Luke Rolfes: Today we are having a conversation with Matthew Cooperman about his new collection of poetry from Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press called the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless. This is a lyrical and wondrously wide-reaching book that tackles living in America during tumultuous times, and the ways we hold fast to hope and love. Thanks so much for taking some time with us, Matthew!
MC: My pleasure Luke, and it’s funny the timing of things. The book somehow speaks to exactly now. When does that ever happen from the conception of a book to its publication!
LR: Apropos, I always start with the genesis of the project. You mentioned in the notes that you began writing this book during the George W. Bush presidency, just post 9/11. So this manuscript has been around for about twenty years? Can you talk about how this manuscript moved from those early ideas to its final form?
MC: I started the first poems in the double shadow of the second Bush presidency, and the atrocity of 9/11. And it was a reaction, initially, to speak witness to what then seemed unimaginable. We’ve come––or gone––a long way from then.
And the first poems were odes. I was interested in a form that spoke to the historic “occasions” I seemed to be witnessing. One of our most ancient poetic forms, the Ode induces, among other things, an apostrophe, an address to what’s missing––a thing, person, quality, belief; or something lost, forgotten, misused. Originally supplications to the gods, dances between acts of ancient Greek drama, the Ode calls out to the world. The early poems took the occasion of the American cataclysm of 9/11, a tragedy, to be sure, but also the exposure of our vulnerability and culpability, the beginning of the age of deceit. I vowed to write odes to America as the occasion occurred. Needless to say, in the twenty-year span of the project those occasions changed dramatically, and the early cast of the poems in the light of 9/11 gave way to the darker cast of the January 6th insurrection. I didn’t set out to write a twenty-year book. It’s just that the particular qualities of the odes required the particular occasions, and the odes kept coming as our country, frankly, unraveled.
LR: You use font size, italics, and text color in this manuscript, as well as specific spacing to shape the lines. Will you discuss your process in shaping/presenting these poems on the page? Is this something that you map out ahead of time, or is it something that comes organically?
MC: I’ve been deeply influenced by Charles Olson. His landmark essay “Projective Verse” (1950), which states, among other things, that the poem is a “field of attentions” visual as much as literary, and that the projective space of the page is a performance, is my bedrock. It’s really about scoring, using the full template of visual and auditory elements of composition. Ironically, Olson was talking about the typewriter as a ‘techne’ breakthrough for poetry. It’s a bit charming now, in light of InDesign and AI. But the obvious development of the “field” of the page into the environmental field of the planet itself is the metapattern the book attempts. I’ve been incorporating this thinking since I first read the essay in college, but throughout my poetry I try to use the field of the page to register distress, joy, aporia, corporatism, etc.…
LR: As well, there is quite a bit of assonance, repetition, music, and subtle rhyme throughout these pieces. At what point do you consider “sound” when crafting these poems? Is that something that comes upfront or is that something that you hone with revision?
MC: Sonics are part of “Projective Verse,” the aural field articulate with the visual. As Olson put it, “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATHE, to the line.” And then that goes back to the performance of the Odes; how they are inherently musical forms. We are persuaded by repetition, mutation, rhyme, assonance…music, but in the late 20th and 21st century, it is increasingly slant where we find our cadences. But Emily Dickinson was on it from the start. I like to think the book is a kind of “sonic geography” of American poetry. There are many voices and songs in it.
Compositionally, music is always both inherent and first and unconscious, and absolutely the measure of my attention. I am an (amateur) saxophone player, but I started playing when I was seven and that instinct has stuck with me. I learned by college that it was language rather than winds that were my instrument, but then they were and are sort of the same thing.
LR: The idea of country is explored often in this manuscript. We live in tenuous times politically and socially with, perhaps, an unprecedented proliferation of tribalism, driven by social media and 24-7 news coverage. Can you speak to this theme of country and how it fueled the poems in this book?
MC: It is rather the subject of the book. Country. And I live in the West. So perhaps I’ve written a Country & Western book. Never saw that coming. But that’s America, and that’s occasional poetics. And that’s always been my concern, from my first book A Sacrificial Zinc (2001, Pleiades/LSU) forward. The complexity––I hope––in the new book is that it’s a love letter to a country I love and am proud of, and am horrified by as well. There’s no escaping the “absolute value” of America if we employ mathematics. But it’s also a living planet I love, and I’m ashamed of how we’ve treated it. We live in a moment of extraordinary witness to geologic change. Right now the East is digging out from the storm of the decade, and Los Angeles is (still) burning in a fire unprecedented in recent history, or imagination. Which is part of the problem. Wake up! The combustion engine of Capitalism and America is full of gas. And we’ve got the new presidency to endure yelling “drill, baby, drill!”. I don’t know where we’ll we be in four years, but the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (which is a line from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”) is an attempt to Ode the situation, which is to say speak to, address, not turn away, confront, apostrophize, atomize, break down the problem.
LR: And as a follow up to that: What sort of texts and/or art influenced your conversation with American ideology and how you wanted to approach it?
