Bird on a Wire

Dennis Cooley discusses love in a dry land, playing with form, and organizing a long-standing project in our latest Quatrain Questions interview.

Q?: love in a dry land is a long poem. While not every long poem includes individual titles for the smaller pieces which make up the various movements of the work, some certainly do. How did you come to title the various smaller pieces in the project and why did you feel it necessary for love in a dry land?

The book began as an unorganized collection of pieces written around a depression-prairie romance that appears obliquely in Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House. For years I had no particular structure in mind. I was carried by the situation and I kept writing. In earlier long poems I had simply stitched the parts together with small graphic markers, which seemed to me more than adequate. After awhile I began to break out major sections for individual books. With this manuscript, I began to think about naming, or at least conceiving of, the smaller section in this book.

I'm of two minds about this. Eschewing tltes leaves the readers pretty much on their own. I like those unsupervised pieces and the readings they are susceptible to, especially in inviting links and departures from one poem to another.

Whatever title you hit upon can reach a reader with special force. For good or bad I decided to title the poems as a prompt and a convenience. A title is so guiding that it might enable a hearing, but it can foreclose on others.

I ask a lot from readers and the issue has a lot to do with the time and energy readers will summon. You always hope they will exceed your efforts.

Q?: love in a dry land is broken into six sections. What were your principles for organizing the book into its various movements?

All those years while I had been writing the pieces I hadn't been thinking of distinct sections, nor of composing them in a singular way. I was in and out of the material. The decision to divy according to the main characters came later.

It was pretty simple. The main characters in Ross's novel are the narrator, Mrs. Bentley, a disappointed musician; her husband Philip, a disappointed artist; Paul Kirby, a local teacher and would-be cowboy; and Judith West, a timid woman with a haunting voice. They each would more or less guide their own sections. The principle remained a rough one. The speaker was often unidentified, and so was the figure addressed. I wasn't always sure myself who was whom, and I didn’t much want to be. I was following the exchanges that circulated among the figures and within them. I was also thinking how I might ease the reader's way when I decided on the organization. I ended up with many poems that would be less anchored in the first four sections but that in later sections would intensify the material.

Q?: “Paul’s sign” (pg 49) is a visually complex piece, with a lot of word play going on. It’s one of the most visual poems in love in a dry land. How did you decide that this treatment was the presentation required for this piece and how do you see it functioning in the larger work?

The poem is enigmatic. It works in riddle and spell. It relishes words and letters that can hide or release secrets. The poem plays with and against our expectations and invites surprise. It behaves in a childlike way with rhymes and puzzles, the A-B-C's in which the teacher Paul colours and letters with his crayons.

You work at this. Where to begin? What is it to work "in it i / ally"? How are we to find a way of proceeding? What is this "Airy the1st"? Are we to laugh at Paul? Do we flirt with fairy tales and gnomic charms? Why the box that houses "LM / entry," the splay and repetitions of letters across the page? Why the near erasure of parts? All the focus on the word "entry"? Why is the LM / entry elementary? What about the LMN in elementary? Why all the doors and starts and beginnings? The poem asks us to consider the function of the sign. You can go on and on with this.

Apart from or (I’d prefer to say) in addition to puzzling the reader, I was after the ambiguity of Paul. What piques my interest is his status and role in the book (Ross's and mine), especially his relationship with Mrs. Bentley. Who is this guy, what do we make of him? Is he working off false signs, disguise, subterfuge, mistake?
Mostly I was after the rich and thick life in language and the potential of the page.

The other thing, of course, is the position of the poem in the book. It's the first in "Paul's" section and offers an introduction to him. It's an entry to him perhaps. It also acts as an opening for the poet. Here's an effort, his "N-try," a sign-nature that is his.

The apparatus is central to our sense of Paul.

Q?: love in a dry land has been a project you have worked on/towards for decades. What was the process like for you to decide what poems ended in the resulting book and now that the project has a its place on bookshelves do you feel finished with your considerations of As for Me and My House and are you ready to leave Sinclair Ross’s cast of characters behind?

I can see no formal end to this. There is no way for me to think of the larger project as done or finished or finally accomplished. It has gone on for, what?, 35 years or so, and it drove itself for a long time. How did I decide on what to include? I wanted poems that felt right to me, ones that I liked and ones that helped to extend the field, as in what's not here. Their play and energy and emotion made their claims. So did my wonderful editor, Rob Budde, who wisely steered me away from work that shouldn't have been there. I was also after variety in tone and rhythm and focus. And I wanted a rough equivalence among the sections, so that I didn't have, say, one or two small ones set against much longer ones. It was hard to decide on the selections, which constantly changed and moved. I continued to write and to revise right up to the time of publication. I still have hundreds of pages.

At some or point or other, time's up and you let it go.

About love in a dry land

In love in a dry land Dennis Cooley continues his lifelong fascination with Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House.
Shaped by Cooley’s expert hands, this long poem builds upon the foundations of one of Canlit’s most recognizable homes.

 There isn’t anyone beyond Cooley able to offer such wild, prairie vernacular, let alone one riffing off a singular work by Sinclair Ross. From Country Music to The Bentleys to love in a dry land, Dennis Cooley playfully provides lyrics as pure gesture, intellectual wordplay and spinning puns in a magical articulation and expansion of open form. Okay, cool it, krazy mclennan, I hear Cooley say, but he can’t deny any of it. love in a dry land is an absolute delight. —rob mclennan, the book of smaller

Between the lines of As for Me and My House, if you squint, love in a dry land materializes. In this long poem, Dennis Cooley revives characters who’ve long been cast in the amber of CanLit canonization. These pages uncover the subtle graces in a home where regrets stick on fly paper, corn syrup coats anxieties, and desires glow behind lampshades. —Nathan Dueck, (1979– )