Confusion Is the Truth

To believe in a ghost was small potatoes
next to the fear in your eyes. I scared you.
All I was is this marked up white sheet, so
I ask you again. Read into my black holes.
— Dennis Cooper, “The Faint” 

The seeds of Dennis Cooper’s longstanding interests in sex and violence, the limits of language and the power of confusion, and punk aesthetics and European modernism were planted in his turbulent teenage years. Struggling to survive an abusive family in Southern California and unsettled by his own dark fantasies, his life changed at age 15 when he discovered Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry.

“Fifteen was a really important age for me,” Cooper told Robert Glück in 2006. “I decided to become a writer. I met George Miles, who would become my muse and the most influential person I would meet. I started using drugs as an investigative tool. I had sex for the first time and realized I was gay. I found a group of similarly artsy, intelligent friends and was suddenly cool. All these things helped me start to get away from a life that had been very confusing and unstable.” 

In the following years, further inspirations came quickly. He found the work of the Marquis de Sade, which legitimized his interest in exploring fantasies of sexual violence. In college, the second generation of New York School poets offered a form and a style that spoke to his life of art, drugs, and rebellion, although Cooper remained deeply connected to visionary French poets such as Baudelaire and Lautreamont. And on a trip to London in 1976, he witnessed the Ramones ignite the UK punk scene.

The further influence of filmmaker Robert Bresson and nouveau roman novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet helped Cooper refine his themes into an intense, thrilling, and influential body of work that has been compared with that of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker, and William Burroughs. Today he’s best known for the George Miles Cycle, his acclaimed pentalogy of novels that includes Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), and Period (2000). He won a Lambda Award for his novel The Sluts (2004). In addition, he has created numerous theatrical pieces in collaboration with French director Gisele Vienne and two feature films with Zac Farley. Amid this multifaceted work, his poetry has been largely overshadowed.

Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper (University of Iowa Press, 2020), by the cultural historian and scholar Diarmuid Hester, makes a compelling case that Cooper’s poetry contains the keys to unlocking his major themes. The book focuses on Cooper’s early poetry publications, carefully tracing the development of his aesthetic and contextualizing the cultural impact of this work. But as Wrong shifts its attention to Cooper’s fiction and other artistic pursuits, it skips over his two most accomplished collections: The Dream Police: Selected Poems, 1969–1993 (1995) and The Weaklings (XL) (2013). Among Cooper’s many artistic successes, these books remain remarkable achievements and deserve closer scrutiny.

***

Clifford Dennis Cooper was born into a wealthy family in Pasadena, California, in 1953. His childhood was haunted by traumatic violence: seeing a young girl set ablaze by a falling tiki torch, his uncle’s suicide by shotgun blast, his alcoholic mother alternately trying to kill herself with pills and attempting to kill her children by driving them into a wall, and a friend’s cutting Cooper’s head open with an ax, an accident that left him close to death when he was 11.

Writing was a refuge from his difficult childhood. “I think the attraction of writing was its secrecy,” Cooper told Glück. “I could do it with absolute independence and in complete privacy…these qualities really appealed to me.”

Cooper’s initial poems focused on adolescents and teenagers, who have remained his lifelong subject matter. As Hester notes in Wrong, Cooper refused to treat adolescence as an awkward transitional stage of social and psychological development. “Adolescence is rather a state that Cooper’s work investigates and enshrines,” Hester writes.

This state takes many forms, from accounts of teenage lives to moments of reverie, as in a later poem, “The Ex-Poet”: 

He got so stoned he was a kid
again, wandering at night, eyes
peeled for stars distinct enough
to have engraved a word in him.
 
Take that spot back in his teens
when words built stars within him,
a secret milky way so dense no
drugs competed with their score.

As Cooper began to explore intergenerational relationships in his work, many readers and critics missed that his moral sympathies were always with the teenagers, even—maybe especially—when inhabiting the points of view of killers and rapists. By foregrounding the victimizers and placing the victims in the background, he underlined the latter’s dehumanization.

