Allan Cooper's Blog

Prose Poems and Henry David Thoreau

2009-12-05T08:06:00.001-08:00

It's been a long time since I last posted. I spent the spring, summer and fall working on a manuscript of new and selected prose poems. Since the late 1970s, I've written around 80 prose poems. Many remained unfinished in manuscript boxes stored in Alma and Riverview. I selected 27 poems from my published work, and completed 27 new ones. The revision process included a great deal of cutting and rewriting. Prose poems are just that--poems in prose form, and one of the challenges is to decide how much detail to leave in, and how much to remove. The form is demanding, as the writer walks a high wire between traditional lyric poetry and prose. If the poem draws too much description to itself, it fails. If it remains too lyrical, then it fails as a prose poem.

For me, the masters of the form include Thoreau, Francis Ponge and Robert Bly. Thoreau in his Journals wrote dozens of descriptive passages, and I'm including one here. They're found throughout the Journals, tucked between philosophic meditations and catalogues of plants and animals. This entry is particularly fitting, as the first snow is supposed to fall over Alma tonight.

A SNOWFLAKE

Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart?...I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of an enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill.

From The Journals, January 6, 1858

Notes Copyright Allan Cooper, 2009

What We Expect from Ourselves

2008-05-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another small poem from Heaven of Small Moments, this time an ecstatic love poem, newly revised.

What should we expect from ourselves? The mundane, the ordinary, or a wildness and intensity that heightens everything we see and feel? The ecstatic poet Mirabai writes in one of her poems about Krishna: "His seven notes play over and over,/and not even he can stop them." And Rumi writes in Coleman Barks' translation, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest."

BLACK CARNATIONS

There's someone inside us
who doesn't believe in real time,
and doesn't want it. He knows
a love that is dark
and wild, and his hand

reaches instinctively for it.
A thirsty man claims water;
the cricket, feeling the cold
that is coming,
sings of the frost.

And Rumi saw
through the eyes of his friend
even after his friend was gone.
Why should we expect
anything less from ourselves?

(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)

A Spring Poem

2008-05-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

I wrote this small poem in 1993. It was later published in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998). I was influenced by the old Chinese poets, James Wright and Kabir when I wrote this poem.

I usually have a long trek across the hills in early spring to see what's happening in the natural world. The hummingbirds are just back, and they're busy in the river willows and at the feeder. A rose-breasted grosbeak visited us for a whole afternoon. And the centre of gold that I write about in the poem seems to be getting stronger every day.

WALKING IN THE HILLS IN EARLY SPRING

Somehow the day begins
unfettered.
A few little willow leaves
open.
Dry leaves of maples
that fell last autumn
give off their radiance.
This is the centre of gold I wanted.
All afternoon
I walk alone across the hills, content,
accompanied
only by my shadow.

(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)

Goldenrod in Winter

2008-02-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

With the huge amount of snow we've been getting, I decided to sift through some poems and see if I could find something that reminded me of the fall. I found this goldenrod poem. I was thinking of two things when I wrote it: a line by John Haines ("disappearance begins with you"); and the quote in the poem by an anonymous Irish poet.

GOLDENROD

A delicate voice has been given to me. I hear it always,
rising and falling in joy or grief. It is the voice of the
hidden woman. If I take her hand she is here, then
gone. If I hold her waist, she dances away and is
gone. If I give her blossoms, her face blooms golden
and then fades.

Hold still a moment. I'm no one who will harm you.
I have a broken heart, and "a heart once broken
can never be healed."

Now she leans toward me and, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, disappears into
the lost avenues of fallen light.

(Copyright Allan Cooper 2008)

A Poem about Light

2008-01-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

I was going through my third book, Bending the Branch, which was first published in 1983, and found this small love poem. I think this is a good place to start the new year. I've always liked the poem, but I'd forgotten about it, not having read the book in a number of years.

POEM ABOUT LIGHT

You first came to me
as light across fields,
light from a seed,
light from inside the body

And I knew this life
is but a moment of light
on earth: bloom
that gives itself entirely to the seed.

There are places I return to
to call all the particles of light
up into the form of beauty;

when you return, the light
will stand inside me
like a tree.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 1983, 2008)

Jimenez

2007-11-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

Juan Ramon Jimenez was one of the great modern masters. His colloquial style has always appealed to me. In his best poems he is having a dialogue with his reader, and each reader feels as if Jimenez is talking to them only.

Jimenez was a mentor for another great Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca's early poems resemble Jimenez's work in many ways. There is passion, depth and spontaneity in his poems. It's as if a wind that we recognize but have never felt before had suddenly arrived.

Here are two small poems by Jimenez, in Robert Bly's translation:

MUSIC

Music--
a naked woman
running mad through the pure night!

OCEANS

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...
--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

A New Book

2007-09-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

Fall is coming along here now. The first few branches of the maples are turning red and yellow. The bees are busy among the white and purple asters and the hummingbirds are gone until spring. The days are shorter and at night sounds carry great distances--a good time to read Jimenez and Lorca again.

My next collection, I Didn't Come Here to Meet You, is starting to take shape. I've been writing this book for three years and wasn't even aware of the connections between the new poems. Two quotes made me aware of hidden shadow the manuscript was beginning to cast: "Absence makes what? Presence, presence" (John Thompson); and "All the waters of the world find one another again" (Hermann Hesse). It will be a varied book, style-wise: lined poems and prose poems, small poems and a long elegy called "Requiem." I figure another 12 months of revision and the manuscript will be almost there.

