National Poetry Month: Peter Cooley

Peter Cooley holds a dear place in my heart among American poets. When I was studying as an undergraduate, most of my work was focused on my family and, while some of the poetry I was putting out was inspired, some of it was also just memoirs with line breaks. Cooley read at Pittsburg State University shortly before I graduated, on April 11, 2002 if his inscription in The Astonished Hours is to be believed.

A Place Made of Starlight hadn't come out yet and the most recent book he had finished was Sacred Conversations. I read it over time and time again in the months that followed. I wrote a review of it for my first graduate workshop and aggressively told people they had to read it, which led to someone eventually running off with the copy I'd bought at Cooley's reading. I have since repurchased it.

The title refers specifically to a series of poems in which Cooley directly interacts with various literary characters, such as "For Jay Gatsby," "For Daisy Miller," "For Emma Bovary in Heaven," and "To Emily Dickinson in New Orleans" to name just a few. This last one in particular grabbed me, as the speaker imagines himself in a passionate love affair with Emily Dickinson that gets played out in the library stacks, later teased by his friends for going after a much older woman. Before reading this, I never recognized that the way I interacted with a text might be unique and interesting in and of itself.

Cooley also interacts with texts in less direct ways. The book opens with a poem called "To My Hypocrite Reader," a play on the similarly titled "To the Reader" that opens Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal. In this way, I learned how to better use allusion in my own work by reading a master like Cooley. If it weren't for Sacred Conversations, I probably would have never written "Lost Inside the Neon-Fruit Supermarket," which is probably the poem I feel proudest of. If you have an interest in poetry, pick up one of Cooley's fantastic books when you get a chance. You will have trouble putting it down.