David Cope. The
Invisible Keys: New and Selected Poems. Madison, Wisconsin: Ghost Pony
Press, Spring 2018. ISBN: 0-941160-18- 1 and 798-0- 941160-18- 6. $16.00.
I first came
in contact with David Cope and his poetry while a teaching assistant to Allen
Ginsberg at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1980. Ginsberg
was much taken with the poems that the then-younger Cope had sent him from the
heartland. The poet Charles Reznikoff had just died and there was much to do
with Cope’s poetry that struck Ginsberg as a continuation of the direct and
clear objectivist style for which Reznikoff was known. I also saw up close that
Ginsberg found some relief in the articulate, well-read Michigan poet. After
all, once the Kerouac School opened in 1974, hordes of young novice writers
descended upon Ginsberg and other Beat Generation writers at Naropa to create
what at times appeared to be a kind of night-of-the-living-dead, unbeat, zombie
poetry scene.
Cope was a
distinct and singular exception to the poets that flocked to Ginsberg insofar
as he had no intellectual or emotional affinity to the Beat notion of
improvisational “First Thought, Best Thought” mind. “First Thought, Best
Thought” was the phrase that Ginsberg used to describe spontaneous and fearless
writing, a way of telling the truth that arises from naked and authentic
experience. David Cope took exception to this methodology in favor of the basic
tenets of Objectivist poetry, championed by early 20th century American poets
Luis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Reznikoff, among others.
As defined by Zukofsky, Objectivist poets were to
treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence and the
poet's ability to look clearly at the world. This view of the world, as well as
poetry, is the world of Cope’s sturdy compilation of selected poems, The Invisible Keys.
Fast forward to today, a good 100 years past the deposition of the
Objectivist School. Today, we have more schools of poetry and poetics discourse
than perhaps in any other time in history. We also have a president who does
not distinguish between truth and untruth, who openly argues against “fake”
media, “so called” judges, “alternative facts” and so forth. As Michael Hayden,
a former director of the CIA wrote in “The End of Intelligence,” a New York Times op-ed piece, “These are
truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the
values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what
constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of
objective reality itself” (29 April 2018, 1,6). You won’t find in David Cope’s Invisible Keys a universe unmoored from
its objectivist foundation as you’ll find on any given day at the Oval Office.
That’s a very good thing.
Another
distinction between Cope, who Ginsberg first invited to teach at the Kerouac
School in the summer of 1980, and most of the Naropa student poets with whom he
would meet at this still relatively early juncture in his poetics journey, was
that he was already living a blue-collar family life and working as school
custodian. Perhaps there are certain kinds of objective reality that may be
harder to ignore than others. Earning enough money to raise a family of four
comes immediately to mind. Maybe Yosemite Sam (a name ascribed to Donald Trump
by his biographer, Tim O’Brien, after the cartoon character) can get away with
a life seemingly dedicated to overriding objective reality. But a janitor? It
would be a cold day in hell before a clogged up toilet gets fixed by insulting
it, calling it all kinds of awful names. And unlike the Syrian government,
whose leader seems to enjoy chemical warfare assaults on his own people with
relative impunity, mostly invisible custodians live their day-to-day lives
exposed to a variety of toxins in oft invisible benefit to others. Cope was
fully aware of objective reality when, in considering his legacy of blue collar
employment, he used Whitman’s catalog technique to write the poem, “AP Wire
Story: ‘Janitors at Risk’”:
For years I breathed spray paint, toluol, methanol,
xylene & hi-lo fumes under roaring fans
in the factory,
then coal dust in aging boiler rooms, pulled
hot clinkers & breathed the fumes,
inhaled
diatomaceous earth, muriatic acid & chlorine
vapors 6 years at Lincoln Pool, breathed
asbestos in boiler rooms,
in tunnels & mechanical rooms across the city,
inhaled chlordane, wood dust, germicide
fumes, stone cleaners,
boric acid dust, ammonia vapors––almost my whole
adult life––exposed myself daily to
shit, piss,
vomit, mucus, hair, congealed sweat, menstrual
blood, as every janitor does. Today,
meetings to save the planet
fill auditoria as janitors wheel chemicals for the
air conditioning right past
the door where
the speakers have worked themselves into a
righteous frenzy! [...]
