Home-page - Numeri
Presentazione
Sezioni bibliografiche
Comitato scientifico
Contatti e indirizzi
Dépliant e cedola acquisti
Links
20 anni di Semicerchio. Indice 1-34
Norme redazionali e Codice Etico
The Journal
Bibliographical Sections
Advisory Board
Contacts & Address
Saggi e testi online
Poesia angloafricana
Poesia angloindiana
Poesia americana (USA)
Poesia araba
Poesia australiana
Poesia brasiliana
Poesia ceca
Poesia cinese
Poesia classica e medievale
Poesia coreana
Poesia finlandese
Poesia francese
Poesia giapponese
Poesia greca
Poesia inglese
Poesia inglese postcoloniale
Poesia iraniana
Poesia ispano-americana
Poesia italiana
Poesia lituana
Poesia macedone
Poesia portoghese
Poesia russa
Poesia serbo-croata
Poesia olandese
Poesia slovena
Poesia spagnola
Poesia tedesca
Poesia ungherese
Poesia in musica (Canzoni)
Comparatistica & Strumenti
Altre aree linguistiche
Visits since 10 July '98

« indietro

 

 

MATTHEW COOPERMAN, Still: Of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move, Counterpath Press, 2011, pp. 120.

 

 

It has come to be a truism that all writing is about writing and that any literary text is, as Roland Barthes insisted in Death of the Author, «made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author». Of course, by now such a claim is beyond being a well-established theory and has become a fundamental convention. Still, it may be that we continually need to be reminded of the fact that no text, or person for that matter, is a unified whole but is a collection or series of parts that are perpetually reworking and repositioning themselves, depending on moment and context. To not see that is to always be in the grip of an illusion of permanence and settledness that forecloses discovery and possibility. Matthew Cooperman’s third collection of poems Still: Of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move in essence foregrounds that condition of being an evershifting constellation or gathering of parts in ways that are as ambitious as its title indicates. More than a hundred pages in length, the work is a serial investigation of contemporary form that makes apparent through lists and indexes, quotations and erasures that perception and attention is always a process of suturing together disparate parts. Rather than being a collection of discrete poems, the book, written over the course of a decade, acts as a single, integrated text, but one that always exposes the fact of its having been assembled. To be clear, Still is not one long poem. As the book’s list of acknowledgments testifies, many of the sections have appeared separately in various journals and magazines. Yet, each poem is so tied to the overarching structure that clearly readers are meant to see almost simultaneously how the sections hold together and how they also push and pull against each other, trying to wrest themselves free. In this way, Cooperman’s poetic structure enacts the complex experience of living within a democratic system. The poetics of Still allegorizes what it means to be a democratic subject.
Cooperman employs many devices to establish the foundation within which sections are complexly interconnected. For instance, each poem or section is framed with the word still, as in «Still: Fighting», «Still: Reality», «Still: Demons». The word ‘still’ suggests both ongoing (as in yet) as well as a film still. The poems each deconstruct the materials and references that shape an understanding of a moment. Using the trope of the film still as a way allows Cooperman to break down a perception of an action in a moment of time into constituent elements. The poems consistently cut against narrative conceptions in order to reveal the conceptual elements that are always in play in any experience. Cooperman, in a manner of speaking, reveals the html code of the act of perceiving. That is to say, in Still any moment, every action is a text, and like any literary text is comprised of an almost unending set of codes and significations and references, like a string of programming code. Take for example this excerpt from «Still: Howling»,

Cause: hunger, as if there were something else, the urge to eat the need to shit. And yet play, lamentation, the joyous body. The wolf sets out to mark the dying day like an actual bone. No need for our time, they have their own time
Communication: vocal, postural, olfactory. «Their pelage is like a sign... » Camp: Lobos (family fun! picture day! tracking! hats! biofacts! 301c opps!) Journal:
Wild Canid Center Review, «Providing an alternative to extinction»; Hominid Studies, «Good humans make good labors»; Howling Wolf, «Letters to Presley»Wish List: two-drawer fire proof file cabinet, plaster of Paris, bleach, fresh meat, heavy duty blankets, rawhide bones for games
Report: very multicultural, fourteen Mexican grays, six reds, one Iranian gray, six South American maned, three Ethiopian reds, two swift foxes

