From the Open Sea: Body and Lyric in the Poetry of Jane Cooper

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2008 by Ali, Kazim

I MET JANE COOPER ONCE IN MY LIFE, WHITE light of the afternoon pouring through the windows of her Upper West Side apartment. It was late afternoon, late summer of 2001 and the sound of the earth moving beneath us seemed at last obvious. Jane moved very deliberately, performing each activity, opening the cupboard, taking out cups, pouring water into the kettle. Not one thing was a hinge moment, a transition from one thing to another, not one moment was Jane performing two tasks at once; each moment belonged to itself.

Which is to say, when she looked at me she looked at me. When she spoke to me she spoke to me. The space between two figures in the painting in her hallway, the space between the word she spoke and when I heard it and then the next word. Her body existed in that room, in that space, at the beginning of another era in our history, but that moment when it still seemed we might move towards peace, might move away from what now seems an inevitably impending endless war.

In her prose poem, "The Past," Jane writes of being treated as a child by a doctor whose uncle fought in the war of 1812. The poem concludes, "And how do I connect in my own body-that is, through touch-the War of 1812 with the smart rocket nosing its way via CNN down a Baghdad street? How much can two arms hold? How soon will my body, which already spans a couple of centuries, become almost transparent and begin to shiver apart?"

Cooper held the mortal momenta-trie moment of the body's failure-as close as she held the breath in the heart of her poems. Also in between her poems' lines was that pause of silence between one thing and another, a moment that acknowledged bodies' separation from one another, the compassion they owed one another as mortal objects. I think if there is anything political in Cooper's work-she is the most political of poets after all-it is the mere recognition of this compassion, a compassion that requires a principled opposition to ail violence and war, a commitment to work towards other solutions.

By the end of her life, affected by illness and away from New York City where she rfiainly made her home. Cooper's body would-like all of ours eventually-shiver apart, like a treasure of the earth, dispersing its passions to those connected to her only briefly-including me, a lonely schoolteacher who knew very few poets, writing to her out of the blue, in need of hearing any news at all of the earth's survival, anything at all, asking if he could come and visit. Her published work-four short books written in the second half of the twentieth century collected with some previously uncollected work in The Flashboat-seems work that transcends time and ages. If in a hundred years future generations want to know what it fait like to be alive and human through war, bomb tests, genetic engineering of the food supply, the dehumanization inherent in the spread of global capital, other legacies of the twentieth century, one can only pray that among the poems in the time capsule are hers.

It's a panic, I admit-that the individual's body doesn't mean anything in the face of the machinations of the state, or more likely in the present age, the corporation. That to be an individual at all, with one's own perceptions, hopes, and compassions is political in the extreme. To refuse cruelty-to refuse to participate in the machine of production and consumption that global capital both enables and requires for survival-is practically unpatriotic. One has to talk about politics when talking about Jane Cooper because her concerns are human-individual and human-and so wedded thus as a conscientious refusal of what might otherwise seem the inevitable advance of 'civilization,' which is anything but 'civil.'

In an early poem called "Letters" Cooper presents an idea of the individual body fluidly woven into the fabric of time, the surrounding world, the processes of aging and decay inherent in life. In the first section of the poem she writes:

That quiet point of light

trembled and went out

Iron touches a log:

it crumbles to coal, then ashes.

The log sleeps in its shape.

A new moon rises.

Darling, my white body

still bears your imprint.

When the log succumbs to its natural process-not burned here but rather "touched" by the iron-it does not disappear but "sleeps in its shape." The new moon rising is an image of presence-byabsence-a moon real and extant but completely invisible. The speaker herself at last appears as the body that appears in the final couplet-a body that is also the log, the ash that remained, also the moon in the sky, also the quiet point of light of the first line. These are all things in the world that disappear and even after their disappearance have a life by what remains of them.

The second halff the poem doses this theme neatly:

Wind chewed at the screen,

rain clawed at the window.

Outside three crows

make their harsh, rainy scraping.

Autumn has come

in early July.

On the ground white petals:

my rain-soaked letters.

We're immediately, in the second section, in the world of humans: inside a house protected from the howling elements that both "chew" and "claw," the wind, the rain, the crows. If s an unseasonable climactic shift in this short poem about mortality and endings, bodies becoming not what they were, Autumn appearing two months early. The "letters" on the ground are gorgeous-"white petals" and "rain-soaked" but also heavy with meaning-they are communiqués from the speaker, things dropped on the ground, what remain after life, but also letters as in elemental parts of the communication itself. A body does not disappear but unravels itself, sheds its meanings into the earth.