Originally printed in Poetry International

A Sacrificial Zinc

By Matthew Cooperman. Warrensburg, MO: Pleaiades Press 2001.

Humanophone

By Janet Holmes. University of Notre Dame Press 2001.

Reviewed by Joseph Duemer

Reading A Sacrificial Zinc, I imagine a dictionary being blown up and then put back together again by angels. And not particularly pious angels, either. Reckless angels drunk on etymologies and unheard of collocations: “…vignette vandal, res roulette, try one two three endless possibility chainsawing the inexhaustible dark wood of memory—the scream, the teeth biting the neck.” [“Story”]

This is a book heavy with paraphrase and quotation, heavy with ironic literary allusion. Cooperman draws on the entire library of literature from Marvell to Charles Olson; his most important sources are American. He also draws in material from popular culture that, in its new context, becomes part of the poet’s reformulated canon:

1. String theory, pollywogs, spells of vanquished Ortho balms

Which fade in brown glass jugs. Efforts at Pi. Home movies

1.1 extolling The Final Day. Tiny ivory elephants. Kachina dolls

like Matchbox cars, conflation and collecting. Oh, cultures

1.2 equilibration. “A Mason ring here is a Mason ring there.”

Ozone depletion and the question of where…

These lines from the opening of “Hermeneutica” will give the reader some sense of Cooperman’s range of reference; numbered like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the poem works to dispel the last dim ghosts of logical positivism’s reductive view of language as a mere transcription of thoughts that exist prior to their entrance into language.

Cooperman’s project is to replace that reductive view of language, which regards poetry as, at best, decorative and emotive with a view of language that might be taken from the latter Wittgenstein’s notion of language games. Cooperman enters into our language games with a vengeance, with a raw joy in destruction and reconstruction. He disrupts the cybernetic feedback loops out of which we test and regulate reality. And yet stylistically, the reader of these poems will find passages that seem derived from confessional and deep image models:

Soul itch, hour wife, heaven jar,

I want to write you a love poem, exquisite braid

of wind in the wheat,

bells victorious…[“The Art of Navigation”]

In other poems the reader discovers strategies and verbal arrangements that appear to have been adapted from the experimental poetics usually associated with the Language Poets. There are prose poems and what might best be called personal lyrics, recalling Coleridge’s “conversation poems.”

The rake stands still against the house,

tines of shadow and streetlight limned

like a moon worked through the thresh of maple…[“After Raking Leaves”]

So is Cooperman merely offering up a pastiche of 20^th century styles—a postmodern potpourri of poetic simulations? I don’t think so: while the book is stylistically various, it also maintains an attitude toward perception that pulls the various poetic practices together. That is, the poems in A Sacrificial Zinc are bound by an epistemological vision that is pragmatic and pluralistic; linguistically, this view finds expression in Cooperman’s willingness to bring language itself into play within perceptual field. Often this shows up in print as italics:

Fire is hunger, imperative, heat. A lighthouse,

corrosion, the natural agency of ruddy glow.

Of element, this fyre is named elixir vitae.

To give out the body, to set the cask, to state

All our brilliant combustions. As virtues go,

Water is found more widely, the liquid of

Composure. Contrasted with wine, the drinke

of plantes and animals…[“E Is For Evidence”]

By bringing in material from various sources (attributed in notes on the last pages of the book), Cooperman is calling attention to intertextuality and also celebrating the wild and disjunctive collocations available to a poet writing within a long literary and linguistic tradition.

A ‘sacrificial zinc’ is a chunk of zinc alloy welded to the hull of a ship in order to help prevent oxidation of the steel hull itself; such a zinc is an “anti-fouling device” and so are Cooperman’s poems: they draw the corrosive salts of our lives to themselves, allowing us to get on with our journeys.

If book reviews had titles, the one might be called “Postmodern Poetics Comes of Age.” Like that of Matthew Cooperman’s work, that of Janet Holmes is—if a bit more elegant—eclectic in both style and subject; also like Cooperman, Holmes has a knack for the just juxtaposition and the revealing shift of diction. Both poets are comfortable with a range of techniques that range from traditional lyric modes to typographic arrays of words and phrases. What these techniques reveal or open to the reader is a particular attitude—call it “postmodern”—toward poetic identity, subject matter, and language. The techniques of both poets lay open the act of composing a poem even in the act of composing—or perhaps in our reenactment as readers of that composing.

Humanophone takes as its tutelary figures the American musicians Harry Partch, Raymond Scott, and George Ives, whose musical imaginations required them to invent their own musical systems and own unique instruments with names like cloud chamber bowls, theramin, and the humanophone, an instrument made up of human singers, wach of whom sing a single note when called upon by the score to sound. These are our “outsider” composers:

Partch is peevish,

There isn’t room on his fingerboard

to find all the notes.

There should be 43 in each octave:

they all mush together.

(People are already laughing somewhere.

Forgive them—)

Edward Benten helps him:

fixes a cello fingerboard to the viola

and Harry marks the stops with fractions and brads,

cradles the soundbox between his knees

gingerly, to calm it.

This section from “Partch Stations” is a lovely figure for the work that Holmes is trying to do with poetry. Cooperman, too. Humanophone and A Sacrificial Zinc are both highly accomplished books, but it seems to this reviewer that they are also more than merely accomplished—these are books that in their philosophical orientation, poetic technique and material have enlarged the contemporary possibilities for poetry.