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One of Canada’s most important, yet under-rated poets is Winnipeg’s own Dennis Cooley, author of over a dozen collections, from early books such as Leaving (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1980), to his Sunfall: new and selected poems (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1996), and to the more recent Irene (Turnstone Press, 2000), a second edition of his long poem Bloody Jack (first edition, Turnstone Press, 1984; second edition, Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), his vampire poems, Seeing Red (Turnstone Press, 2003), and his most recent poetry collection, Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004), published as the second volume in the “Mackie Lecture and Reading Series” out of the Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers. His other works include the collection of essays, The Vernacular Muse (Turnstone Press, 1987), and the journal passwords :transmigrations between canada and europe (Trier Germany: l&f Verlag Kiel, 1996), and as editor, RePlacing, an anthology of critical pieces on prairie poetry (originally published as issues 18-19 of Essays on Canadian Writing; reprinted as RePlacing, Downsview ON: ECW Press, 1980), and Draft: an anthology of prairie poetry (Turnstone Press, 1981, 1983). And of course, Cooley being Cooley, you can almost never find most of these titles listed on his other books; never one to announce himself, but let the poems do all the talking. Essential in the prairie, for whatever reason the influence of his writing seems predominantly tied to the boundary of the Rocky Mountains to the left, and the Canadian

 Shield on the right. What is it about the stone he can’t surpass?

                                                   &

                        her upper lip    faint moisture

                        and on the step there is  this

                        little laugh as if   there is not

                                                enough

                                 air in her &  the

                        lungs    don’t

                                                know

                                    their rhythm

                             a soft hair on her

                        face burned and   freckled hand

                                 fickle air in her throat (Country Music, p 49-50)

Still, Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems comes as a strong announcement for the existence of the recently revived Kalamalka Press, which was originally started in the 1990s as an annual manuscript contest for first poetry collections, publishing collections by Greg Simison (1996), Nancy Holmes (1988), Karen Connelly (1990; winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Su Croll (1992), Sue Wheeler (1995; shortlisted for both the Pat Lowther Memorial and Gerald Lampert awards) and Dona Sturmanis (1998) before fading away. Working now as a publishing arm of a month-long residency in Vernon, British Columbia (on Lake Okanagan), Craig McLuckie, Chair, Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers describes the new relationship in his preface to the collection:

The Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers and The Mackie Lake House Foundation created the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series to fulfill parts of the legacy of Mr. Patrick Mackie, a patron and practitioner of the Arts in this community. The Mackie Lake House is a component of the joint endeavour, where writers of all persuasions, unfettered by constraint, can bring a manuscript to completion while in residence. (p v)

An essential aspect of Cooley’s writing is the breath; the breath, and the shameless pun. Cooley the outlaw, Cooley the dog you can watch run away for three whole days. Cooley’s poems are never ones to keep to any part of the page, or any part of the margins, and do little of what a reader would expect a poem to do. In Bloody Jack, Cooley’s outlaw poem of John Krafchenko, “Canadian outlaw” (with its obvious roots in, among other things, pure prairie vernacular and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid), taunts history and the text itself, even as the text finally turns in on the reader, and on the author, as in the poem “high drama,” where he writes:

KRAFCHENKO (recovered) Butt out buddy. It’s none of your

       business. (Kraf & Penny begin to kiss. Defiant, then lost in it.

       Cooley looks angry & impatient.)

COOLEY NO, no! Can’t you get it right? It says right here, look,

       it says: “But they soon feel awkward & pull away. Penny

       sighs.” See, the stage directions immobilize you. The stage

       directions do not allow you to fool around. Now. Not now they

       don’t. Not once I get here. It’s too late then, you blew your

       chance. (They start to grope & nuzzle. Not listening.) Not now

       I  said. (murmurs of protest) No, I mean it. Now. According

       to the script, Kraf, you get yr ass outa here. Then Penny is

       supposed to make a play for me. I wrote it that way. A clear

       case of textual authority. Of my authority. My authorization.

       So, way you go now, Kraf. I’ll look after things from here on

       in.

(KRAF goes, looking back, doubtful. She turns to cooley, upset, her eyes large with dark. A crow calls, offstage.) (Bloody Jack, p 260)

One of the founders of Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press in the 1970s, and helping to start the Manitoba Writers Guild, Cooley has been an important figure in the prairies for years, an important prairie figure, publishing his own writing, mentoring younger poets, editing collections on prairie writing and writing on prairie writing, and teaching literature and writing at the University of Manitoba. His essay on the line break, for example, is one that some authors, like Montreal author Jon Paul Fiorentino (originally from Transcona, a suburb of Winnipeg), or Prince George author Rob Budde (another transplanted Winnipeg boy) swear by. To know Cooley or his work at all is to already be influenced. Step into the prairie and you can see him everywhere. Running away for days and days and the poem in his head writing constantly.