Finally, a small fall poem. The last of the blueberries are picked, but when I was in the field above the house last week, I remembered this little piece from twenty years ago:

BLUEBERRIES

After picking blueberries alone all afternoon
I carry
some consciousness of the fields back with me.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Goodbye to Mira the Cat

2007-08-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

One small soul with a big heart went out on July 31, about 5:30 in the evening. Mira, our yellow male cat (11 years old) died after 5 years of on again, off again bad health. He had a rare blood disease that finally became a brain tumour. He was in no pain until the end. Our daughter called him the "miracle cat", he came back so many times.

In the evenings, he followed me to the cabin where I write. A constant companion, he liked to sit among my manuscript pages and lick the various rocks I'd collected for him. We buried him on the sidehill behind the house, where he often hunted during the day.

Right now, his sister, Jake, is sitting beside my computer, vying for my attention.

THE BEST DAYS

The best days don't begin
with grand pronouncements.
It's when the cats are content
and the house glows
like the inside of a honeycomb.
Jake sleeps stretched out on the floor
while the big male, Mira, watches her
and preens. He has been something
wholly given to me, like true love,
or a gift you didn't expect or deserve.
The best days begin
when something inside begins to glow
like the light from a single cell.

(Copyright 2004, 2007, Allan Cooper)

Daughter Poems

2007-07-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Poems are like diary entries: I can go back and read any of my poems and remember where I was and what I was doing and what inspired the poem. For me, it's a way of relocating myself in my past.

A couple of months ago, I was remembering the trips we made to the Alma house in the late Eighties after our daughter was born. One evening around 1989, Kate and I were sitting at the picnic table on the front lawn. Big white fluffy clouds were moving over the hill and disappearing into the distance. Kate, about three years old, said, "Where are the clouds going ? To supper?" So I wrote a prose poem for her--an answer, really, to her question, eighteen years on.

(Footnote: I've written and published about thirty poems about my daughter, the first one the night she came home from the hospital, the last one just after her twenty-first birthday.)

THE CLOUDS

--for Kate

Years ago, my daughter and I were in love with the
clouds. We sat at the picnic table as dusk came on.
"Dad," she said, "where are the clouds going? To
supper?" Yes, my dear, to supper, to the final
banquet of the light. They'll sleep all night in the
trees above the hills until the day comes out again.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Trout Lilies

2007-05-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Trout lily season is almost over (I love their yellow blossoms and their green and brown mottled leaves). Spring is finally opening here. The hummingbirds are making their frequent and busy visits to the feeder. A few big bees are feeding on the dandelions. The kingfishers are patrolling the brook for trout.

A LONG WALK IN TROUT LILY SEASON

Today I felt a marriage between what is inside me
and inside streams and plants. Entangled also was
the sound of your voice, sweet and unpredictable:
"We could walk one more mile."

What are we walking toward? The trout lily
blossoms are completely folded back, slumped,
exhausted. But the windflowers have opened,
staking their ground; they blush a little with a
quiet excitement.

I close my eyes and see small flames rising
in the blossoms. On the white road turning
to sand you walk beside me.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Van Gogh in the Snow

2007-05-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

After last night's wet snow (yes, snow) knocked down the daffodils, I woke today thinking about Van Gogh's flower paintings, especially his Irises. That led me to some old poems, and I found "Cornfields, Summer", written in 2001, revised this morning. I've always admired Van Gogh's work ethic, his perseverance, his gentleness. He would have walked out in the snow with his palette and brushes and painted the fallen daffodils.

CORNFIELDS, SUMMER

New light catches in the corn rows.
Hundreds of lovers are waiting to be born
in a single corncob.

The crickets talking near the cool roots
draw souls to the waiting
tassels and kernels.

Van Gogh's irises wait at the edge
of the field, calling the sun god
down from the heavens.

The sound of grief starts up
in the ripening fields. Then we hear
the wedding of separation, cloaked in lonely dew.

The cornshucks hide the harvest.
Only tough hands can find
the gold laid out in the solid rows of light.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Defiant Old Men

2007-04-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm still going through the prose poems from 20 years ago. Here's one I particularly like, as I'm slowly becoming one of those defiant old men myself. I'm not as lively as they are in this poem--lots of creaks and groans as I'm stumbling out of bed in the morning.

TEN OLD MEN CHANTING

Long 'o' and 'e' words rise in my throat on a day
like this, wet and warm in mid-winter. The snow
is heavy, and these words--green and tight as poplar
twigs--have their own earth weight. A crow flying
over gives the 'o' sound praise, and the chickadee
gives praise to the 'e'.

These are the vowels of the earth, that go on
breathing after death, floating in abandoned
dictionaries like proud old men who have given up
nothing, and move about their huts chanting the
old words loudly, lively and defiant in their praise.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Water Turning to Wine

2007-04-08T21:23:00.000-07:00

I recently found an old computer disk that contained a sequence of prose poems written around 1988. I had it transferred to CD, and started making tentative revisions. They were originally part of a sequence of 20 entitled Leaping Across the Bridge. I like them, because they were my first real attempt to write ecstatic poems. They seem a bit thin now, but sometimes less is better. One of the poems, "Water Turning to Wine," is printed below.

WATER TURNING TO WINE

New snow fell through the afternoon, so slowly I
hardly noticed it. Now my feet kick up an inch of
powdery snow as I walk toward the house.

Inside me there are abandoned warehouses, fields
untilled for miles, tables prepared where anything
could happen. And water turning to wine, the body
changing to accommodate the growing spirit.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2007)

I Didn't Come Here to Meet You

2007-03-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

The prose-poems are starting to build up. I plan to do a limited edition booklet this spring. As with my last Owl's Head Press publication, this will be a small, handmade production of 30 copies.

It will be called I Didn't Come Here to Meet You. Copies can be ordered from me at this blog site or e-mail me at allan-cooper@excite.com Each copy will sell for $20.00.

