Dennis Cooper's Favorite Everything of 2016 Concludes With Visionary Kenward Elmslie
As many artistic-minded folks tend to agree, the best year-end list of best things is Dennis Cooper's "Mine for yours: My favorite fiction, poetry, nonfiction, film, music, art & internet of 2016." This year, Cooper's poetry list has much we've enjoyed, and much more we want to, including Jos Charles's Safe Space (Ahsahta Press); Renee Gladman's Calamities (Wave Books); Donald Britton's In the Empire of the Air (Nightboat); Juliet Escoria's Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press); Josef Kaplan's Poem Without Suffering (Wonder); John Godfrey's The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 (Wave Books); Ted Greenwald's The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969-1982 (Wesleyan Poetry Series); and many more. And if you need nonfiction, fiction, film, art, internet (we'd gratefully like to point out that Harriet is listed here!), or music recommendations, this list will set you up for months.
Cooper also includes a post-script--focusing mostly on Kenward Elmslie, whose book The Orchid Stories, reprinted this year by The Song Cave, is mentioned here in best fiction:
p.s. Hey. So, there are my favorites from 2016 as far as I can remember, and it would be awesome if you could hit me back with at least some of your favorites from this year. Thanks a bunch. ** David Ehrenstein, I of course heavily second your kudos about Kenward’s work. And thank you for the link of Kenward singing. Someone really needs to upload the impossible to find Kenward Elmslie Visited, an album of Kenward (and guests like Barbara Cook, Elaine Stritch, Estelle Parson, a.o.) singing his songs. Do you have it? Extremely recommended, especially for Kenward’s rendition of my favorite of his songs, ‘They’. Everyone, To get the full wonderfulness of Kenward Elmslie, I highly recommend you use this link provided by Mr. E that takes you to a video of Kenward singing his song Who’ll Prop Me Up in there Rain’, taken from the documentary film ‘Poetry in Motion’.
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Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Thanks again, man. I’m very happy with how it went. I think it did raise awareness not only of that book but of Kenward’s work in general, which is very important, I think. And I’m thrilled if Michael and Song Cave were happy with it. They were both so generous. Oh, gosh, there isn’t a poetry book by Kenward that isn’t pretty amazing. Mm, maybe I would say either ‘Tropicalism’ or ‘Moving Right Along’ are good places to start. Good question about why he’s less known than his peers. One reason is his work’s absolute uniqueness, surely. It’s related to the work of his peers, but it really operates within an imagination and world that is only his own. It’s kind of visionary in that way. Another is that, age-wise and in terms of when his poetry started being published, he’s kind of inbetween the first and second generations of the New York School, and the categorization of his work has been confused. Also, his talents and mediums are so various, what with his work in music and theater, that the variety within his body of his work may make him harder to nail down. I don’t know. It’s a mystery and a crime to me that his work isn’t widely known and hailed...
Head to Dennis Cooper's blog for more of 2016's best. At top: image from the 2013 film Cemetery of Splendor, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.