MC: The tutelary spirts of the book are Whitman and Ginsberg, and I use and abuse their texts lovingly. My general orientation since I discovered Olson has been Black Mountain poetics. But that's a huge roster of folks; and that’s a whole series of concerns, from the proprioceptive body we inhabit in scale to the material archive that leaves the traces, an anthropological attention to how things and people live on the daily, to a deep interest in local mythology, bioregionalism, and its projective scale of place. I studied with Ed Dorn, Olson’s “star student,” and his iconoclastic assiduity has influenced my thinking intensely. And it’s really about methodology, how to find something out for oneself. Read “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn.”
But there’s a lot of other art and texts that have influenced the book, largely because it took so long! But Shakespeare, Robert Duncan, George Oppen, Claudia Rankine; the philosophers John Paul Sartre and Timothy Morton (see The Ecological Thought), the psychologist Andrew Solomon. And musicians and artists, The Talking Heads, Bill Evans, Terry Riley (I’m old), the painters Lee Krasner and Jasper Johns. In fact, the blue, white and red colored sectional breaks are pulled from Jasper Johns’ “Flag” paintings (thank you editor extraordinaire David Blakesley at Parlor).
I’ve had a long friendship with the Romanian painter Marius Lehene at Colorado State, where I teach. His thinking and seeing has influenced my practice (and my book covers). And I got dragged through “the museums of my youth,” so art––a kind of ekphrastic attention in the poem––has always been there. It’s certainly there in my next project, Time, & Its Monument (Station Hill Press, 2025) that is at once the most collaborative and visual book that I’ve written.
LR: One of my favorites in the opening part of the collection is called “Snow Globe.” “Snow Globe” takes place on January 6–– a somewhat loaded day in recent history. In this poem, you ruminate on memories of snow, and you associate, freely, images that come along with it. This poem, though small, seems to forecast much that comes later in the book. Tell us a little about this one and its role in the manuscript. Is there something about weather and the sensory details it produces that makes us look backward and forward at the same time?
MC: I hate to say too much, but “Snow Globe” is a little shake of the orb of that Whiteness that has so clouded our vision since I was a child. I wrote that poem in 2003 or 4, with January 6 being simply a sonic through line to “it was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it / the 60s.” That it became a predicative ghost through the whole book just sort of filled out the durational contract organically. And a snow globe is a small weather––an idealized or terrorized––microworld, and the book is filled with the weather of our times, so it just sort of happened that way. But it’s part of something much larger, which is realizing Whiteness as a “hegemonic disease.” How to be white––and a male––is to be completely neutral. But that’s never the case. Much of “Difference Essay” is taken up with this diagnosis. And whoever we are, wherever we are, we have to choose. See “Late Music” in the book.
I grew up in a politically activated family. My mother was, while not a delegate, deeply involved in California politics, and was a committed feminist, as was and is my artist sister; and my father’s a clear-eyed defiant lefty “non Jewish Jew” to the end (he’s 92, a former doctor). So political consciousness was part of my education of privilege––of being white, but also a Jew, and also the bearer of some ethical responsibility. So being aware of the “always already” biases of western culture is part of my responsibility, even as I enjoy a certain privilege. It’s oddly what drew me to Ed Dorn, my primary mentor, who was the most individual, interrogative person I ever met.
LR: The Ginsberg-esque “Gun Ode” speaks explicitly to America’s obsession with firearms, and our conflation of guns with Americanism. Gun violence has been front and center in this country for the last three decades, and it seems that this crisis has created a social impasse. How do you navigate, in poetry, a topic that seemingly has us stuck in a recursive loop of violence, outrage, and inertia?
MC: That’s such a good question, because it’s what led me to the Ode. The meta structure is this dialectical form of address: I, You, We; or variations of that. And that address atomizes the subject, catalogues the parts, calls out the transgressions, invokes, through the fundament of Breath, a release, singing: the anodyne of poetry.
And Ginsberg understood this deeply. He was––though not directly––one of my teachers as well when I was in Boulder. He was at Naropa University when I was at the University of Colorado with Dorn. It was kinda a Sharks and Jets situation, with me decidedly in the Dorn camp. But years of learning and reading and teaching––I teach a Beat Generation Literature course at Colorado State––made me realize the deep imprint Ginsberg in person, and then in print, had on my poetics, especially to me as a “non Jewish Jew,” or more accurately a BuddhaJew. And Ginsberg’s work in the Ode––“Plutonian Ode,” “Magic Psalm,” and most impressively “Howl”––is a direct address to America. And I hoped, in a less vatic way, in a less vatic time, to offer anodyne to our “gun problem,” which is a sickness parallel to the white sickness I’m calling out.
LR: The piece “Difference Essay” is another favorite of mine. “Difference Essay” is a multi-sectioned, tour-de-force that circles the subject of your daughter and the differences that define each of our existences. This piece, for me, seemed to divide your collection into two parts. Can you talk about the creation of “Difference Essay” and why you chose to place it at this specific point in the manuscript?