In his writing, Cooper consistently challenges the treatment of teenagers as objects of sentiment or sex, often while implicating readers in the objectifying gaze of the adult characters. This subtle drama plays out in “Hustlers”:

I stand with the guys I resemble.
Jerry, Tom, Dick, Sam, Julian, Max, Timmy.
Guess which of those names is perfect.
We dream of a casual million.
We light our cigarettes gently.
I take what the night has to offer.
I roll a ripe peach from one wrist to the other.
I can’t speak I’m so fucking stupid.
Our bodies are simply stupendous.
When we breathe, it takes us apart.
You know. You’re inside us.

***

In the mid-1970s, Los Angeles wasn’t widely known for its poetry scene, although the city’s Black Sparrow Press, and Charles Bukowski, its marquee talent, had a cult following. Returning from a trip to London where he’d been energized by the possibilities of punk, Cooper set out to shake up L.A.’s literary reputation. In 1976, he founded the literary magazine Little Caesar with his friend Jim Glaeser, who stepped down after the debut issue. “Little Caesar aimed to introduce the iconoclasm of a punk attitude into the usually staid confines of a literary journal,” Hester writes. “The editors were convinced punk could alter the form and status of literature in the 1970s.”

In addition to poetry, the magazine featured essays on film, pop culture, and music; interviews with Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten and teen idol Leif Garrett; and contributions from Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, and Brian Eno. It was further enlivened by portfolios of art and photography, including a full-frontal nude photo of Iggy Pop.

Second-generation New York School poets such as Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett contributed work, as did downtown luminary Gerard Malanga. There were also poems by Los Angeles writers Cooper had met over the years: Amy Gerstler, David Trinidad, Bob Flanagan, Jim Krusoe, Ed Smith, Benjamin Weissman, and Ron Koertge.

In 1979, Cooper and Gerstler took over programming for the reading series at the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice Beach. They invited guest writers Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Christopher Isherwood; threw festive birthday parties to honor literary legends such as Frank O’Hara; and programmed beyond literature to include performances by visual artist Mike Kelley and the local punk band X.

Hester writes that Cooper’s tenure at Beyond Baroque dramatizes one of the main themes of his life and work: how Cooper “continually negotiates between a desire for togetherness and an endorsement of individuality.”

This played out in the controversial decision to get rid of open mike nights. Cooper and Gerstler curated local readings to cultivate high quality work, ruffling regulars who were accustomed to a community that encouraged creative expression regardless of the results.

“Basically, Amy and I tried to assemble a kind of group,” Cooper recalled in 2012. “We were very interested in the New York School poets and how the scene around St. Marks was, and [we] were interested in trying to have a group of writers that we were peers with.”

Beyond Baroque became the hub of a vibrant cross-disciplinary literary scene in Los Angeles. A number of Cooper’s poems, such as “The Blank Generation,” reflected the energy of punk:
 

Kids like to watch
you more than movies
then they’re bored
no matter what you do.
 
You hate them all.
You speak their minds,
writing poems and songs
black with mistakes.
They know what you mean.

In 1978, Cooper launched Little Caesar Press, which published more than 20 titles during its approximately six-year run, including books by Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles, Elaine Equi, and Tim Dlugos and a newly translated version of Rimbaud’s Voyage en Abyssinie et au Harrar.

Cooper thrived artistically during this time, producing many of his most significant early poems, work that was later featured in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994) and the 1996 PBS television series The United States of Poetry. But eventually the scene began to sour, and money for Little Caesar ran out. In 1983, Cooper stepped down from Beyond Baroque, shuttered Little Caesar, and left Los Angeles for New York City. Having made his mark on American poetry, he shifted his focus toward fiction.

***

The fruits of Cooper’s most focused period of poetry writing are assembled in The Dream Police: Selected Poems, 1969–1993. Instead of separating the poems by their original collections, he organized them into three chronological eras under the headings “Dumb,” “Deaf,” and “Blind.”

“I saw there being three levels of my poetry, in terms of both my improving as a poet and my aims evolving,” Cooper told me in a recent interview. “I tried to break them into groups that indicated what I saw as being the three phases of my work in poetry to that point.”

