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»,