            Working all sorts of spacing and text size, Cooley’s Country Music lives up to its title, writing a music across the page of the prairie country, of his own Estevan, Saskatchewan (where poet and Cooley mentor Eli Mandel was also from) and Regina, writing in large letters on the page below the arrow, “[insert words here / dear reader: fear not / your favourite tune]” (p 136). Throughout the text, each fragment begins with an ampersand, staging and paging each breath in a different score. Instead of being delineated by individual poem titles, the “new poems” work as a long, continuous flow; his “new poems” become, simply, “poem,” as he writes:

                                        &

                        every spring & every fall

                                birds flow down

                           the sky, vast & vascular

                                                     an open thorax

                        the whole world bleeding

                        & all the time in dry grass a ticking

                        time makes fire as it lies there or rises

                        they dig holes bore hollows

                        down into the light & through it

                        there in the sandy soil

                        a small hill seeded with stones

                        talk rises from alyssum sweet

                        mustard plastered on day

                        till they fill up with darkness

                        till there are wells & there

                        is loneliness splashing

                        we lie in till we drown

                        eyes rinsed clean as bone

            flown out to the dark before dark

            & we cross the darkness like water (p 39)

and later, writing:

                                         &

                        train drains the prairie

            dries each town each day into a cracker barrel

            wind a gray squirrel in the streets

                        track a spinal column

                                spavined over ties

            work on the cpr & yr playing with fire

            yr playing for keeps yr splaying for ties (p 124)

What astounds me is not only the breath but the breadth to which Cooley writes, working up to a six hundred page manuscript, and then back down to a size more publishable. In the issue of Prairie Fire called “the Dennis Cooley issue” (Volume 19, No. 1, spring 1998), there were a number of works-in-progress included that have yet to appear (with a few that have appeared since), including a prose piece called “the hospital (excerpts from a work in progress).” Another, included in his selected poems as “love in a dry land,” has also yet to see the light of day as a completed work. Considering how much he has published so far, the fact that some of these collections live for so long, being constantly worked and reworked, seems even more astounding. In an interview I did with him, published recently in Rampike, he had this to say about his almost obsessive amounts of writing, while discussing his journal passwords :transmigrations between canada and europe:

But, listen, everybody does something like this. We all are engaged in writing our lives, all the time. Forget the high-powered arguments about this (though they hold, I’m sure). But in the most basic and obvious ways this is true. We tell about what happened at work, we talk to ourselves, tell ourselves what we should have said when some prick was abusing our dog, rehearse what we will say when our kid gets home, imagine how we  might speak when a charity calls, admire or envy the way someone has spoken about being hard-up, store up a good phrase we heard at the pub, save it for the right occasion. Whatever. We write and rewrite our lives all the time. We’re in constant rehearsal. What is it to be in love? We’ve got an idea - we’ve read a few books, seen a few movies - and we ourselves have a go at the script.

And then, more generally, I’d say, yes, I am constantly writing, and that activity is a defining one for me, is central to my life.

For Cooley’s collection Country Music: New Poems, don’t let the title fool you. They aren’t random pieces scattered around the collection or around the page by accident, but a deliberate act by the often-humble Cooley. As writer and Okanagan University College professor John Lent writes in his “Introduction to Dennis Cooley and Country Music”:

            Any reader of Cooley’s poetry might greatly benefit from seeking out and reading the texts of two pivotal essays he has written on the formal aspects of the poetry he is advancing. The first of these essays is “Breaking and Entering (thoughts on line breaks)” and it opens up and explores the issue of abandoning formal poetic ‘measure’ and pursuing more unconventional, ‘open’ forms in poetry, especially in the writers’ approach to line-by-line phrasing. In the end, Cooley places the move towards ‘composition by field,’ - the loose, improvised, jazz-like play between text and space, sound and silence, logic and whimsy - in the context of postmodern thinking about art. By allowing the poetic text to assume a spatial rather than temporal logic and measure, the poem not only returns poetry to the ‘singing’ that it began in centuries ago, but it also operates politically in the sense that it both de-centers received order and logic and demands the reader’s participation. This essay explains why a poet might take the approach Cooley has taken in Country Music to the important relationship between words and graphic space, that constant, joyous exploration of the ‘measure’ of the mind and body being alive, or, as Lee says, ‘the craft of scoring energy on the page.’

Country Music: New Poems is as prairie as the long poem gets, and breathes new life into an established form, and writes the poem out as far as it will go, Cooley’s sly eye smirk in every line of continuous and familiar song.