an interview with Dennis Cooley

This interview was conducted electronically in June, 2004.

Contemporary Verse 2: seeing red is not the first time you have tackled popular myth; there was a chapbook, goldfinger, in which you attempted to revise several well-known fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, and then there was Bloody Jack, where you took on the legend of Jack Krafchenko, a notorious Manitoba outlaw. What pulls you to these stories and what is it that you are attempting to create by reshaping them in poetic form?

Dennis Cooley: They are given but they are not frozen, these characters and these narratives. In writing them, or rewriting them, a person has a lot to play off and yet few constraints of the kind that might squeeze a realist narrative. There’s room to imagine, a chance to redo the material, without feeling you have “lied” or committed some impropriety. These stories are godsends. The fairy tales are all known, but few readers would insist on hearing their versions of them. They have gone through many reshapings anyway, historically, those stories, and took on their relatively set form only with their appearance in print. Once printed, they lost some of their plasticity: this is the story. But they also became available to revision: the writer is asked for novelty.

CV2: One could say that poetry abounds with its own myths. Poetry is considered by many to be somehow beyond the average mortal, that it somehow retains a superlative sense of reality, that it is elite, ultimately a smart game and of little practical use for the average Joe or Josephine. What, for you, are the predominate myths about poetry? Why do you think they remain pervasive?

DC: I think you’ve identified one of the main assumptions in our culture. But there are others. On the Prairies at least, and elsewhere too, there is quite another one, sometimes held by the same people who believe poets are chatting up the gods. This one holds that the poem must be written in known forms, in simple words, about the observable world, and it must above all be easy to read and to understand. It will often even spell out a message for us. As readers we can then be reassured in the fineness of our souls. My own view is that poetry can be enormously varied and it can offer all kinds of things, including apparently simple and accessible expression. I don’t like the spirit of disallowance that holds so widely and so powerfully in the literary world. Write like me (or us) (or like this) or don’t bother writing at all. What I/we do is what should be done. The rest of that stuff is unworthy.

Myself, I’d ask for a text that really gives readers some reward, but one that also asks something of readers. It’s bizarre to suppose that a poem must be totally and immediately available to a reader. It may appear to be that, at first glance, but why should so little be asked of it? Why should we be eager to ask so little of ourselves? Inasmuch as something like this unreadiness is part of our culture, it offers comfort to would-be readers. The refusal is self-protective: if there is a problem it isn’t with me, it’s those smarty poets who are filled with pretensions and perverse obfuscation. There is so much fear out there, fear of language, which many readers give up before they have even tried. I don’t know: are we too prone to living our lives as consumers who choose diversions before effort? Are we too prone to changing the channel if we are put into uncertainty?

CV2: One of the most difficult things a poet must do in his or her work is deal with the mythology of language, what it can or cannot say, how it is supposed to work and not work—what it is capable of communicating to a reader. How do you deal with these issues in your own work? What wisdom about poetry in general have you gained as a poem wrangler?

DC: I try to offer the reader a lot. Language wobbles all over the place, and part of a poet’s privilege is to take advantage of that so that she can spring the poem into fuller and richer and newer and renewed meaning. That can mean verbal play, it could involve echoes of other texts, it might lead to formal departure or to syntactic surprise. It often involves image and metaphor, often the exuberance and energy of oral phrasing. I’m happy to try resources, wonder what can be done. The poem can come from anywhere, involve almost anything, and take on almost any shape or vocabulary. The writing may be emotional, it may be parodic. It includes what you here point to, language itself.