MC: More astute reading, Luke. As I’ve mentioned, atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And “I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference.” I guess the point is we’re all different, nothing is self-identical, and the disease of homogeneity is actually––at least in my lifetime––an American disease. So the book turns inward in various ways.
LR: In “General Syntax,” I am fascinated by this stanza, “Build me a son, I say, and I will show you a river. There, in my / dreams I hear footsteps, crying, the green rustle of reeds. In war / there is no victor if you consider the reeds. The sedges, by contrast, / were always on the up and up unless we slept there.” It seems that your poetry sings loudest when you juxtapose the abstract with the natural. Is there something to that? Tell us, if you would, about this poem and how you balance the concrete with the abstract.
MC: That poem and “Major Lure,” its pendant, are largely constructed from General Douglas MacArthur’s “Farewell Address to Congress, 1951.” I cut it up, rearranged, and denatured his “national language.” That the world it describes in 1951 is still the war-strung world we live in today is the sad song it sings. Oddly, the “natural language” I threaded into it comes more from own time, my own watching of Vietnam on television and in film, watching “Huey” helicopters buffeting the grasses.
LR: The title poem in this book “the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless” takes us on a trip across the middle of the United States––past, place, and present floating alongside us like utility poles on the highway. What was your stylistic inspiration for this one? When did you know that this was the title piece of this manuscript?
MC: Your last variable of question goes to an interesting point. The title comes from a poem I wrote, tried to write, was a part of my Masters’ thesis at CU w/Dorn, and the original poem is incorporated in ways into the poem. But that goes all the way back to 1992!! So again, durational poetics. But oddly enough, that trace leapt all the way to last series of poems in the book, written post pandemic. You’ll note the opening of the poem is a returning. That’s Aby (my wife the poet Aby Kaupang) and our daughter Maya (of the poem “Difference Essay”) and me returning from a sabbatical in 2021 at the pitch of the pandemic. We came home after a year on Maui. (I know, it was in the works before the pandemic). And coming back was coming back to a different world. And the material gas of the descended world was acutely there on our return from the airport. To have been on an island for a year, connected, but disconnected, and then to return to the “scrim of haybales,” it just made the hyperobject of gas, oil, the sooty atmosphere, a felt thing. That poem also emerges out of my rather obsessive reading of Timothy Morton, who could be described as everything from an ecopoetical philosopher to deconstructionist, object oriented ontologist to Zen aphorist. He’s really something.
LR: Another interesting poem is “Country Mulligan,” in which you imagine American history basically getting a “do-over” on key recent events––one of the changes being that Al Gore was elected instead of George W. Bush. This poem is seemingly playful yet sobering. What led you to reimagine this cross-section of history in this way?
MC: The 2000 election will always be a watershed in my consciousness. To grow up believing in my country and its institutions, and to see it betrayed, or rather the beginning of the betrayal, “weapons of mass destruction” foreboding a far darker future, was devastating. And I’ve always wondered how we’d have turned out if the “hanging chad” had swung in Gore’s favor. I think we’d be better off, and the poem is an attempt at speculative realism, something maybe we could use right now.
LR: “My Wife’s New Desk,” which appeared in Laurel Review, ruminates on the building blocks of the desk itself––the life of the lumber harvested in Missouri, built in Thailand, and then assembled in your living room. It seems like this book, to my reading, sees existence as a continuum––how we stand atop mountains built by the generations before us. Can you talk broadly about the concepts of time and history in your poetry?
MC: To live on earth is to be connected. The simultaneity of the planet happened long ago (the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time, 1912, because of European train schedules). So we live in a Oneness that is hard to discriminate. We are, our experiences, our communications, our tactilities, our payments, radically dispersed yet connected. Back to the title poem; and certainly in “My Wife’s New Desk.” Everyone has literally and figuratively touched the desk. It is a hyperobject to which we are a flow channel
LR: This book––even though it navigates our tumultuous and incendiary times––doesn’t seem pessimistic in totality. At least not to my ear. Are these poems, in the end, hopeful?
MC: I really don’t know, Luke. I don’t know where we’re headed. But poetry has directed me in ways of learning and teaching and healing. So I’m going to go with that. The poem “Repair” offers some glimpse, perhaps, we’re all connected, but “you hold your [beam] skyways, and I’ll try.”
LR: What’s next for you and your work? New projects in the works?
MC: I mentioned it earlier, but I’ve got a book coming out with the venerable Station Hill Press in 2025, Time, & Its Monument. Edited by the brilliant poet Sam Truitt, and published by the legendary (but underrecognized poet and artist) George Quasha (along with his photographer wife Susan), the press dates back to the Fluxus moment in the late 60s. I’m humbled to be a part of it. And it’s a collaborative/ekphrastic book—drawings by the Italian artist Simonetta Moro; and paintings by the poet/painter Peter Richards. There’s some collages of my own as well, and a long erasure sequence. It’s an oddity, but I’m excited about it.
LR: This is a wonderful book, Matthew. Thanks so much for sharing some time with us! Link to book.
MC: My pleasure, thanks for asking, Luke.