(42)
What David
Cope’s catalog of real toxic substances signify is that while people in power,
people with great privilege, people with enormous wealth and fixers may get
elected as president of the United States throughout American history, the only
silver lining in our current president’s language is that Trump’s post-truth
misuses shine a light on everyone else’s awareness of their own communication,
behavior, truthfulness of speech and written words. So the first thing for
which I want to praise Invisible Keys is
its dedication to facts, sanity, and to its dedication to the Objectivist Way.
Personally
impacted by the horrific death machine that was the Vietnam War, as were many
of his generation coming of age in the 1960s, Cope dropped out of college
before completing his undergraduate degree after an antiwar demonstration in
Ann Arbor turned violent and the police began busting heads, but not before
studying at the University of Michigan with the African American poet Robert
Hayden to whom he dedicated Invisible
Keys. In the poem “Peace,” Cope recorded what that form of anti-war
desperation looked like for those whom Vietnam was a living nightmare. He
writes of one custodial coworker named Benny who “talks of piles of bodies, /
corpses with arms, heads, legs ripped off”:
he speaks without passion,
regretting the wasted effort, the needless deaths,
yet he accepts his part in it,
still amazed people could live like this for years,
from attack to counter-attack
hiding in fields & ditches,
finding uncles & sons blasted to pieces
more often than children are born. (8)
Cope
eventually dreamed himself out of the
janitorial employment he done for 18 years to become a professor-poet for the
next 22 years. That is, he taught Shakespeare and worked on curriculum
development at Grand Rapids Community College after having previously cleaned
the college’s toilets and mopped its floors. In his life, there were no
shortages of improbable juxtapositions such as his unusual leap from janitor to
professor within the same physical workspace. Here was a living blue collar
working man who in his invisible, secret life as a poet was a voracious reader
of history, a devotee of art, culture, film and music, a literary
multiculturalist, and a person attuned to the natural world in which he reveled
and later channeled its most healing and joyous qualities.
Dreaming
holds a special place throughout Cope’s Invisible Keys and it is worth
investigating why the word, or some form of it, appears again and again in his
poems. It may have been that without dream
activism, or acting upon one’s
dreaming, as Martin Luther King demonstrated in his “I Have a Dream” speech
given on 28 August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that so captured
the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Cope would have never made
the leap that he did, the leap that ended the interruption of his academic
career during the height of the Vietnam War and resulted in him entering the
academy as a professor of Shakespeare.
It may well be with an Elizabethan eye
that Cope also uses the word dream repeatedly
in his poems for, like Shakespeare, dream is a central and dominating image in
Cope’s poetry, encompassing at once the terrors of the irrational and the creative
powers of the imagination, humanity’s deepest fears and highest aspirations. The
Shakespeare dream world is peopled by ghosts, witches, fairies and spirits and
governed not by reason, but by omen and prophecy, vision and daydream,
coincidence and disguise. Shakespeare’s dream world is shown to be a key
indicator of symbol and meaning, sometimes even a metaphor for the plays
themselves. By the time of the late romances, including The Tempest, Shakespeare’s dream and dramatic worlds are virtually
indistinguishable, and the vision of life as a dream achieves its fullest
reality.
Consider how
Cope chose to open his selected poems––with the dark incandescence of the poem
“American Dream,” a vision of the raging hellfire that was as if the Vietnam
War had been imported lock, stock and barrel to the homeland in a manner of
brutality that we have come to accept for its numbingly raw cinematic portrayal
of our own country’s pervasive shock and awe violent tendencies:
the house was all in flames,
orange billows bursting up into the sunlight.
FBI agents & police were laid up
behind walls, sheds & other building
armed with M-16s & rocket launchers.
the firemen were kept back.
the battle had gone on for some time
when the fire exploded thruout the house.
one of the bodies could be seen inside the house,
loaded with ammunition bullets,
the bullets exploding from the heat.
While the poem
remains as raw today as it did at first reading in 1980––with its Objectivist
realism, it’s Hemingway-like minimalist language, vivid cinematic accents and
close-up detail, in the context of Invisible
Keys, “American Dream” plays a part, as does each poem that follows, as a
statement of meaning that says the essence of gesture is invisible, is
symbolic. This essence of gesture depends on images and the ability of language
to evoke the inner qualities of perceived objects in the absence of those
objects.
