Daze: (Salt Modern Poets)

The poems of "Daze" form a prospect on time--the passing of literal days, the ephemerality of the body, frangible memory, American speed, the crisis of late modernity. "Daze" charts out the periods of our belief, blending personally-lived experiences with wildly assimilative narratives which make up our blurred identities. Written as a series of series, "Daze" works out the demands of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. Challenging the moral entropy of the 21st century, "Daze" is as much a view of bewilderment and outrage as it is the beautiful or true expression of poetry. Serial poems, whether lyric or in prose, are the technical means of embodying this vision. Written as a series of series, "Daze" works out the challenge of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. There are three such sections--"view", "ink", "bed"--deploying a series of odes, calendrics, personations, textual deformations and possessive identities.As Robert Duncan's opening epigraph suggests, "my mind is a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations . ..the twisted sinews underlying the work." Pressure is placed on syntax and in form as a practical response to bewilderment. In this regard the poems of "Daze" are tinged with the pragmatism (and texts) of Emerson, Dewey and Isaiah Berlin, as well as the actual and imaginative "instruction" of Hesiod's "Works and Days" and Virgil's "Georgics". There is also, one hopes, some humor.

Table of Contents:
view Apropos • Pigmentia Nanosphere The Dictionary of Allusions Plot Shapes Are Making Their Way Own Diminutive Day's News Faith Day's Fan Day's News Seen and Felt Watching • Channel Town ink conscious Fame Reasons for the Novel From the Corner of My Chorality How to Do Things The Roots of Romanticism It is Absence We Cultivate Knowing the Corpse Another Souza Globe Rendering Joying Day's Chaco • What Comes Between bed Loneliness Day's Kinsey Day's Flavas Pictures of Can Can Ruefulsome Elevated Music whirling disease Pyrrhony Versions of Progress Republic • shining, axis

About the Author :
Matthew Cooperman was born in New Haven, CT in 1964. He is author of two chapbooks, Words About James (Phylum Press, 2006) and Surge (Kent State University, 1999) as well as the full-length collection A Sacrificial Zinc, which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize (Pleiades/LSU, 2001). He currently lives in Fort Collins, CO, where he teaches at Colorado State University.

Review :
While `Daze’ delivers numerous interlocking forms and inventive substructures, it is at its most engaging when it allows one to simply stumble upon them... Such is the case with the serial poem “Channel Town”, which begins with what seems to be an innocuous narrative that quickly breaks down and reforms as one progresses through its seven pages... Cooperman’s sequence uses the detritus of reportage to show the mutability of language, of narrative and event, and therefore the ease with which such things can be recast as fodder for any kind of argument or action... That the poem works outside of the confines of such a reading, which is to say that it’s as aesthetically interesting as it is ethically engaging, is tantamount to the success of the book as a whole. One moves through the unexpected corridors of `Daze’ not to derange the senses but to sense the world’s derangement – the first and indeed most difficult step toward change.