THE FACE

We are the snow ticking through the branches,
the needles of hemlock fallen on earth. We are
the voice inside the cricket, the unborn child,
the hands of the very old. We are the winter
light peering through the kitchen window,
longing for the leaves of geraniums and sage.

We know so much! We’ve seen the room
where no one ever lives, filling with our wishes
and desires. Our small boat drifts across the river.
The face we love forms slowly on the waves.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

White Chrysanthemums

2007-03-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

A few more prose-poems are poking their heads out. "White Chrysanthemums" came quickly the other day, a rewriting of a poem from twenty years ago. Only the last line remains from the original poem.

I'm thinking of calling the new sequence I Didn't Come Here to Meet You, which I feel reflects some of the Zen and Sufi influences in the poems. Let me know what you think of the title.

WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUMS

I didn’t come here to meet you, but here you are,
and the world is better for it. I don’t know if we’re
male or female, black or white. These are questions
the cricket never ponders.

For now the snow and ice are on the garden, so the
blossoms will have to wait. I remember the black
dahlias nodding their heads in the wind. And the
white chrysanthemums, each bloom as radiant as a
human face in love.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

The Teacher

2007-02-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

I'm posting two more prose poems from the new sequence. I'm not sure what to call it, but I'll probably come up with something.

A month ago I ran into an old teacher at a bookstore. I hadn't seen him in years. He reminded me of Blake's Jehovah. The second poem is about him.

THE FRIEND

Our Friend has been waiting for thousands of years.
He was the shy girl standing at the edge of the
playground, the woman in her twenties that you
never quite saw. He was the wind rising in the
nest, the light in the East that suddenly woke the
jays and crows. When we look at the earth we
remember his face.

Each time we wake we have this new chance in the
world. Swallows land on the grave of the old holy
man. Hands that open in forgiveness grow young
and supple again.

THE TEACHER

Yesterday I felt a sudden love for an old teacher
I hadn’t seen in many years. He stood with two
canes, his white hair and beard as wild as Blake’s
Jehovah. We talked--he wife gone 10 years, his
father one-hundred years old--and the years
unraveled in the wind.

How many old fathers do we carry inside us?
Surely, given the chance I would carry this man
down to the River Styx, place two coins, grieve
again for what the world has lost and forgotten.
I would tell Charon “No matter what, take care
of this man,” as the boat slides silently across the
unknown waters.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

The Invisible Book

2007-02-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

Lat summer, I wrote a series of small poems called The Invisible Book. The idea was that behind every book of poems, there's an invisible or shadow book--like the long shadow a pebble leaves on a dirt road at dusk. I selected and revised 16 of the 40 poems I'd written, choosing them on the basis of whether I could feel 'the shadow', or subconscious inside them. The poems are printed below.

THE INVISIBLE BOOK

The invisible book
writes itself
whether we know it or not.
It's in love with the small things we abandon.

*

I like sentences that begin with rain
and end in silence.
The stones love it too,
and the white rabbit feeding at the edge of the field.

*

Heaven can wait.
But I seem to find it
in the fox sparrows
kicking up bugs from the leaves.

*

No one knows when the last word will come.
That's why I talk so much.
Let's spend the rest of the day with a stone Buddha,
who is always silent, always aware.

*

I can deal with silence, and age,
two or three books on my shelf.
I want to wander with Rilke near the dark roses.
I want to tell Hesse our homesickness will never end.

*

I'd like to take a little walk
that ends at water.
All the roads inside me
are turning to sand.

*

The earth breathes evenly,
takes everything inside: the bones
of a vole, the blue shadow hiding
inside an empty shell.

*

The brook sound reminds me
of the earth's hands,
holding everything steady.
What catches the earth when it falls?

*

I want to be playful with the light,
show it my shadow in late afternoon.
At night I am the lone presence
moving from room to room.

*

Night comes. The whole field
is soaked through with dew.
Lovers don't mind: they spend
the night wrapped in a cocoon of light.

*

3 am. I step outside to take in
the moon, the clouds, a little wind.
Someone keeps changing my name,
and the small things I fall in love with.

*

Don't worry,
someone looks over us.
It would be a shame if the world
were a garden where nothing ever grew.

*

I am the voice that never leaves you.
I am the hand that never sleeps.
I am the voice of the wild grass ripening,
the light inside the light.

*

It's a good thing that the earth
shakes itself now and then, like a giant
waking from sleep. In the earth's cells,
whole pastures of light are waiting to be born.

*

Let's be playful, then.
It may be the only way to mend the soul.
A woman stitched it by moonlight
from the sorrows of passion and dew.

*

Let's call down the black and white angels of the air.
It may be the only hope we have.
Wings keep turning the pages of the invisible book
that we write but never know.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2007)

Zen Master Seung Sahn

2007-02-16T19:13:00.000-08:00

I've been reading some of the stories and anecdotes about the Zen Master Seung Sahn. He died a few years ago, but his zany wisdom (and that's a compliment) lives on. I've been writing a few off-the-wall things myself lately, and am including two here. The second is based on one of Seung Sahn's teaching stories.

THE AXE HANDLE

Let’s leave the night to itself. The leaves rising on the
wind in wildest speech have settled down beneath
the fallen snow. The new moon reflects itself in the
icicles hanging from the eaves.

The cave inside the body grows. This is the place
where our tenderness can go, our grief, the holiest
gestures we have made. What we are is inside
the cup stained with years of use, and in the hand-
carved axe handle leaning by the door that no
one has touched.

THE BROOM

--for Seung Sahn

A king went to a Zen temple to collect taxes. “There
are men here,” the Master said, “who can fly around
the world on brooms.” The king didn’t believe him,
so he put the broom between his legs and flew
around the room, one, two, three times. “Now
you try it.” The king put the broom between his legs
and jumped. Nothing happened. Two times;
nothing happened. And a third.

