Part of the myth of Lorine Niedecker is that of the “woman in the woods,” the isolated poet working at such a remove from literary centers that her work goes un- or at least under-appreciated until after her passing. That of course is largely hokum – Niedecker’s connections with the Objectivists were early, deep & lasting, and kept her connected even during the twenty-year period (1940-60) when Objectivism itself was mostly out of print & forgotten. A better example than Niedecker of a poet whose remove from The Scene caused genuine neglect might be Besmilr Brigham, who moved around between Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas & Mexico at a time when a trip to New York, San Francisco or Boston might have created the basis for an audience that would take root & spread widely. We are fortunate that C.D. Wright in particular took notice – Wright is one of the great readers of my generation as well as one of its great poets – and published Brigham’s selected short poems, Run Through Rock, but we’re still waiting for a publication that would give a fuller sense of Brigham’s overall range & reach as a poet.

 

Similarly, Rae Armantrout benefited greatly from living in Berkeley during her junior & senior years in college & then again in San Francisco between 1972 & ’77. While San Diego is not exactly the boondocks, Armantrout already was widely acknowledged as a major writer in one of the nation’s two largest writing communities before she returned to her childhood hometown.

 

Lisa Cooper is the kind of poet who would be a household name in post-avant circles if only she had spent a couple of years in New York or SF. As it is, she has devoted followers among those who have read the work, but unless one has picked up her homolinguistic translations of Jack Spicer – & Calling It Home , which I believe is still available from Chax Press – the work has been pretty fugitive outside of Tucson, a beautiful city, but one that few people get to casually – it’s one of those places you really have to want to be in order to be there at all.

 

Happily, there are three new poems of Cooper’s in the Tucson issue of Can We Have Our Ball Back, one of the very best online zines of verse. The issue, guest-edited by Tim Peterson, came out six months or so ago, it would seem, but I didn’t notice it until I came across a link on the POG website, which I was looking at because of Heather Nagami’s poetry in Antennae. Nagami’s actually not in that issue – presumably because she’s moved back to the Bay Area – but Cooper is among the 27 poets who are to be found there, some of whom will be familiar to readers of this blog (David Ray, Dan Featherston, Charles Alexander, Tenney Nathanson, Sheila Murphy gerrymandered in from Phoenix), others of whom will be new (I recommend Frances Sjoberg).

 

Obviously, Lisa Cooper is part of a vibrant poetry scene. But just as clearly, Tucson is a community at some remove from other literary centers in the United States. That’s a distance that technology – such as the net – can reduce, but never completely eradicate. And just as some poets – Charles Alexander & Sheila Murphy are good examples – negotiate that distance to become internationally known for their work, a poet as fine as Lisa Cooper can still remain largely a secret to the wider world of readers.

 

So I’d recommend that you read these poems by Cooper, especially “As if Your Life Depended” & “Vagabond.” I’d try putting one of them up here, but I had trouble enough with the spacing in Jules Boykoff’s piece the other day &, anyway, I want you to browse around both the Tucson issue as well.

 

And, likewise, you should take a look at these two poems of Cooper’s from Poethia, now part of the CybpherAnthology of Discontinguous Literature, luigi-bob drake’s infelicitously named ongoing web collection of post-avant verse.

 

Scenes – by which I mean geographic communities, as opposed to an aesthetic community that transcends any particular geography (which in the past I’ve called networks in order to distinguish them from geo-specific scenes) – can have an enormous impact on individual writers, a good deal of it healthy. Many poets do their very best work when they have a sense of it directly responding to the work & ideas of their closest associates, some of which may just be a collective desire for everyone to do their very best, to push (& be pushed by) their comrades. Yet scenes are diverse aesthetically, where networks almost by definition tend to focus on certain aspects or approaches to the poem. This has both positive & negative implications. Niedecker & Brigham lacked scenes, yet Niedecker – and this may be a decisive difference betwixt the two – had a network that proved one of most fruitful in this century, where Brigham’s contacts with other poets appear to have been sporadic. The Tucson issue of Can We Have Our Ball Back presents a view of a scene – Peterson’s done a great job at this – some of whose poets can be said to have broader connections. (I think that one could argue that, sociologically, Chax Press is itself a network, given how coherent its editorial choices have been over the years.) Yet I would love for more people in more places to know the poetry of somebody like Lisa Cooper. And I wonder how establishing the connections that would make this possible might impact her work.