My Reactions or Reading Wyn Cooper's book "Postcards From the Interior"

Review: Wyn Cooper Postcards from the Interior

Wyn Cooper’s latest collection of poetry, Postcards from the Interior, is motionless and frozen like a postcard from which the title gets its name. Cooper’s poems capture singular moments of emotions or people with suggestions of contemplation. But they lack the language that creates depth and imagery. The only distinguishing feature between his prose poetry and verse poetry is the alignment of the words on the page.

His title poem “Postcards from the Interior” frames a house the speaker found while hiking. The last lines are full of consonance that cause the reader to trip while rolling over an awkward line break:

Somehow the wallpaper matches it all,

yellow-brown, dust grey, content

turning to form from floor to ceiling,

a sight to behold on this bring spring day.

Simply listing a few colors with grade-school precision does not constitute imagery that can give birth to sights in the imagination. The house still remains a pile of formless nothings that Wyn may or may not have seen. Ending the line with “content” is ambiguous as to which line it belongs to and is has a harsh repetition of “t” quickly followed by “f”s with “form”, “from” and “floor”, blending all of the words into each other with more of a disruptive sensation than a literary illusion to the idea of formation.

Cooper writes his lines as if he has never seen any of the things he writes about. His removal from the subjects is suggested by his inability to relate them in his lines. Why does he decide to pick on hunters in “Postcard Recipe form Hunting Season”? Who would cook their venison in Ketchup and not butter? In Sprite and not wine? The only uneven heat would possibly be due to campfire flames, and even they bring a glorious flavor to foods they touch.

The slow pace which the poetry moves and the lack of imagery makes his poems dull and ineffectual. It is easy to read one poem and jump to the next without noticing that you have actually completed one thought. What is noticed are the poor line breaks and out of place rhymes, not what you want your poetry remembered for. I haven’t read any other poetry by Cooper, so I don’t know if he is trying something new—attempting to capture the singularity of postcards in his writing, but if he is then he should revisit the power of still-life art. Just because there isn’t any motion doesn’t mean that art doesn’t move.

If you are interested in looking into Cooper's works, he also writes songs, please go to his website: www.wyncooper.com

Spring

Spring is here--at least the weather is finally starting to resemble spring. Many of my posts have been writing assignments for my classes, and i have to admit that i have been having fun doing them. I greatly look forward to graduating in a few weeks, but lament over the fact that I will be out of the world of academia for a while. My only hope is that I will be able to read more books and increase my poetry writing; which has been very slow as of late. Perhaps with the warm weather the muses will dance towards the Northern Hemisphere and become one with me again. But for now, I have sapling thoughts on the character of Victor Frankenstein...this weeks forecasted rain may help them grow.

Some thoughts on Kant: Critique of Judgement

To Kant, Sense gets in the way of human understanding in so much that it tries to force people to have a relationship of familiarity with new experiences causing them to be incapable of accepting something that is genuine and/or abstract. While reading Kant’s philosophy, one must put aside their Sense, enough so that they might see the argument as a whole, for seeing only small pieces, as with the Egyptian pyramids (112), the meaning of his argument cannot easily be determined. Alternately, if we completely remove our Sense and take in the whole of The Critique without considering each section of the argument, then the details that are most artistic will also be lost. With either situation in place, the writing will fail to perform its task of inspiring mental growth.

This concept is what, according to Kant, allows people to experience the Sublime. I agree with Kant that the Sublime is not the object itself, but the subjective and psychological “state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective Judgment is occupied, and not the Object” (110). Sense strongly encourages the mind to rationalize all that it sees, and can even discard the unusual for being irrational and irrelevant. The sheer awe created when the mind attempts to comprehend what it has just apprehended is what is painful because we use our Sense during the process of comprehension, creating a state of conflict within the mind.

Kant says that, since we have a difficult time processing the sensation of the Sublime, we conceal some of the truths of it (subreption) because it “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (118) and therefore we label the Sublime as “an Object of Nature” (119). In doing this, we create for ourselves a tangible concept that can be worked through with our Sense, and neatly understood. The Sublime cannot be neatly understood because it is not the object, but the state of mind. It is the pain that the human mind undergoes when it cannot neatly understand the observed, and it stays with us and works through us, just as reading Kant’s philosophy works through our minds while we attempt to understand. When easily we understand, we loose the Sublime feeling and all that we are left with is the object, be it the mountain or a body of writing.