The Muse Sings by Dennis Cooley (At Bay Press, 2020) was great fun. I’ve long admired the playfulness of Dennis Cooley. This is his 21st book. His abcedarium (University of Albert Press, 2014) has a freewheeling sort of swirl of concrete poetry and “is the letter “a,” a letting out, eh” or p. 68 on a typo “a slip of the pen/is to be/come  he bene/fitting from a slip”. There’s a certain romp rather than pretentious poet voice pomp. 

In his selected poetry, Word of Mouth (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), Cooley wrote “the first thing you should know/about me is i am/ a sound poet” In interview (http://poetryminiinterviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Dennis%20Cooley) he said, “Poetry’s the lucky terrain of what-ifs and just-supposings.” and describes ow “a poem whose wit and rhythm rinses you with newness. You want lines, you hunger for lies, clever and unusual lies”.

He’s at his best when he uses language like lego. In The Muse Sings he finds a sort of Matryoshka internal rhyming as in “librarians”. p. 102-103

list and definitions
in gay libations loud celeb
rations & ratios defi

lers of deli
cacy & celi
acy co.

smonauts thrown by words
among the shelves & key
boards playing with dog
its its exciting to be
removing the dust jackets

This I find fun and exciting. He’s known for his “typographic exuberance”. The problem with reading is the reader. When he used in abecedariam random fonts, cowboy, handwritten italic, sudden pops into something of the Helvetica family, the words flutter and twitch changing typeface within the words, it was reminiscent of 1970s children’s books. I thought it fun, breaking up the tedium of uniformity, in line with his capering through subjects.  Staggered lines, staggering word play.

When he does it again 6 years later to illustrate onomatopoeia whu-ump! bang! plup! it brings in comic book aspect that feels half play, half like a shortcut to being articulate. When in a poem you can say anything, why did that make the cut to binding? Yet, they translate his voice and he’d probably shout the words live. Yet I feel talked down to and the use of typeface seems a dated praxis. Me culpa. Mia cuppa tea, ear grey cold?

Sometimes you have to judge a book in part by its cover. The Muse Sings has great production values of hard cover binding, sweet page layouts and fonts that are friendly to read, scale of font and book fitting the line length. A few poems are crowded to the margins. A little eccentric that the table of contents is all in boldface. Medium paper weight with a shadow of the other side of text showing. There’s a distinctive wraparound cover design with an Art deco font. It’s printed on 100% post-consumer fibre paper, as all books should be. Overall an enviably object of design. Cooley probably concurs since his next title, Gibbous Moon, will be out with them in October 2021.

The central idea as the title suggest is a dialogue with the Muse, a romancing the imagination. Since Cooley likes to play, I’m sure there’s a bouncy humour underlying the whole premise of an affair with the muse. His muse is sassy and demanding. He takes the idea of transcription from the muse literally. 

But the male is voicing on behalf of the female, relates a sparring. Why is the muse female at all? Why not partner with a woman writer to voice the muse as a collaboration? The whole sexual dynamic of male writer and female muse is uncomfortable, in an era of female writers taking back control, the silencing and speaking over being the object of muse. Does that make this subversive of subversive? p. 82

“as for her part she said
she was tired of being
admired from afar
it was high time for an affair[…]
hinted she was mocking
time (or stalking me”

So is it empowerment for the muse to be an equal engaging tit for tat or being the initiator? does this not risk as a metaphor tread close to blaming the victim for being an obsession? More problematic than problem solving. 

It largely fell wrong as I’m not the ideal audience. The idea of a man having a female muse seems dated by nature. He tries to re-inject it with zest. He aims to deconstruct the idea of untouchable muse, like he deconstructs everything else where the muse can tear a strip off (p. 122) “you and your half-baked terracotta heart”. The muse as female falls flat sometimes but humour is personal. 

He at least engages the subject of women whereas some male poets have quotes and references as if there is one gender in the species. Is that to the good. For example Cooley describes a busload of woman, characterized as Sumo wrestlers, as “heifers in heat”, as killer stampede, (p. 123). If read by a man in his 60s in the 1960s, probably would be funny. 

It’s not like he doesn’t like cattle. They are one of his touchstones it seems. In The Bestiary (Turnstone Press, 2020)’s narrative farm animals clop through including “the cow called Esmeralda/whose hormones blew past/ a ruddy and sometimes luminous moon”. In Perishable Light (Coteau, 1988) cattle are on the cover and sympathetically spoken of in “dreamfarm” (p. 20) “these ambles of bone/large with fluid//flies at their eyes[…] noseslurp & hiplurch/down into the yellow/knuckle of barn bright as corn/limp with ecstasy” and yet at the same collection, a metaphor  on mosquitos describes than as “they are ladies/of the night” and “she is a feminist of the vampire world” (p. 57).  That said, I wouldn’t agree with my own ideology from 33 years ago so why would he? And of course, what does Dracula mean to someone who wrote a book on Dracula myth? “Seeing Red” (Turnstone Press, 2003). In short I sometimes struggle to find my footing on how to take him. He means no ill but does he do no ill?