Gestural
images, portrayed as passing characters, parade across Cope’s poems. There’s a
“crone [wheeling] a battered pram, empty” (“Abandoned Hotel,” 2), a “small boy
[who] tried to strangle a pigeon” (“Chinese Calligraphy,” 11), a funeral
cortege with “sun [shining] over the hearse, thru the windows/onto their laps
where their hands are folded” (“Labor Day,” 13), an “old bum [who] scratches
his back beneath his coat” (“Modern Art,” 15), imaginations of Civil War dead
“where bodies were heaped up waist-high” (“Antietam,” 16), a “Sikh [standing]
near the back of the room” (“The Liberty Bell,” 17), and a “neighbor’s hanging
out his laundry” (“Alone,” 18).
While these
characters make only brief appearances, one character in particular seems to
haunt the mind long after reading this tender and sturdy selection––the old
jazz pianist who “looks at his hands, palms down, fingers spread” (“At the
Croyden,” 20). This aging musician who “played everywhere, all these big joints
downtown, / an’ he played Detroit, & up in Canada, too. / he knew all the
good numbers–– [...] looks back up into my eyes / & I see the invisible
keys.” It’s as though Cope plotted his book in the context of a Dantean journey
and the aging jazz musician is his guide. It’s also fair to say that the
gesture of “dead, old John, premiere piano player, / found sitting up on his
toilet after / 3 days not answering his bell” that begins the title poem of
this collection marks an epiphany of symbol and meaning in its conclusion:
somewhere
that old tune’s floating up
in a dingy hallway
one bare bulb hanging
& those keys’re
rolling, waves under fast fingers––
& two floors up
a woman sobs alone on rumpled sheets
shattered glass
on the floor, picture on her pillow––
two lovers
in white, with a red rose––
hearing those notes
again, she’ll rise & look out at
the empty street,
streetlights going off in the
lavender dawn,
& she’ll remember an embrace, a
tender moment
in a room like this, & sighing,
wipe her eyes
& fix her hair, who knows who
might turn up today,
toes still tapping to that old song.
(“The Invisible Keys,” 24)
The American
poet Antler (for whom Cope wrote “For Antler, after the storm,” 74) has written
of David Cope’s poetry that his poems are “Majestic condensed narratives, each
a short story” and that to fully understand Cope’s achievement is to see this
poet as “tenderness incarnate.” In his comments on The Invisible Keys, Antler also noted how Cope’s poetry transformed
over time and celebrated the sense of change, of growth, from an “apocalyptic
rebel youth” to “the bard of today invoking love and hope.” You see that both
epic narrative compression and tenderness incarnate with particular clarity in
the book’s title poem.
There is great
density of poetic weaving of the personal and political, the religious and
sexual in The Invisible Keys. There’s
also the sense that Cope has presented a universe of poesy just as Pound
suggested: news that’s stays news. There is an alignment with tradition and
lineage that goes back through time across the span of these poems. While
Cope’s allusions have heavy anchoring in Shakespeare and Dante, the comparative
literature scholar and translator Dr. Hong Sun wrote in a 2017 review of Invisible Keys that “Cope’s poems
collected here present a panorama of over two millennia of world history. They
run the gamut of dramatic events from ancient Greece, through 15th-century
Inca, to the world of our own century.”
With the
pandora’s box of Trump as president unleashed on the world, a man who is a liar
and who abuses words as much as he does people, this book of selected poems by
David Cope reads like an antidote against all things authoritarian. There’s the
complex, varied, subtle and richly multilayered poem “Tiananmen Square
Sequence” (28) that zeroes in on China’s domination over its people. There’s
“Fireball in the Clouds” (38) with its juxtapositions between the visible and
unseen, the living and dead, woke and asleep “as / gassed Kurds & blasted
Iraqis/mingle in the silent screams / that rend tender springtime’s/sleeping
buds.” There’s “Ghazal of The High Plateau” (41) with its “one tiny yellow
flower, an unearthly flower, nameless, a / crooked flower once signed to you by
a long-dead sage. / this is the sign you were to wait for.” There’s the strange
and surrealistic sutra-like historical poem “Catching Nothing” in which Cope
imagines “the dinosaur bone collector, / efficient & ambitious, / whose
skull is now some / professor’s paperweight” (44). There’s “In Silence” (65)
that portrays the extreme calamity of the September 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center by focusing on Cope’s cousin, Ann Barber, who was a doctor
stationed at an NYC emergency room “expecting the onrush / of wounded,” but
found “only the silence & / the realization at last / that none would come
/ thru the open door.”