The poem makes use of these long prosaic lines that suture together a series of notes, ideas, claims, and references in the form of various kinds and sources of discourse. This network of languages is what forms a sense of multiple, confederated selves.
We hear in Barthes’ suggestion that a text is a tissue of quotations, the implication that a text has no center and thus it does not build and fall. Cooperman has created a form that does not exactly move since there is no narrative development or even logical goal. The poem’s lines and ideas
accrue rather than develop towards some specific goal. We are left then to experience how things gather rather than letting the mind race ahead to the goal or conclusion. The sections of Cooperman’s Still are hard to quote briefly and concisely – the poem wrestles with the fact that it cannot offer a stable center from which its authority can be said to flow. Still works against closure and stability so that the texts mirror the process of experience itself. Or as Cooperman writes, «I questions all / myselves occluded sum / disguise a record / of our eyes».
In many ways, this excerpt teaches us how to read
Still. We might unpack its argument this way: A singular conception of an «I» works to question the sum of all the selves that each person is. And the «occluded sum» that is the gathering of selves – the beliefs, thoughts, values and perceptions we have – also flows between each of us and any direct, unmediated experience of the world.
Cooperman’s
Still directs our attention towards the very means and mechanisms of how we experience our own experiences. Indeed, Still reveals its vision and ambition at every turn because Cooperman believes so much depends on our recognition that thinking is shot through all the ways we might encounter the world, other people, and ourselves. As he writes in «Still: Here», «and in the end, I’m still here, I am always in the book, a somewhere I am, traveled, traversed, the amount of space I use I am, I seem to move around». This sounds less like description and more like a melancholic intervention – devout and chastening, by turns – by which we might begin to or- der the respective books of our individual days, and reminds us why Cooperman’s Still has so much to teach us. About our own operating systems.

(Richard Deming)


¬ top of page


Iniziative
19 settembre 2024
Biblioteca Lettere Firenze: Mostra copertine Semicerchio e letture primi 70 volumi

19 settembre 2024
Il saluto del Direttore Francesco Stella

16 settembre 2024
Guida alla mostra delle copertine, rassegna stampa web, video 25 anni

21 aprile 2024
Addio ad Anna Maria Volpini

9 dicembre 2023
Semicerchio in dibattito a "Più libri più liberi"

15 ottobre 2023
Semicerchio al Salon de la Revue di Parigi

30 settembre 2023
Il saggio sulla Compagnia delle Poete presentato a Viareggio

11 settembre 2023
Presentazione di Semicerchio sulle traduzioni di Zanzotto

11 settembre 2023
Recensibili 2023

26 giugno 2023
Dante cinese e coreano, Dante spagnolo e francese, Dante disegnato

21 giugno 2023
Tandem. Dialoghi poetici a Bibliotecanova

6 maggio 2023
Blog sulla traduzione

9 gennaio 2023
Addio a Charles Simic

9 dicembre 2022
Semicerchio a "Più libri più liberi", Roma

15 ottobre 2022
Hodoeporica al Salon de la Revue di Parigi

13 maggio 2022
Carteggio Ripellino-Holan su Semicerchio. Roma 13 maggio

26 ottobre 2021
Nuovo premio ai traduttori di "Semicerchio"

16 ottobre 2021
Immaginare Dante. Università di Siena, 21 ottobre

11 ottobre 2021
La Divina Commedia nelle lingue orientali

8 ottobre 2021
Dante: riletture e traduzioni in lingua romanza. Firenze, Institut Français

21 settembre 2021
HODOEPORICA al Festival "Voci lontane Voci sorelle"

11 giugno 2021
Laboratorio Poesia in prosa

4 giugno 2021
Antologie europee di poesia giovane

28 maggio 2021
Le riviste in tempo di pandemia

28 maggio 2021
De Francesco: Laboratorio di traduzione da poesia barocca

21 maggio 2021
Jhumpa Lahiri intervistata da Antonella Francini

11 maggio 2021
Hodoeporica. Presentazione di "Semicerchio" 63 su Youtube

7 maggio 2021
Jorie Graham a dialogo con la sua traduttrice italiana

23 aprile 2021
La poesia di Franco Buffoni in spagnolo

22 marzo 2021
Scuola aperta di Semicerchio aprile-giugno 2021

19 giugno 2020
Poesia russa: incontro finale del Virtual Lab di Semicerchio

1 giugno 2020
Call for papers: Semicerchio 63 "Gli ospiti del caso"

30 aprile 2020
Laboratori digitali della Scuola Semicerchio

» Archivio
 » Presentazione
 » Programmi in corso
 » Corsi precedenti
 » Statuto associazione
 » Scrittori e poeti
 » Blog
 » Forum
 » Audio e video lezioni
 » Materiali didattici
Editore
Pacini Editore
Distributore
PDE
Semicerchio è pubblicata col patrocinio del Dipartimento di Teoria e Documentazione delle Tradizioni Culturali dell'Università di Siena viale Cittadini 33, 52100 Arezzo, tel. +39-0575.926314, fax +39-0575.926312
web design: Gianni Cicali

Semicerchio, piazza Leopoldo 9, 50134 Firenze - tel./fax +39 055 495398