Robert Bly in New Brunswick: The Cross-Border Poetics of Allan Cooper

ABSTRACT

New Brunswick poets have a history of looking to the United States for literary models. A recent example is Allan Cooper, the Alma, New Brunswick writer, editor, publisher, and translator, who since the late 1970s has spent much of his career emulating both the poetics and literary activities of the Minnesota poet, editor, and translator, Robert Bly. Not only did Cooper adopt Bly’s Deep Image poetics and the concept of the twofold consciousness: he also modeled the editorial policies for his creative-writing journal, Germination, on the editorial approach employed by Bly in his poetry magazine, The Fifties. Cooper also followed Bly’s example by performing translation as a means for improving his own poetic craft. Taken together, Cooper’s embrace of Bly as literary mentor corresponds to the beginnings of a larger shift away from Canada’s entrenched cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s toward more internationalist cultural interventions by the mid-1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Allan Cooper
• Robert Bly
• Deep Image
• American poetry
• Canadian poetry

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the journal reviewers and editor, as well as my colleague, Drs Matthew Cormier and Andrea Cabajsky, for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Regarding Roberts and Carman, Roberts declares in an 1866 letter to Carman that “the greatest of American Poets are Emerson and Lanier.” Roberts’s emphasis; (Roberts 1989, 59). Roberts also wrote the Introduction to an 1899 edition of Walden. Carman’s Transcendental tendencies are also well-established – see Sorfleet (1974); Bentley (2004). Regarding Bailey’s literary debt to T.S. Eliot, see Lane (1986). Regarding Lane, she wrote both her M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation on Frost at Cornell University (see Lane 2015, 61). Critic Michael Thorpe also declares that Lane’s main influences were “Stevens, Williams, and especially Frost” (cited in Neilson 2015, 78).

2. It should be noted that Cooper’s south-looking instinct is in keeping with a larger Canadian phenomenon. As Gillian Roberts notes in her “Introduction” to Reading Between the Borderlines (Roberts 2018), “Canadians can and do look in on their American cousins across the border, while the reverse does not seem to be true … It would seem that Canadians, with their ‘panoramic windows’ facing South, are the perpetual audiences of US cultural production, in a flow of information that moves only in a northerly direction” (5). Having said that, Robert Bly was not ignorant of Canadian poetry, or New Brunswick poets for that matter: in fact, prior to Cooper’s discovery, Bly had already written the Introduction to Alden Nowlan’s selected poems, Playing the Jesus Game (Bly 1970); Bly later wrote the foreword to the U.S. edition of Nowlan’s collection, What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Bly 1993), as well as a Preface to Greg Cook’s biography of Nowlan, One Heart, One Way (Bly 2003). Moreover, although there is no evidence that Bly’s poetics was influenced by Cooper (an unlikely prospect given their difference in age), their literary relationship should not be construed as a case of one-way fandom, especially since Bly was a semi-regular correspondent with Cooper, as well as a generous submitter of his work to the small-town New Brunswick editor and publisher.

3. Reinforcing Cooper’s familiarity with Bly’s twofold consciousness theory is his 1990 essay, “Earth’s Dark and Liquid Eye,” which Cooper penned for Germination’s Special Issue on the Object Poem, and which makes explicit reference to News of the Universe: “Robert Bly, in his anthology News of the Universe, says ‘This book asks one question over and over: how much consciousness is the poet willing to grant to trees or hills or living creatures not a part of his own species?’ My answer is, ‘I’m willing to grant a lot’” (Cooper 1990a, 12).

4. Cooper was not unique in his internationalist sensibilities. In fact, he was part of an emerging literary and scholarly movement in the 1980s and 1990s that began to increasingly challenge the perceived insularity and inward-looking approach of the Canadian literary establishment. Witness, for instance, Frank Davey’s Surviving the Paraphrase (Davey 1983) as well as Camille La Bossière’s collection of essays, Context North America: Canadian-U.S. Literary Relations (La Bossière 1994).

5. American poets Brian Swann, Patricia Barone, and Thomas R. Smith appear in the Spring/Summer 1983 issue of Germination; Patricia Barone also appears in the Fall/Winter 1983 issue; Robert Bly appears in the Fall/Winter 1984 issue; Smith appears in the Spring/Summer 1985 issue; Smith also appears in the Fall/Winter 1985 issue, along with Gian Lombardo; Jere Truer and George Kalamaras appear in the Spring/Summer 1986 issue; James Grabill and Smith are included in the Spring 1987 issue; Barone, Bly, John Bradley, John Krumberger, Mary Kay Rummel, and Truer appear in the Fall 1987 issue; Grabill, Ray Gonzalez, Krumberger, and Truer feature in the Spring 1988 issue; Bly, Bradley, Smith, James Tipton, John Lang, and Melanie Richards appear in the Fall/Winter 1988 issue; Bradley, Grabill, Kalamaras, Smith, Tipton, and Lisa Horton Zimmerman, appear in the Summer 1989 issue; Smith appears in the Spring/Summer 1990 issue. It should be noted that the Spring/Summer 1990 issue marks the final regular installment of Germination. Only one issue has appeared since the December 2012 issue that celebrates the work of Robert Bly.

6. Brian Swann is a New York poet and English professor; Jonathan Wright is a New Brunswick poet, who in 1983 was enrolled in graduate studies at Memorial University.

7. See, for instance, Bly’s essay on “The Eight Stages of Translation” (Bly 1982). Several of Bly’s translation publications also employed this term, such as Kabir, Try to live to see this!: Versions by Robert Bly (1976); Mirabai Versions by Robert Bly (1980); and Issa: Ten Poems. Versions by Robert Bly (1969).

8. Also worth noting is that Cooper published in 1990 through Owl’s Head Press a small chapbook of Bly translations, a series of object poems by influential mid-20th-century French writer, Francis Ponge—a form that connects Cooper to another Bly-inspired mode found throughout Cooper’s oeuvre: prose poetry (Bly 1990). Far from being an early poetic model, Cooper’s affection for prose poetry and the object poem has been a constant in his publications. In fact, with the exception of his chapbook, Jottings Toward the Country of the Light: 10 Ghazals (Cooper 1984a), this genre appears in every one of Cooper’s collections.

Additional information

Funding

The author reports there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.