Over the
course of the four plus decades Cope has produced his body of work (1975-2017),
his writing style began to shift away from the grit of Reznikoff and more
toward a tender lyricism. As he aged, the blazing darkness of Reznikoff began
to lift and something like the sweet honey variability of William Carlos
Williams began to emerge. This shift in the poems toward a more pronounced
compassion, one cleansed by the frustrations and angers of youth, comes into
focus during his mid-life work most clearly with the poem “Tender Petals for Calm
Crossing” (62), a poem that sets the stage for the elegiac poems of his later
period:
along this silent path among cliffs thru terraced green
you’ll sing beneath your breath where the poet dreamed
his escape thru the clouds, where whole populations fled
to rebuild shattered dreams, hands in the moist earth––
stone masons who shaped the rock attentively, that it
interlock & honor earth that gave both seed & harvest
in the sweep of seasons––ghosts today, they wander here,
picking your pockets, to know what dreams you bring
to this place, what breath you leave among these rocks,
what song you gather in your backpack & basket of silence...
[...]
where arms & legs of the dead clutch & kick at heaven,
vanishing dreams of hungry ghosts. so you come, bringing
blessings & eyes to flush the tears that still pool in the
world’s
grief thru all the rages of lost centuries, all the weeping sisters
crying for lovers who never appeared, all the lost brothers
marched thru barbed wire to death’s final anonymity
in the last burst they’d ever hear, minds turned inward
to their mother’s cries on the day they forced their way
into this light, compassion now for them all: that your dream
be clear when you come to this pass, I send you this wish
where tender petals turn, open in both darkness and light.
David Cope is
a poet of vital occasions––“occasion” in its meaning as a juncture, “a place where
things join. His poems bear
witness to time beings, humanity dreams, invisible signs, traditions held fast
and close. His poems are set to circumstances of which Cope bore witness.
Looking at this first major retrospective of his work, The Invisible Keys: New and Selected Poems contain significant
occasions in which the primary impulse is one of consecration, even if the arc
traveled reveal a desecrated world strung out on destruction and suffering.
The finest
example of Cope’s later work is “A Dream of Jerusalem,” a poem inspired by an
installation by the Spanish painter and sculptor Jaume Plensa. Cope’s “A Dream
of Jerusalem” appeared alongside Plensa’s Jerusalem (2006), an
installation that featured 18 bronze sculpted gongs, each fifty-two inches
diameter, at the Frederik Meijer Gardens of Grand Rapids on 7 November 2008. In
comments on the process involved in the making of the poem, Cope wrote this
rare and expansive discussion into and about his writing process:
“A Dream of Jerusalem” begins with my own associations with the city
through William Blake's prophetic “Jerusalem”—the city itself as a metaphor for
imaginative redemption—and through childhood reflection on Jerusalem as locus
for both spiritual journey and holocaust, the latter including the Lamentations—the
fall of the city, destruction of the temple, and the Babylonian captivity—as
well as the slaughter of the population and destruction of the second temple c.
70 CE. as recounted by Josephus in The Jewish War.
There were also countervailing associations: Plensa's inscription of
lines from the Song of Songs on the two parallel rows of giant gongs
which with their sounding hammers form the sculpture. Song of Songs is
a woman's book, a book of love and longing, and of the spiritual sexuality of
love itself, and in thinking about the poem I would write, I recalled the
woman's search and the famous refrain in 2:7, 3:5, and 8:4, which I rendered
freely as “none may turn to Love until it descends in morning dew and in
calling doves.”
While this line would become the refrain for the poem, I did not
begin by thinking of it as such; in the initial composition, the line repeated
itself in the 9th line-it just seemed to fit there—and it came up again as the
final line of the poem. Later, I reworked a lot of the lines in the middle
sections, largely for condensation of phrasing and for specificity of image,
and in this process repeated the line as the 21st line, thus framing the poem
up with two refrains at the beginning (lines 3 and 9) and two at the end (lines
21 and 27).
[...]