The Master said “There are monks in the next room
who could kill you with a single glance” (You could say
the Master was bringing the axe down on the king’s
neck). The king, in his wisdom, left.

It’s good to think that there are places in the world
where men still fly around on brooms, places that
the rich will never understand. Snow builds outside
the temple door, and the wise old voice of the frost.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Alma Elegies

2007-01-24T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Alma Elegies is set for release from Gaspereau Press on March 5. I've just finished going though the final proofs of the book, and the design and typeset are wonderful. Anyone looking for more information about their spring releases can find them at www.gaspereau.com.

We've had a bit of snow lately, and during the last storm I started work on a new sequence of prose poems. One is printed here. I've long been attracted to the Sufi poets and this poem is in honour of them. There's an old idea that when two or more people are engaged in intense, passionate conversation, "the Friend" is present. Other ideas suggest that when this inner conversation takes place, we create or conjure the Friend between us.

DERVISHES WHIRLING

All night wind blew, making a high whistling sound around
windows and doors. In some places the walk was swept
clean; in others it’s drifted up, little smooth runnels of
abstract sculpture. There are tracks in the snow where
a squirrel ran quickly from one trunk to another, small
notes in all this whiteness.

At my feet, I find a spruce branch with a single brown
cone attached. It is wild as the dark love the Sufis knew,
the seed of thought that carries the thinker to the
edge of the planet. He knows that love and compassion
are what we need to carry us through the darkness
of this world.

For a moment the sun breaks through clouds. Now
it is the sound of lovers waking, light moving in the
eyes of the Friend.

(Copyright 2007, Allan Cooper)

Van Gogh

2006-12-04T16:02:00.001-08:00

Here are three more poems from The Alma Elegies, all of them written after Vincent Van Gogh paintings. I originally wrote about 30 poems and kept 4--about average for me. Some day I may go back to the others and see if there's anything to salvage.

The reader is encouraged to find the original paintings. Really, there was no one like Van Gogh, and there never will be.

THREE POEMS AFTER VAN GOGH

I Potato Planting

In the early morning, the sky is sombre and grey,
and the earth, newly turned, seems a little startled.

A man, a woman and a bull--
all three are hitched to the plow.

The woman, bent nearly double, balances
on her clogs. There’s no room for joy here.

Her death was planted the moment she was born.
A long shadow follows the lines of the furrows.

II The Weaver

What’s the man doing on this crazy contraption?
Miles of thread are the roads he travels. He wears a conductor’s hat.

If it had wheels, the loom would seem natural
wandering the corn rows, the country lanes.

Then the man would feel the sky,
the tiny speck on the horizon,

the distances
moving between us.

III The Blossoming Almond Branch

You kept things around you that spoke
of your gentleness and your generous heart.

That small sprig of almond blossoms,
and behind it, one red brush stroke

thin as the line between the heart’s desire
and the sight of our own blood.

You knew that birth and death join hands
in every single living thing we love.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Old Voices

2006-12-02T20:07:00.000-08:00

Here's another poem from the Alma Elegies. When we moved to Alma in 1991, one of our reasons was to spend more time with the older people here. Murice Martin was the local historian, who had a plethora of information about the past. He was also a custodian of the local United Church cemetery and dug graves well into his 70s. He had bad knees. One afternoon after my house was raised and a new foundation was put in place, Murice arrived with a rake, a hoe, a shovel and a roller and told me we were going to landscape my property. I could hardly keep up with him. When the day was over most of the lawn was back in place.

The other people mentioned in this poem are my maternal grandparents, Reta and Cerdic McKinley; my grandfather's sister, Hattie; my father-in-law, David Armstrong; and my father, John.

OLD VOICES

All the beautiful presences are gone,
all the old men,
Murice with his bad knees, and still he dug graves
and raked topsoil with me all afternoon, and told me stories
that brought the past alive like a ruby
that lit the entire room.

All the old voices
have gone out now, so far that we
can no longer imagine those kinds of distances,
all we can do is hold them, name them--
Reta, Cerdic, Hattie, David, John--
wrap them in this dark cloak of human love that dies.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

The Black Coals of Grief

2006-12-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

I found this poem on an old computer disk in my study. I had to write the poem out by hand, as the printer died a few years ago. The fall I moved to Alma, after the house was renovated, I discovered wheat growing beside the foundation. The seeds had been dormant for who knows how many years.

On one level this is a poem about the past and how it comes forward inside us. Some might also say we can reconnect with the dead in our poems, build them rooms and vistas, place flowers on their tables, leave them the bread of love and the water of our grief and loss.

The poem isn't finished yet. If anyone has any ideas where this poem might go next I'd love to hear from them.

THE BLACK COALS OF GRIEF

The abundance of the world is contained
in a single sheaf of wheat.

Someone planted it
one hundred years ago,

forgotten beneath the soil
until the soil was turned again.

Old bottles glinted in the light,
a lump of coal, square-

headed nails. In the night
familiar footsteps

climbed from the cellar
though no one was there.

*

And all through the autumn
winds rose and fell,

sunlight came out, yellow leaves
blew suddenly to the ground.

A voice rose with the wind:
"This is the way it happens--

things live and die, and take their place
on earth."

*

I would like to call the dead
home, but I can’t.

They sleep on, wake
and sleep again.

Old memories make a vessel of light.
It’s thirty years ago;

my grandmother
steps outside

to pick
a single rose.

*

My father’s cap
hangs from a nail by the stairs.

Twice he has called me from sleep.
Should I go?

On the morning he died
all the roads inside me turned to sand.