He is on a roll of publications with Cold Press Moon (Turnstone, 2020), which is more narrowly focused on recasting myth and fairytales. He likes the act of turning language and story inside out. 

Each book has its own flavour. In Correction Line (Thistledown, 2008), there’s his characteristic exuberance (p. 35) “thistle practice epistle cat tails coat tails red coats talis man tall men some bearded some apostles white men wade through light nearly mire in sloughs under grasshoppers that thud against”. The whirl of word chains ricochet about. The poems are intense. 

In The Muse Sings there’s a slow-mosey pace. In “wherein they dispute” (p.64) “so what if i have/mixed the metaphors.who cares if i come//like iambs to the laughter”. It’s his poem and he’ll own and own up to any puns he likes. He’s having fun. The reader opts in, or doesn’t. Either, his techniques for opening up the box of what a poem can be.

Locked in Different Alphabets by Doris Fiszer (Silver Bow Publishing, 2020) is debut collection by an Ottawa poet.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing some of these poems as they developed since Fiszer and I overlapped for a time in the same writing group. I’ve read some iterations of the poems in her chapbooks The Binders (Tree Press, 2016) and Sasanka (Wild Flower) (Bywords, 2018). 

It’s a different effect to read the poems of her parents and childhood collected up.  This book adds a chapter on her brother and expands on the poems of her father’s decline, decline like an injured lion swatting.  Chapbooks have a focus that amount to pinhole looks. A book has more dimension of horizon. It gives a more satisfying read to go in depth and breadth.

Locked in Different Alphabets has been short listed for the Lampman Award for best poetry book of the year in the National Capital Region. I’m not surprised. The poems are moving. I interviewed her for Literary Landscapes CKCU after she won the Tree chapbook contest and she impressed me with her commitment to sharing her parents story, a story. 

The downside of the book is the design. The interior is a clear legible font but on thin paper. I’d like to see it on heavier linen paper suitable for the quality of the words.

The back cover is illegible from font choice and contrast with the background image. The front cover is a little more legible. The page numbers are larger than body text suggesting they are more important than the text. The poems crowd the gutter. That is minor and not enough to distract from the words and alert, articulate framing of moments. 

The section of interactions with her father with dementia particularly hit hard, being in that stage of life relative to parents myself recently. It stands up well with compassion, comparable to Crossing arcs: alzheimer’s, my mother and me by Susan McMaster (Black Moss Press, 2009). “Our Single” (p. 42) has something of the tenderness of “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke as the author remembers past the lousy times to that moment of singing together. It recognizes, like many of the poems do, that there is breaking off of family relations and conflicts, but among that turmoil and silence, there are happy times and moments. Those remembered after everything went wrong is a sort of reconciliation and truth bearing. 

A family is rarely uniform. The complexity of relationships are not made simpler than they need to be. The brother that attempted rape, is not exiled but taken care of when his health turns with ALS. Neither good nor bad cancel out each other. Both exist and the poems testify to that. She doesn’t shy away from the painful, nor the joyful. The ending (spoiler alert) fits perfectly with the perspective of resilience, coping with whatever comes. p. 101

“Breathe in morning silence.

Exhale morning silence.

A sugar-swollen monarch

will shiver its way to warmth.”

Locked in Different Alphabets is a moving collection, and affecting and inspiring.I wish I had moved with such grace with my aging parents instead of being short-tempered and shell-shocked. 

We sometimes forget as children the whole lives our parents had before we arrived, in the case of her parents, concentration camp. Although the past is over it affects future generations, whether through ownership of family history, family and interpersonal dynamics or epigenetic switches.  What this book nimbly illustrates is how the past and present intercut. She is dextrous in interleaving her memories and her fathers so the two stand as testimonies. For example in “Useful” p. 51 while caring for him in an old age home, she recounts her father describing Nazi camps which he navigated to survive,

the guard asked me

why I said I was a barber

when I wasn’t

so I wouldn’t be killed

made myself become his friend

fresh blood

on razored 

skin

The past is close to the surface and salient even when silent. On top of all the traumas lived, there comes dementia as a further cruel twist. Memory lapses, moodiness make caregiving a challenge on top of this preface to mourning. It is a hard thing to absorb and amazing to express so faithfully and accurately and acutely painfully in poetry. 

p. 66 in “My Fault”

the list of all the things I do wrong

rings in my head

Yet, I’m told you always ask others

did you meet my daughter

that’s her picture on the wall

Yes, my mother was the same. Thank goodness for secondhand accounts to counterbalance that pride with what a parent says in person. The time of life is not without its humour, even if sometimes stemming from awkwardness. You should read in entirely, when you buy the book, which you will of course, “A Reasonable Request” p. 67 where father is eyeing to upgrade his suite once the other resident knocks off. 

Surely, there’s no need to tell the truth slant, unless you’re not permitted to speak. In this era perhaps we can get more women speaking of the role of caregiver of parents and replacement matriarch to head the family when the grandmother dies. There are stories that are humorous and touching and worth telling.