When I came to Plensa's notion of the gongs, this binary concept of
stillness/action found its form in the idea of the shofar untouched and of the
“presence that could in a soundless tomb shiver the dark with hammers, sound
the call in waves shimmering in all the wheels turning across the universe
& make seraphs weep.” Silence thus became the meditative center of the
poem, a priori the “unheard music of spheres” which cannot be heard in a fallen
age.
The last major association was the idea of the woman herself-in Song
of Songs, fairly obviously a young woman in the prime of her youth—yet I
also thought of her as the elder she would finally become, of Time itself. I
had lost my own mother this year, thus the importance of the child reaching out
to touch the mother's cheek, the bone where the mother's vision once stirred,
and finally the ashes which “swirl in shining waves, sink into dark murk &
are gone”—an image from the final ceremony after my mother's death, wherein my
siblings cast my mother's ashes into the river where she raised us. The poem is
thus the central poem in that sequence of works exploring my mother's passage
from this life and my own self-discovery borne of that passage.
In the associations which come with my mother's passing, there is
also the image of the “scattered bones chirping in dry day”—that astounding
image from the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel, wherein the voice asks
the prophet whether these bones shall live (Ezekiel 37:3). The part of
my mind that was revolving on the associations with my mother's death picked up
on the chirping bones, an image I had previously combined with the notion of
Christ as “the word made flesh,” turning the phrases in my 1993 poem “For
Martin King”—“who sang the flesh made word that bones may walk.” The image
returned here as a rebirth, as the city itself has been reborn.
All these associations were activated when I first encountered
Plensa's Jerusalem; when it came to the composition, the words came quickly. [...]
The work quite naturally fell into the pattern of long-lined tercets, a format
I have been very comfortable with ever since my extensive interrogation of
Dante's Commedia.*
“A Dream of Jerusalem” embodies Cope’s later-life poetics perception
of the long and deep poetics history of “the great lyric dream,” a history of
which the poet, upon the death of his mother, has this epiphany: “we are
creatures made of words rounded by incantation / & the great lyric
dream...” The poem continues:
in this heart shaped by words there is a presence that could
in a soundless tomb shiver the dark with hammers, sound
the call in waves shimmering in all the wheels turning across
the universe & make seraphs weep. yet there is the stillness of
the word, the child’s mind that turns to her mother & touches
her skin made of words: words that measure breath to be
shared as tender touch in passing time: brothers cry out
at the prison door, women sigh in their last dank beds, boys
turned men shoulder rifles behind dusty tanks. blood is the cry
thru a thousand cities. here there is silence: here light & form
where words ring the lovers together, here a dream of soft bodies
moving together, the dream at once the child’s cry & the mother’s
last gasp exhaled in fierce sunset as if none may turn to Love
until it descends in morning dew and in calling doves
here the desolate city, deserted temple, the lost tribe: here
the dream wrapped in words that round the breath in silent air:
here ashes that once were man, the bright dream & endless night,
here sun disc’s eternal round, silence, unheard music of spheres...
The enduring significance of the lyric impulse is central to “Dream
of Jerusalem.” This lyric impulse––its essential compassionate
nature––underlies much of the arc of Cope’s development as framed by The Invisible Keys. The application of
the lyric to his art is also a signaling of the importance of the genre’s roots
to him, as well as the evolution of meter and song, going back to the ancient
Greeks, the classical Roman poets, the Chinese poets of the Songs of Chu collected by Qu Yuan and
Song Yu, the 10th century Persian ghazal
form, the 11th and 12th century courtly love poetry of the French Troubadours,
the Middle ages Hebrew singer-poets, and Dante’s Vitae Nuova. I would argue that if it had been Cope’s mission to
update and reinvigorate the lyric impulse in this era, he, unlike the
president, can honestly say, “Mission accomplished.”
Jim Cohn
8 May 2018
Louisville, CO
In regards to any
head-scratching by readers wondering about David’s statement: “The work quite
naturally fell into the pattern of long-lined tercets, a format I have been
very comfortable with ever since my extensive interrogation of Dante's Commedia,” and the fact that “A Dream of Jerusalem” is formatted
into quatrains, he noted in a private email discussion with the reviewer (11
May 2018) that “the poem was indeed composed on the dantescan
tercet model reconfigured in vers libre, but I later modified it to quatrains,
primarily because the long lines wouldn't fit in the space available in a
printed 6 X 9 book."