I take flowers, cold water,
the black coals of grief.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

The Alma Elegies

2006-11-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

My next book, The Alma Elegies, will be out from Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2007. I've always felt close to the Spanish and German poets, especially Lorca, Jimenez and Rilke. They're all mentioned in this poem from the Elegies called The White House. Look for some more previews from the book over the next while.

THE WHITE HOUSE

I remember sitting in the house
with one light only, the screen door
open to the sounds of crickets
rising through the night fields.

The grass slow;
a few leaves fell, red
and gold
among the purple asters.

It was a solitude
I learned to love, a table
I returned to
again and again,

carrying a small cargo
of words that were true.
The brook sound moved
through the night;

I no longer heard
the clock ticking
on the white wall.
I was carried

on an inner raft
lashed together
by my own longing
and loss.

And all through
the autumn nights
I was looking
for shore,

the gong
of the light buoy
sounding the way
of the deeper current

where Rilke sat
in his aloneness,
Lorca
with his hat

and wooden sword,
Jimenez by the shore,
skipping black stones
across the water,

ripples and words gone out
in such a way
that they freshened
and startled the world.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Rodin and Rilke and Destiny

2006-07-29T03:37:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of Rilke lately, and was remembering that in university I wrote a monograph about the relationship between Rodin and Rilke (Rilke was Rodin's personal secretary for a period.) It was Rodin who suggested that, as a cure for his writer's block, Rilke go to the Jardin des Plantes and study birds and plants and animals and write about them. Rilke's magnificient New Poems was the result, including his poems about the panther, the swan and the flamingos. Rodin's solution to not being able to create was to sit down and work. "Travailler, travailler, travailler!".

Part of my monograph was to chose several of Rilke's short poems, write my versions of them, then pair them with Rodin sculptures. I'm including one small poem with this post.

For over 30 years I've longed to see Rodin's work. I was in a local bookstore the other day and, lo and behold, I saw a poster saying the the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton is having an exhibit of Rodin's work until September. So I'll be there soon--I can't explain how much this means to me.

Make your home out of everything in this world,
no matter how hard.

What makes you think you can pick and choose
the strange stones of your destiny?

(Copyright 1975-2006, Allan Cooper)

Alma

2006-07-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

The title of my new book has changed from It Doesn't Matter What the World Wants to The Alma Elegies. Gaspereau Press will be publishing the book in the fall of 2007. The first section is Blood-Lines, my first collection of poems which has been out of print for nearly 20 years. Encouraged by Harry Thurston, I decided to write a new sequence to go with it. Twenty years on I found myself dealing with many of the issues and concerns that first engaged me as a poet.

Blood-Lines was written in Alma, New Brunswick in the fall of 1978. In 1991, the old family home became available, and my wife and daughter and I moved here that September. I've always felt presences in the house--unexplained voices at night, conjunctions between the past and the present, as if a spirit suddenly entered the room and left again. In this place, months and years seem to peel away like old paint. My best poetry continues to be written here, and each day I'm grateful for having this ongoing connection with my past.

The other night I was thinking about the village, Alma, and the Spanish connection with this place--for Alma means soul in Spanish. So I decided to let some of those voices speak for this place, voices from the past, the voice of a well-known American poet (find him if you can), the voices of the natural world, and who knows what else. I whittled this small poem down to 8 lines. I like it because it's open-ended: you can read the poem backwards, start in the middle and read to the end and then start again.

ALMA

I am the love that's bound to find you

I am the wish, the dream, the river

I am the broken branch of willow

I am the sound, the voice inside you

I am the soul, the spout, the fountain

I am the seed that sleeps forever

I am the light, the field, the waking

Nowhere you go will you go without me

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Who Is This Poet?

2006-06-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I read a great little ecstatic poem. The poem is probably a few hundred years old and the poet may have been Indian or Arabic. At the time, I changed a few words of the translation to make it more readable. This is what I remember of the poem:

In the ocean of ecstatic love
there are invisible shores
and no shores at all.
If you're wise
you won't swim in it.

If anyone knows who this poet is, please let me know.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2006-05-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the great German poets of the last century. I came to him early, when I was twenty-one. I did several versions of his poems for a Fine Arts class, from the original translations of J. B. Leishman. Leishman was named the official translator by Rilke's estate.

I've been carrying one of my versions with me for over thirty years. I love the poem, and I still find resonances in it. The poem is untitled in Leishman's translation, and I left my version untitled as well.

I saw the world in the face of a woman,
but that glimpse left in an instant.
I thought the world was outside me,
it couldn't be understood.

When I held the cup, why didn't I
drink from her full face
the world that was so near?

Oh, I did!
I drank and drank.
But I was so full of the world already
I overflowed.

(Copyright 1975, 2006, Allan Cooper)

Lorca

2006-05-22T06:23:00.000-07:00

I've been revising a few of my translations of Federico Garcia Lorca, and feel it's time to post a few. Lorca was one of the greatest Spanish poets of the last century, and as I mentioned in an earlier posting, he was gunned down by one of Franco's hit men. Lorca was just 37.

VILLAGE

A cross
all alone on a bare mountain.
Clear water
and hundred-year-old olive trees.
In the alleyways
men with covered faces,
and on the rooftops
weathervanes turning,
endlessly
turning.
O village of loss,
deep in the Andalusia of weeping!

WHAT'S TRUE

It's so hard to love you
like this!

Because of this love
the air hurts me, and my heart,
and my hat.

Who will buy my
ribbon and the grief
of white cotton, to make
handkerchiefs with?

It's so hard
to love you like this!

GHAZAL OF THE FLIGHT

How many times I've lost myself at sea
with my ears full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue filled with love and anguish.
Many times I've lost myself at sea
as I've lost myself in the hearts of certain children.