The “Dumb” section begins with poems about his teen years through the chapbook Tiger Beat (1978) and his first proper book, Idols (1979), now considered a classic of gay literature. The pieces are largely sex- and pop-inflected, focusing on teen idols such as David Cassidy and John F. Kennedy Jr. Cooper describes this work as “more naked, both stylistically and content-wise. I was most interested in writing about sex, trying to figure out how to locate expressiveness in relation to desire, negotiating the unbridled.”

In the Dream Police’s opening poem, “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade,” the narrator describes himself and his friends watching jocks playing sports “from my porch, books of poems / lost in our laps, eyes wide as / tropical fish behind our glasses.” In “Craig Tedesco,” the narrator dreams about “these eyes clenched / beneath me” and a smile that “was softened / and smeared by mine.”  

Hester notes that these early poems enact a desire for communion that’s thwarted by bodily boundaries and the inability to access another person’s mind—a common theme in Cooper’s work. Despite this, Cooper still tries to reach the beloved through writing, a conflict that plays out in “First Sex”:

I try to get his shoulder blade between my teeth.
He complains, pillow in his mouth.
Doesn’t mean it.
Means it.
 
He rolls onto his back,
face raw and wet as fat,
like it has been shaken from nightmares.
I don’t know how to please this face.
 
Tomorrow when he has made breakfast
and gone, I will sweep
the mound of porno from my closet,
put a match to its lies.

The second section, “Deaf,” slips into much darker territory, mapping the connections between sex, death, and writing. It features poems from Cooper’s second and third books, The Tenderness of the Wolves (1981) and The Missing Men (1981). According to Cooper, the poems in this section are “colder” and reflect the influence of Bresson’s films and French novelist and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, whose work explores paradox and uncertainty.  

These influences are most explicit in “Darkens,” part of Wolves’ remarkable title sequence, which revolves around serial killers, their victims, and the emotional aftermath of violence:  

I hire him to clean up my work room. I slip a pill in his deep breathing mouth. I sculpt a hug into raping. I completely unravel his talent. I take a knife to its history of power. And then its world enters the river’s. He winning that cold blue reward. His body softens there, darkens and scrawls. First he’s impeccable, tense, too ideal. Then he is weeping, annoys me. Then limp, cool, unprevailable, dull. Then sprawled saint-like on the floor, gazing upwards. I dump that in the river and he is gone.

The third section, “Blind,” draws from Cooper’s fourth book, He Cried (1985), and later uncollected poems. In this work, Cooper finesses his phrasing and widens his emotional palette after the darkness of the previous section. The book ends with “Hand in Glove,” an elegant meditation on writing and desire.

Though I’m blind, it is in
my hand, yes? Meaning a work
that’s supposed to be filled
up with lust, but couldn’t.
I grow too bored, am restrained
if I think about who’s ly-
ing outside my grasp . . . I can’t
finish. But I’ve made up my
mind about art, its lasting
effect. It’s polished, having
once in the dark been poured
gradually into my body of work
from an impossible height.

In the Village Voice, the critic Bruce Hainley praised The Dream Police for fighting “the context of poetry in a way I can only call urgent and beautiful. [Cooper] is interested in evacuating all notions of poem to begin again.” Which is to say that Cooper’s acknowledgment of language’s limits and inherent failings is built into the poems themselves, serving as feature and byproduct, obstacle and animating force, all at once.

That tension is acknowledged and dramatized in “ABBA,” a poem named after the Swedish pop supergroup:

We are too stoned to.
We dance till we’re tired
and listen to lyrics
we mouth like a language.
 
What we feel, when we
hear them, is inexpressible.
We can’t put in words.
Maybe our dances show it.

“Language is a total compromise,” Cooper told The Fanzine in 2014. “You can’t be honest, you can’t completely say what you feel, because as soon as you talk you have to use language, which inherently censors emotion…I’ve always thought that confusion is the truth. But writing cannot be confused. It can be confused on the inside, and most of the writing that I like is really confused on the inside, but the language has to be organized and seductive and beautiful in some kind of weird fucked up way.”

