Matthew Cooperman and Aby Kaupang
Monday, Nov. 21 2011 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Crossroads for the Arts
Matthew Cooperman was born in New Haven, CT in 1964. He is the author of three full-length collections, Still: Of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move (Counterpath, 2011), DaZE (Salt Publishing Ltd, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize as well as three chapbooks, Still: (to be) Perpetual (Dove/Tail Poetry, 2007), Words About James (Phylum Press, 2005) and Surge (Kent State University Press, 1999). He currently lives in Fort Collins, CO, where he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a poetry editor of Colorado Review.
“in our still lives, in the still shots of cultural, historical and individual atomized memory, Matthew Cooperman is holding a Geiger counter, a microphone, a mixing bowl and a spatula, defying his own lines, ‘we cannot sing dragging our saddles after and befores.’ On a big canvas, both global and the glottal, all history and information aswirl, this book risks being courageous, even heroic, in how it works a lyric out of its rage. Matthew Cooperman is an indexical, flaneur-prone excavator. I love the anger in this book, and I like following Cooperman’s miner’s lamp.” — Gillian Conoley, on Still: Of the Earth as the Ark Which Does Not Move
Globe Rendering
there is an arc of hide
in the fallen stone a reason
what’s picked up by the curb a curve
world fleshed out by convenience
grooves of madness it might be
it might be habit that the throwers are others
are purposely elsewhere in deserts cities
a kind of globe rendering going round
the crab apple burgeons its little fists
they are similar dispensations of need
each day in its circumference rolling
we are one weather distinguish places
dig in the earth for winter fruits
and the street a private fiefdom
one town over a pitcher throws heat
they despise in their lawn chairs others
fathers they have taken up the fruit
of vexing games it’s a burning building a basement
of dreams the arc the prize of intemperate men
is a first fire sintering the tainted heart
what blazes diurnal bombs and boys
he cast it a bronze of interminable scale
it goes on traveling around something pure
the black blank sky like a stone like something pure
they are listening (chairs forward) always sided
a game involves leap both listening and doing
what we know is the ball is heavy
there is something pure in a heart can hide
Aby Kaupang is the author of Absence is such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011) and Scenic Fences | Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in VOLT, Verse, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Parthenon West, Aufgabe, 14 Hills, Interim, Caketrain, lo-ball and others.
he who believes in you futures
I get up my friend is Brazilian I admire her
we are not friends actually
her strategy in dailies is remarkable
the husband says it then scribes it in absence
many important objects are hazardous
inconvenient actually my other friend
in this world joins
the army has never seen
Central Park I can imagine going
nowhere together weightless
and many are the pennies in grocery bags
maybe we are all important
left
I bought my ideas
elsewhere the husband does not
budget anxiety he will go
to New York and again
the army will not see it
who will slow every hour
a war poem