There's not one person who when they give a kiss
doesn't feel the smile of faceless people.
And no one who touches a new born child
will forget the motionless skulls of horses.

Because roses search the forehead
for a tough landscape of bone
and a man's hands have no other job
than to imitate the roots beneath the earth.

As I lose myself in the hearts of certain children,
hundreds of times I've lost myself at sea.
And I'm unaware of the water as I search
for a death where the light will consume me entirely.

GRANADA AND 1850

From my room
I can hear the fountain.

One sprig of grape vine
and a shaft of sunlight.
They point toward a place
inside my heart.

Clouds are moving
through the August air.
And I dream that I am not dreaming
inside the fountain.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Lin Chu's Last Poems

2006-05-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

The Lin Chu booklet, The Black Swan, is now ready. It can be ordered directly from me for $25.00 at allan-cooper@excite.com. This edition includes 20 poems, and is limited to 30 numbered and signed copies. The booklet is printed on acid free, archival paper.

I was going through my papers at the cabin the other day, and found 10 more finished versions of the last poems of Lin Chu. These are elegant little poems that resemble haiku. Eventually I'll collect all 75 of my versions under one cover. In the meantime the reader can find a number of the poems in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998), Singing the Flowers Open (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and the new publication, The Black Swan (Owl's Head Press).

I've decided to include the 10 Lin Chu with this post, just so everyone can see what they look like. The "Little Cricket" poem I posted earlier appears at the end.

I saw you again today.
Your face still holds
the same clear lines of longing.

*

I want you to understand
I sleep alone
and think only of you.

*

When you're gone
this intensity
lingers on for hours.

*

I see faces in clouds,
in blossoms opening,
and each of them is yours.

*

When you're gone
I feel the sorrow
of blossoms falling.

*

I trace the creases around your eyes:
life lines
I've followed since my birth.

*

Today I saved an ant,
a spider and a moth.
And all the time I was thinking of you.

*

I saw you once with fireflies in your hair.
I reached out and touched them.
Others thought that I was flirting.

*

The wild strawberries are so intense
and fragile
I can't reach down and lift them to my mouth.

*

My desire
tangles
in the sound of your voice.

*

Little cricket, you called me.
My voice followed you
all the way home.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Owl's Head Translation Series

2006-04-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've decided that, instead of publishing one big book of translations, I'll do small booklets for a while through my publishing company Owl's Head Press. The Lin Chu booklet is almost ready. Next on the list--probably by fall--is a selection of 10 translations of Federico Garcia Lorca. One of the great poets of the last century, he was executed by Franco's men. His body was never found. There was no need for his death. Interestingly enough, he lived during a time when poetry was considered dangerous. Today in North America we're in the Dark Ages of poetry, smothered by the academics and the New Formalists. And anyone who's read their poetry knows they're no threat to anyone.

What would Lorca have said? "We'll have to get down on our hands and knees and eat the grasses of the cemeteries forever."

The only ray of hope in this country is the strong, ctitical writing of Carmine Starnino. Whether you like what he says or not, he's at least willing to go out on a limb. I admire that a lot.

Lin Chu Booklet

2006-04-19T11:47:00.000-07:00

I've now completed my last 20 versions of Lin Chu (at least I think they're the last). New Brunswick author and designer Lee Thompson is busy preparing the booklet, and copies will be available soon. Anyone who wants a preview of the poems can see my entry on this blog.

The booklets are available for $25.00, including shipping and handling. It is a limited, signed edition with a hand-sewn binding. Any queries can be sent directly to me at my e-mail address: allan-cooper@excite.com

There are a few tiny poems of Lin Chu that I haven't collected in this book--too few, really, to publish on their own. One is printed below as a little bonus.

Lin Chu wrote in the ecstatic love poem tradition of Rumi and Mirabai.

Little cricket, you called me.
My voice followed you
all the way home.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

Day Lilies

2006-04-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

New poems are starting to come along. I found a scribble, really (a first draft of a poem on loose leaf) in James Wright's Collected Poems, and decided to rework a few of the lines. A few images seemed right. I kept them, rewrote them, and by the end of the afternoon it was pretty well done. I don't have a clue when I wrote it--probably years ago. I like finding these things. I feel a bit like a squirrel who buries a pine cone and finds it again months later.

DAY LILIES

Today, tired
of the thorns
and shadows of grief,
I am filling with light.

The brook carries the sky
on its back to the sea.
The kingfisher clatters
above the bridge,

waking the lilies
and trout. Out there
on a small patch of lawn
dandelions big as daisies

are almost open. Desire
sleeps on in a spruce cone,
in a snail hunkered down
with its shadow.

There’s a secret out there
somewhere in the grass.
God have mercy on the grass,
thickening its blades in the sun.

(Copyright 2006, Allan Cooper)

Towser

2006-03-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

If anyone has Pete Townshend's GOLD, listen to "The Sea Refuses No River" followed by "Let My Love Open the Door." The pairing is wonderful, like bookends.

Hook Lines in Songs and Poems

2006-03-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

I was just thinking about similarities between songwriting and poetry, and how the important 'hook line' is common to both. I was listening to Pete Townshend's "The Sea Refuses No River". The song builds on the title line over and over, and each time it's introduced it means more, and draws more power to itself. The line hooks you and draws you in.

I'm including two new poems with this post. The hook lines in these poems, I think, are at the end, especially in the first poem. If anyone sees the hook somewhere else, please let me know.

WATCHING THE LILACS IN MARCH

It's true, the world holds its secrets
and reveals them, sure as the taut
buds of the lilacs will hear
the first spring tone and burst

forth, as they say.
Where I come from
love is measured in drops,
maple sap gathering,

the old men distilling
the sweetness inside them.
I found love in the smoke
wreathing from my father's pipe,

in the small gestures he made,
leaning over the bed each morning
to kiss me
into the day.