***

Cooper pushes this aesthetic even further in his next poetry collection, The Weaklings (XL), which expanded on an earlier limited edition published in 2008. In the two decades after The Dream Police, he dedicated himself to fiction and produced a series of important novels that are only beginning to receive their critical due, including the George Miles Cycle, inspired by Cooper’s real-life classmate and muse who shot himself in 1987. The Weaklings (XL) features several poems about Miles, including “November 17, 1997”: 

                    When you were here,
I never thought about you, but fell in love
with anyone who resembled you, I was
so haunted. So I forgot who you were,
and you wanted me to know. You’re the
one who fired a gun at his head, so high
on whatever, and so depressed by my
lack of whatever that you were afraid you
might have otherwise not hit the target,
wherever I was at the time. Not with
you, I guess. It’s finally hitting me now.

A version of this poem originally appeared in Period, the final novel of the cycle, written by a grief-struck character mourning a version of Miles. Cooper later revised the piece for one of his collaborative theater works with Gisele Vienne. Like “November 17, 1997,” numerous poems in The Weaklings (XL) originated in other projects. Taken together, they offer a refracted survey of Cooper’s work in fiction, theater, and his celebrated blog, which he considers a long-running art project and which briefly shared a name with this collection.

The poems in the “BOY2BRELOCATED” section first appeared as part of Cooper’s monthly blog posts featuring male escorts’ online ads, a type of found poetry that he further tweaks. “HornyFitSkaterInACage, 17” offers his wares with a few caveats:  

You must be 18 and 35 years old without hairs on the body and if you don’t shave your body, youd better be into making me roll my eyes and vomit because thats all youre gonna get out of me. Update: WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING BLIND? NO LARGE, HAIRY, DIRTY!!! STOP IT!!! ILL FUCKING KILL YOU, MAN!!!!!!!!
 
conductor/musician

A number of other poems were created for such theater pieces as I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), and This Is How You Will Disappear (2010). “None of his texts offer a narrative that might allow the audience to make sense of them or the piece as a whole…but they create a powerful and pervasive feeling of desire, mistrust, and contempt,” Hester writes of Cooper’s work in I Apologize. The effect is similar when these sections reappear in The Weaklings (XL) as a suite of poems entitled “The Green Album”:

You know who
you fucked. If
she’s my wife,
so what. Soon
you will be me.
If it’s her, you
so screwed. If
not, she lies to
you, on top of
everyone else.
I’ll tell you this.
You’re fucking
evil, if you did.

Other highlights include “A Symphony of Confusion About the People I Killed, by Kip Kinkel,” which offers affecting themes and variations on violence and emotional confusion, narrated by the real-life school shooter who inspired Cooper’s brilliant novel My Loose Thread (2002). The sequence “Elliott Smith at 14,” about the late songwriter, continues Cooper’s longstanding interest in music, teenagers, and pop culture. “Whore Suite (1970s)” brings his poetry full circle by reworking poems about hustlers from his early books Tiger Beat and Idols and grouping them together here in a fresh context. 

***

“Writing poetry has become a much more sporadic practice for me,” Cooper told me via email. “I'll go through phases where I'll write nothing but poetry, but then I'll stop for years at a time.”

He sees a connection between his poetry and his recent work comprised completely of GIFs. Over the past five years, he released two GIF story collections, Zac's Control Panel (2015) and Zac's Coral Reef (2018), as well as the GIF novels Zac's Haunted House (2015) and Zac's Freight Elevator (2016), with Zac's Drug Binge released in June. All are dedicated to his filmmaking partner, Zac Farley. These innovative works generate emotional narratives by juxtaposing unlikely material—anime, horror films, internet memes, home movie footage—into combinations of stammering images.

“Some of the basic principles behind my GIF works come from my poetry writing impulses and interests,” Cooper says.   

“My poetry was always generated mostly from my emotions, but it has become entirely so. I sort of need to feel a particular kind of intense feeling and confusion about something or someone to put my ideas in that form.”

He adds: “I haven't written a poem in quite a while.”