Mars Poetica

by Wyn Cooper

Overview

In Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper explores the conscious and unconscious ways we comprehend both the world around us and the one inside. From subjects like fashion, film, music, and painting, to more solemn and universal themes such as desire, anxiety, and loss, Cooper shows how such disparate topics can mirror each other in ways that help us to illuminate our lives. Employing various styles, forms, and sensibilities, Cooper’s poems both celebrate and mourn, as a means of illustrating the necessity for maintaining equilibrium in an increasingly unbalanced world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945680137
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Wyn Cooper has published four previous books of poetry, most recently Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including Poetry: An Introduction, The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, Jody Redhage, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a CD of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Their second CD, Postcards Out of the Blue, based in part on Cooper’s postcard poems, was released in 2008. Their songs have been featured on six television shows. Cooper has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place. He has given readings across the country, as well as in Europe. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation, and now serves on the Writers Advisory Board of the Nantucket Book Festival. He lives in Boston and works as a freelance editor. www.wyncooper.com

Read an Excerpt

Mars Poetica Imagine you’re on Mars, looking at earth, a swirl of colors in the distance. Tell us what you miss most, or least. Let your feelings rise to the surface. Skim that surface with a tiny net. Now you’re getting the hang of it. Tell your story slantwise, streetwise, in the disguise of an astronaut in his suit. Tell us something we didn’t know before: how words mean things we didn’t know we knew. The Kind of Rain that makes you want to direct a French film, maybe star in it, cigarette in hand in Marseille, sidewalks streaming, sirens blaring a song you’ve heard before, soundtrack that makes you spin toward Aix, toward Cannes, speaking the language, smiling at cameras so small you wonder how you’ll fit into their pictures. This Lightness It shows tremendous presence without a lot of weight, this wine from Cote-Rotie, this supermodel from Vouvray who cheats at poker, legs better than the wine’s, this lightness in my step as I step out today prepared for mystery, history that happens by itself, nothing to dampen my spirit, my Syrah, my reverie. " 9 "10What I Might Have Done Sleek starlings flying low over whitecaps on the bay remind me of Ortygia, so far from where I am, exactly where I wish to stroll the white stones of Piazza Duomo, stop in at the bookstore for tea and conversation, buy tuna at the market, a bottle of Nero d’Avola to sip while fish grills just outside my flat, no radio stations to ruin my slow course of thought, no trains to disturb my reverie, no looking back at what I might have done differently.

Table of Contents

Contents " Mars Poetica " " The Kind of Rain 8 This Lightness Plaza de Toros Viral Movement Lifeboat This Train The Next New Thing 15 Rosemary’s Babies 16 Angels My Idea What I Might Have Done 19 II How Silent the Trees 21 Hurricane Pity Quake Pulse Drummer Sort it Out Mixup at the Speakeasy 28 Her Measured Fall 29 Gravity Counting The Loneliest Road in America 32 III Collected Works 34 Needles and Haste 35 Vectors Gunfire Intense Death of the Cool 39 Tread Lightly Harvest Moon Trapped in a Decade Long Gone 42 She Erased His Mouth 43 Alaska Pirated Debris IV Abstraction Drinking the Stars 49 Menu Parade Three Loves Flow Belief The Watcher Documents Film Starboard The Road Ends Here 59 Acknowledgments 60 Thank You About the Author 62

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mars Poetica: “From the opening words of Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper creates for us nothing less than a manual for memory. The word “reverie” punctuates these poems, and no wonder! For in this book, Cooper wanders and dreams whole continents, the pattern of a skirt, a song no longer playing, lost friends, former homes, spent years. What will we miss the most when we have left Earth? Everything Cooper gives us here and more.” —Kathy Fagan “Wyn Cooper’s poems are cold compresses for the inflamed mind. They calm and refresh with their clarity and lucidity; their music soothes and enlivens; their intelligence and their sure craft sustain us and confirm our faith in art. They are a perfect antidote for the fevers of our historical moment.” —Vijay Seshadri "There is a staccato quality to Wyn Cooper’s poetry that I admire, as if the words have been pried out of him. The poems’ brevity and their short phrases become telegraphic; they give his language a sense of urgency. But nothing is hurried. The poems move forward thoughtfully and gracefully, as they bear witness to the world’s fragility and to Mr. Cooper’s own." —Stephen Dobyns

From the Publisher