LIVING THE DAY

Each day we have this chance
to live again, so why not
step out, grateful,
into the light?

Last night I dreamed
I opened a wooden box.
Inside were neat bundles
of sticks--one for each year

of my life? No, one for each
day, there were so many of them,
some dark, some brown as grief,
others the whiteness of wings.

The day opens for each of us.
A crow flies out
from its stickly nest,
fully awake to the world.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

The Lin Chu Poems

2006-03-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

For the past fifteen years I've been working on three sequences of poems called The Lin Chu Poems. Two previous groups were published in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998) and Singing the Flowers Open (Gaspereau Press, 2001).

The five poems here are from These Poems Aren't Just Sparks Thrown Out on the Road, a book of versions, translations and poems which will be a follow-up to The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream. The book will include 20 Lin Chu poems, 10 by Feng Chih, 10 by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and 6 each by Rumi and Mirabai. Each section will have a separate introduction.

We need more love poems now, and I think the Lin Chu poems help fill that gap. After a period when there were huge chasms between men and women, it seems that we're looking for connections, conjunctions and mutual ground again.

1

Sometimes I feel you know where I am,
and what I secretly want, and where this love is leading.

I live through days endless as falling snow.
I repeat your name over and over; long to hold your face.

Dark water laps at my feet. My desire helps
fill the wound of a love without resolution.

How long before this love takes even my mind away?
If you truly heard me, you’d be here now.

I can no longer bear the thought of living without you.
If I call up your presence, then surely you will come.

2

We're all drunk in this tavern. Things are happening
at the next table that we know nothing of.

Why should I ask for mercy? Half of what I have
is owned by someone else.

Dear God, I cry out to you in the middle of the night:
"Do you hear me or not?" "Whom did I love before I was born?"

These questions don't get any better
when they're greeted with silence.

There's a Way. I know it; I follow it.
These poems aren't just quartz thrown out on the road.

3

When we leave the last word to love, the dance begins,
the old desires and preoccupations.

Someone said you were talking about me.
My face burns, and I wake up suddenly from a dream.

I've heard that the molecules of our bodies
break up at night and join with the one we love.

I want to come back as a single petal wrung
from your heart, painting the earth red with love.

This abundance, this scent rising from the fields--
Krishna longing for Radha, you walking down the road again

4

When we first met, shooting stars fell across the sky.
What would have happened if you'd decided to stay?

What sort of courage does it take to be who we are?
What kind of music brings out joy instead of grieving?

The water hyacinths seem a little dishevelled.
We're like that sometimes, caught up in the intensities of love.

The pleasures of the day are counted in heartbeats.
Sometimes one glimpse or touch is enough.

The wine we've always wanted is created between us.
We drink all day, and still there is more than we need.

5

I’m given over to the night sometimes. The dark swell
of ocean waves is all I can hear.

The tern returns to her nest, and it is lovely, braided
from the common threads of longing and grief.

I walk a long road where the only voice is the breathing
of the dark.

I wake up in the night; Don’t ever leave me!:
the owls understand that cry.

When we met, my heart turned into a black swan.
Listen to it swimming toward you.

(Lin Chu Poems Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

A Reply to the Academics

2006-03-01T20:22:00.000-08:00

I love how the old Chinese poets cut the mustard and got directly to the point in their poems. One of my favorites is Tao Yuan Ming, who left an official post to return to his farm and write poems. He wrote many poems about solitude, his garden, the inner world. And he tended that inner world with care and intensity.

He wrote about spiritual poverty in a way that seems startling to me. In the end, how much do we need? A bookcase with a dozen books; perhaps a dozen songs; twelve months of the year lived fully. Here's a poem of his in my translation from The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream.

A REPLY TO THE ACADEMICS

All things have a place to return to at dusk,
but this thin cloud has no resting place;
winds rise and it's gone.
When will I see it again, transparent, filled with light?
The red dawn opens the night mist;
hundreds of birds go about their daily business.
One crow flies out from its stickly nest
and returns just before nightfall.
To live like the others, to follow the accepted roads
is to go cold and hungry inside.
If no one knows how I live,
so what? Grief means nothing to me now.

The next post will include a few ecstatic love poems by Lin Chu. These are new versions, and are similar in tone to some of the Sufi poets, particularly Rumi.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 1992, 2006)

Things My Father Taught Me

2006-02-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

My father, John, died suddenly when I was 26 years old. Over the years I've written several poems about him.

Last Monday, February 13th was the 25th anniversary of his death. I remembered a story my aunt told me about the day my father skipped school. He had an important reason, and the poem tells the rest of the tale.

MY FATHER TAUGHT ME

My father taught me tenderness,
in his words and actions,
and even in his fierceness
there was a caring

we seldom see in the world
anymore. When he was a boy
he stayed home from school
to feed kittens from a dropper

all day. It doesn't matter
that they didn't survive;
a kitten held in a boy's hand
is all we need to see and know.

When he fed the kittens
he was feeding us all. It's good
to know that some things stay
in the world longer than hate.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

Buddha Face

2006-02-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a series of poems with my friend Leigh Faulkner. I've felt for along time that I might have lived before, but I seem to have a hard time writing poems about it. Here's one I wrote recently:

BUDDHA FACE

There are things that happen
that make me believe
I've lived before. A door
opens, and I remember the room.

A face appears in a dream,
a voice, and I find that face and voice
on the streets
or in a honeycomb of memory.

Who's to say things
don't happen again?
My friend, I remember
your Buddha face.

I saw it
in the birthing room,
the waters of another world
still clinging to my skin.

Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006

The Music of What is Possible

2006-02-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

This essay is from The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream, a book of my translations published by Owl's Head Press 1992. I've changed a few details, but largely the essay remains the same.

THE MUSIC OF WHAT IS POSSIBLE

1

Several times, walking or sitting alone, I've felt something inside me go out toward the natural world, and something from that world return to me, like a greeting or an exchange of consciousness or energy. It's as if an earth-tone went out and was recognized, and another tone--sometimes frisky, sometimes slow and grief-filled--was sent back. This exchange takes place not when I'm busy and preoccupied but when my listening side takes over for a while, the side that feels a connection with earth and rocks, that loves common dirt and bird song, and the fluid, elegant gait of the cougar. Sometimes the tone sent back from the natural world becomes engrained in the chromosomes of language, as in "Sitting on a Porch at Night" by Yuan Mei, and there's a new kind of poem to share:

Some stars are bright, others barely seen.
Light rain falls, a few drops now and then.
The Wu Tung trees feel fall coming on;
new rhythms are passed from leaf to leaf.

Returning from an experience like this, I love people more deeply. Coming back from the heat of good conversation, I love the natural world more deeply. The two feed each other. This is often visualized in Hinduism by Krishna and Radha making love, and the intensity of their lovemaking creates a third presence. This third presence can also be felt in the poems of the Chinese masters, in the poems of Rumi, Mirabai and Kabir, and in the Psalms as well. The Psalm writer says

All living things--
rocks, insects and humans--
are moved by the intensity of this sound.

But how can contemporary poets find a way to bring the third presence inside their poems? They first have to give up any preoccupation they might have about the human world being of a higher order than the natural world. We know that dolphins and whales are highly developed mammals. It's also likely that trees, rocks and soil contain an intelligence which is intricate and vast.

One way for poets to court the natural world is to develop a strong concern for it. If you don't care about the natural world, it probably won't care much about you. Without a reverence for the natural world, it will stay out there in the early spring night, hidden in thick ground fog, and you will stay inside.

2

When we take the time to listen carefully to another person, or observe the natural world acutely, we're inquisitive about something other than ourselves. Our inquisitiveness is part of our animal energy reservoir. Apparently cougars are curious about human beings, and human beings are inquisitive about cougars. When we meet, the inquisitiveness displaces fear and aggression. We come close to one another.

In 1988, my two-year-old daughter was visiting her grandparents. She had been outdoors playing all day, and in the evening she wanted to go out again. Instead of taking her outside, her grandmother opened the door and said "It's dark out, Katie. Listen--what do you hear?" My daughter replied, "Listen to the dark." When we listen to someone or something carefully, we're listening to something other than ourselves; we're listening to the dark.

Perhaps music is a common tie between the human and natural worlds. This music isn't heard in the same way we hear a symphony, or a progression of notes that we immediately identify as "human music." It may be a tone we hear in spring, which is more lively and joyful than the tone we hear in the fall, and more brash and sexual than the tone we hear in summer. It could be that birds migrate north in spring not because a cell triggers the instinct to fly again, but a note or ground tone is heard and responded to by the body. Solitude brings us the music of what is possible. More than once I've heard notes in the landscape which have brought into focus an idea or image as watery and lucent as bird song.

Persons living in big cities can hear this music, but perhaps they have to listen in different ways. There may be other walls that must be torn down, different defences to climb over. A friend of mine living in London, England made pilgrimages to a cemetery to feed a squirrel and talk to him every day. It seems this sort of zanyness breaks down the walls we've built between the human and natural worlds.

The labour of solitude is to become more attached to the world. After going into an ocean of solitude, the Japanese poet Basho said

The bee
leaves the deep flower
reluctantly.

The attached mind goes deeper into the fires of the body, and into the fires of earth and air. Somehow the distinction between what is "in me" and "out there" dissolves.

There's a wonderful story about the Russian composer Shostakovich which is helpful. Shostakovich was living in a small apartment with his family. His writing desk was near his children's bunk bed. He was working on a new composition when one of his children stepped down into the middle of his manuscript page. Shostakovich didn't reprimand the child; he kept on writing. I think this is marvellous.

Copyright Allan Cooper, 1992, 2006

It Doesn't Matter What the World Wants

2006-02-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

I've decided to post the occasional new poem that I think might be of interest. "Harbour Seals at Cape Enrage" is from my next book, It Doesn't Matter what the World Wants (forthcoming from Gaspereau Press). I was influenced by the Sufi poet Rumi. I spent a summer a few years ago reading a Rumi poem in Coleman Barks' translation first thing when I got up in the morning. My back door is surrounded by wild red roses, and the scent of the roses seemed to be part of the poems. All I remember is a summer of roses opening and Rumi poems.

Cape Enrage is a wonderful high jut of land on the Bay of Fundy about 10 miles from where I live. One afternoon I looked down over the cliff and saw several harbour seals, hence the title.

HARBOUR SEALS AT CAPE ENRAGE

It doesn't matter what the world wants.
The whales breach with their shining flippers
and seeds float hundreds of miles
across the waves.

The ocean of ecstatic love is inside us.
Waves break there, and all our losses
and dreams. We dream on.
We wake, we love, and every

moment that we've lived rings true.
The ballast of our days lightens.
Something inside us loves the ocean,
the waves, the seal's black nose above the water.

(Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)

Songs for a Broken World

2006-02-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

I'm just getting started with this, but I'm hoping it might be a place where contemporary poetry and songwriting can be discussed. I've been writing for over thirty years, and my 12th book of poems will be published by the Canadian house Gaspereau Press in the next year or so.

I've also been writing songs for years and years. Some were featured on Isaac, Blewett and Cooper's two CDs, Walk On and Mud River. I released a solo project, Songs for a Broken World in 2003.

That's about it for now. More later.