here you could work with? We both were aware of Jack Krafchenko, who called himself Bloody Jack. A friend of ours, Slawko Klymkiw, had done a programme for CBC on him, with marvellous music and songs by Jim Donahue. What about Krafchenko?

So that set me off, I was off and running. I found a small book on him, a lot of material in the newspapers of the day, and I allowed myself shameless permission to alter and add and delete and invent. It was a happy situation. I had this colourful figure and a lot of material that I could do almost anything with, and away I went. I wrote and researched, read and wrote, began to conceive of the collection as a play of voices, a kind of drama. Having that figure, who came with a fair bit of textual weight, but not so much in being frozen in a particular or recent naming--that was a lucky break. It allowed me to spin out things pretty freely.

I was influenced by other texts too: bp nichol's work, for one. Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue. The excitement in what was being done, and could be done, in poetry at the time had a lot to do with the way I wrote that text. I thought of the writing as an enormous opportunity and out of those times of literary ferment I let it fly, tried a wild array of entries, the lyric included (a fact that has tended to go unnoticed ever since).

Following this initial flurry of writing (including two full-length poetry books and a book of essays), you became rather quiet, with little output other than chapbooks in the 90s. Why this retrenchment?

Well, not quite. There was this only home in 1992, burglar of blood in 1992, goldfinger in 1995, and sunfall in 1996. That's three books and one chapbook. In any case, there was no retrenchment. I was writing steadily all along, as I always am. For me, projects typically go on for years and years and often they pile up into stashes so large that I feel almost embarrassed about them, feeling, certainly, that their sheer bulk strains credulity, or manageability. If the writing is going well I keep with it, even over very long stretches, without necessarily stopping to extract something from it for a book. I was working steadily on several projects over this stretch, including Irene, which came out in 2000, seeing red, which came out in 2003, and then the two books, country music (2004) and the bentleys (2006), the latter two drawn from a large hoard of poems I had been working on since 1989. The Dracula poems in seeing red were part of a big manuscript I had been writing for a decade, and Irene, too, was written over about 8 or 9 years. So, I'm forever expanding series that I'm working on, usually writing them at the same time, though the results for years may be invisible in any book form.

A lot of this has to do with lead time in publishing too. A book could be years seeking acceptance and then in awaiting publication. There are no publishers clamouring to produce poetry titles, so publication is not there for the asking, and certainly not within any immediacy that a poet might hope for. A couple of the books I just mentioned sat in publishers' offices for months and months, only to be turned down, and then to do the same. It's a waiting game. In my experience there is only the roughest of correspondence between productivity in writing poetry and visible signs of it in actual books.

In any case, in the 1990s, I also produced a few other thing. I edited inscriptions (an anthology of prairie poets, which involved reading a lot of books); I issued a revised version of passwords; and I published a critical monograph on the poet Eli Mandel.

this only home (1992) was probably responsible for establishing your reputation as a diverse writer of esoteric subjects. Discuss this book with particular reference to "walking at night the gravel beach."

Probably there were earlier signs of this, at least as early as Bloody Jack, with its mishmash of writing. And then, in 1987, soul searching came out--a satiric and comic take on the mind-body split. That book would probably be an even better example of what you are describing. But even the second book, Fielding, gathers a range and styles of language. I'm not quite sure what you're asking about the poem. Are you supposing that "walking at night" is in some way esoteric? Perhaps it is, but if so, the claim would have to find strange the contemporary understandings we see in astronomy and biology--notions that we are made of matter that drifted through the cosmos, that our bodies bear profound traces of evolutionary ancestry, the salinity of the seas life came from. So there in the poem is the lake cottage and people standing on the shore of Lake Winnipeg, that body of water, their own bodies a very small part of the cycles of light and water in the world, and the rooms of the cottage their own small cosmos. For me, the poem speaks of continuity and a kind of loneliness in inhabiting small corners of the universe. So I don't think of this poem as esoteric at all, though it might challenge readers to seek connections among its parts. For one thing, I've always been fired by the evolutionary narrative and have long found large readings of the material world to be dazzling--the poetry of science, if you will. Though I don't pretend to have a scientist's knowledge, I do draw imaginatively on those wild and wonderful models for reading the world.

I'm going to jump right to your last book, correction line. This book blew me away. I saw all of the idiosyncrasies I'd come to recognize and love in your poetry. But, then, I began to see so many new techniques I'd never seen you use before. Please comment on the writing of this book.

I'm not sure what, specifically, you may be referring to. I'm assuming that you may be thinking of the lines that are broken internally, often within words themselves--the one ("ploughing"), say, that parts more or less down the middle, leaving a furrow of sorts. It's hard to think of that form or almost anything else I try in correction line as "new," since so many poems for so long have lain around in folders, and on hard disks, many of them instances of exploring one possibility or another. I can't see books or pieces in books as "new" quite in the way that a reader might, who of course will not have seen all the antecedents that jam up my filing cabinet and my computer.

The use of documentary passages may seem recent, but that move also appears early in the books, at least as early as Fielding. The poem "cenotaph"--which clearly cites inscriptions from a cenotaph and from grave markers--I have taken from a long poem, 1931, that I started in, what?, about 1985, and that I want after all this time to return to, perhaps, so help me, in the shape of a postmodern novel.

The expressive, and affective, use of fonts has been part of my writing for quite some time now, though I have had trouble with editors and designers in observing what it is I am after. As a matter of fact, they often through inadvertence or recalcitrance have reduced that exercise and even eliminated it. One designer deigned even to consider variance in fonts worth mentioning. But at least as early as sunfall in 1996, say, the fonts begin to stray and wobble, and there's been something of that in the books since then. I've been dreaming for years of publishing poems on the Internet, where I could take advantage of that medium to use letters far more creatively, and it's something I really hope to do as time opens up for me.

But, you know, much of what happens in the books finds precedent in Bloody Jack--which, in some ways, is a compendium of forms.

The last time you and I spoke, you were telling me you were nearing retirement. This raises the question, what is next in the life of Dennis Cooley?

A lot more reading and writing. I've got so many things on the go, and so many things I want to write, that, after spending most of my life facing constant deadlines and pressing calls upon my attention, I will rejoice in long stretches of otherwise unclaimed time and energies. I've long hoped to do some kind of video or Internet production that would make use of music, stills, soundscapes, voices, kinetic lettering, sounded text, visual text, video recordings, moving images, panning--all sorts of astonishing things that can be done. Shortly after Fielding came out, Murray Shafer raised with me the possibility of doing a collaboration around it. The momentum dribbled away on us, but ever since I've mulled over what shapes such a project might take, and how it might be done.

And travelling--I'd like to do a bit of travelling, maybe take my old bones into some hot zones to melt and mellow. Portugal is a dreamworld for me, and I forever imagine visiting there, maybe in the dead of winter one of these times. Fiddling in the yard, daydreaming at the lake, pecking away on the cottage--I'd like to do that, too--that and watching the birds. Maybe I will attend a few more Saskatchewan Roughrider games. I hope I do.

I might get to a few more plays.

The world opens up. Time to tell yr lies in leisure.