Matthew Cooperman

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Matthew Cooperman was born in New Haven, CT in 1964. He is the author of the collection A Sacrificial Zinc, which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize (Pleiades/LSU, 2001). as well as two chapbooks, Words About James (Phylum Press, 2005) and Surge (Kent State University Press, 1999). He currently lives in Fort Collins, CO, where he teaches at Colorado State University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712571
ISBN-10:  1844712575
ISBN-13:  9781844712571
Author:  Matthew Cooperman
Title:  Daze
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-06
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The poems of Daze form a prospect on time—the passing of literal days, the ephemerality of the body, frangible memory, American speed, the crisis of late modernity. Daze charts out the periods of our belief, blending personally-lived experiences with wildly assimilative narratives which make up our blurred identities. Written as a series of series, Daze works out the demands of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. Challenging the moral entropy of the 21st century, Daze is as much a view of bewilderment and outrage as it is the beautiful or true expression of poetry.

Serial poems, whether lyric or in prose, are the technical means of embodying this vision. Written as a series of series, Daze works out the challenge of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. There are three such sections—view, ink, bed—deploying a series of odes, calendrics, personations, textual deformations and possessive identities. As Robert Duncan’s opening epigraph suggests, “my mind is a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations … the twisted sinews underlying the work.” Pressure is placed on syntax and in form as a practical response to bewilderment. In this regard the poems of Daze are tinged with the pragmatism (and texts) of Emerson, Dewey and Isaiah Berlin, as well as the actual and imaginative “instruction” of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Virgil’s Georgics. There is also, one hopes, some humor.

Table of contents:
view
Apropos
•
Pigmentia
Nanosphere
The Dictionary of Allusions
Plot
Shapes Are Making Their Way
Own Diminutive
Day's News
Faith
Day's Fan
Day's News
Seen and Felt Watching
•
Channel Town
ink
conscious
Fame
Reasons for the Novel
From the Corner of My
Chorality
How to Do Things
The Roots of Romanticism
It is Absence We Cultivate Knowing the Corpse
Another Souza
Globe Rendering
Joying
Day's Chaco
•
What Comes Between
bed
Loneliness
Day's Kinsey
Day's Flavas
Pictures of Can Can
Ruefulsome
Elevated Music
whirling disease
Pyrrhony
Versions of Progress
Republic
•
shining, axis

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (444 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

The Dictionary of Allusions

On the verge of becoming impossible certain fictions claim free–floating functioning, or books as the work of authorial egress, yes, even simple words like dog are spinning wildly out of control. Canines, if we can term this a challenge, bark. The Ward offers “bark,” a guttural boat made of trees, or the phrase and fable collective weighing in with the Guttenberg Cup. A kind of sailing, huzzah! In the formidable senate allusions are always the products of a perceived gap. The dog resists, becoming a lesser deity, or “bark,” the peeling of a species’ language. There is something else afoot that nevertheless structures utterance, I say “hamburger” and “Tuesday,” it's all about pleasure and reason initiated but they tell in different ways. The Doctor called it a teasing out of traces, the historical taint a great tool for seeing how, blue pill, pantheons of mythology now, screens and studios of information on the verge of becoming impossible.

Unpublished endorsement :  In the world of Daze, “Far from home cries/here I am,” and the body you thought was yours may turn out not to be. In this world it is not easy to believe in the word. It takes probing impulse against pulse, prowl against prow. It takes careful observation and a fine intelligence. Then finally there can be a text where “the light, like a lacquered comparison to China, makes a box.”

Rosmarie Waldrop

Unpublished endorsement :  The ache of Berryman and the balls of Berrigan—a combination so striking in its language: sonorous, yes, but also snarky; lyrical and yet perky—dare I say perky? I do. As does Cooperman. Moments in Daze are so delicate, and then round the corner comes the stab, the surprise, the knowing frippery and the twinkle-eyed nudge. The poems do daze, they dazz, they does. No other poet has such panache and such beauty: ‘something pure in a heart can hide.’

D A Powell

Unpublished endorsement :  Daze is days (the daily everywhere one reads every Daily) and confusion (the Daily Bugle–or is it Bungle?–of constant shock). “And so the parable grows an extra set of limbs to keep track of the/ ‘foliating of experience.’” Cooperman observes that “Today nothing’s ever Euclidean.” Which is to say there is no point to pass through except
the obvious: “I mean to say we die. He dies.” The poet addresses the Daze of the daily and how we are “confused with the multiplicity of our lives, or/how we are always.” His poems contain the philosophical and the plain-spoken, the scientific and the ripeness of 19th century diction, while at all times maintaining a healthy skepticism about language’s capacity to bring us here (or hear), where we have been wandering around lost for many years. Cooperman’s poems tell us that all may not be lost, there may in fact be a home, even if we never get to open its door.

John Yau