Parlor
Review by H. L. Hix
The title of Matthew Cooperman’s new poetry collection, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, indicates by its very structure one strong current that courses through the book. The title has a chiastic structure: negation of position, position of negation. The atmosphere is not something that is; it is something that is not. By means of this structure, the title locates the book, as it locates the speaker, the reader, and humanity at large, in complexity and paradox rather than simplicity and transparency. What we live in, what we cannot live without, the atmosphere, is not what is, it is what is not.
Poetry chooses between two gestures: looking at complexity and resolving it into epiphany (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”) or looking at complexity and registering it as inquiry (“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”). In the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Cooperman chooses the latter alternative, the openness of inquiry rather than the closure of epiphany, a nightingale poetics in preference to an urn poetics.
In fulfillment of this approach, the interrogative mood is prominent throughout. the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless is a book of questions, a book of questioning. By my unofficial count, there are 81 questions in this 28-poem collection: more than one question per page of poetry, very nearly three questions per poem. But it is not their quantity per se, not the fact that there are a lot of them, that matters about the questions. They do not merely populate the poems: they progress, and they coalesce.
By saying they progress, I mean that, seen in sequence, the questions have direction, they careen toward ultimacy. This progress occurs within individual poems. For example, in the poem “Major Lure,” the direction is outward, from the first of its two questions, which is about the speaker, “Could I have but one moment to remember, shine and fear, / where were we, what bright shore?,” to the second, which is about the nation of which the speaker is a citizen, “Young soldiers / always die, and the tragedy is for what order of belief?” The progress occurs not only within poems but also across poems, as for example in the movement from the leaning-toward-transhistorical “What shape the human?” late in the title poem to the leaning-toward-historicized “Officer, can you hear me?” in “Repair,” several poems later. The progress even occurs across the whole book, from the very first question’s concern with human orientation in space, “for we can cast a form like a dandelion’s bloom / to heed a material blindness of the senses, yes?,” to the very last question’s concern with human orientation in time, “What has passed with now?”
By saying the questions in Cooperman’s book coalesce, I mean that, like stars coalescing into constellations, they combine into larger wholes. Nowhere is this more fully achieved than in the as-deeply-felt-as-it-is-deeply-thought “Difference Essay,” a ten-page inquiry that is the only poem in the book given its own section. Extracting all the questions from the poem and simply compiling them in the order in which they appear creates, I suggest, a found poem with its own integrity:
I never knew about difference, like what is a difference story? What is difference? A thought is a separate world connected to a body, this illusion for many years, is it different from yours? Looking at these hands, these feet, I realize I am not some other — who is she? How does it feel to be a problem? Is this my double-consciousness? Does she wear this self-same sheet of strangeness? Why could these things on a brilliant May day not happen differently? Who said you could choose your poison? Who is not other in the infinite catalogue of difference? What is a person? How could I miss that these things were not seen and tasted by others? Yet where am I? Or what dark torment speaks? How to change this feeling into air? What is a better word for plot, or where we are going? What would make this different? Cognitive isolation? Access to sign? If the world breaks in its misery is that company? How do I sign for world pain? How to see this could be very different? That black lives matter, that saying so points out some don’t, hominid or anthropod, my god or yours, if we can’t get along intra-species, how in the world will we get along with different species? Chance or heredity, speech or stem? What kind of dog for her, and how about a pony? To share a privacy? To find a key to what is private in property? O hubris of the shining mind, what can I write to change?
Philosophers declare the importance of asking questions, as when Simone de Beauvoir asserts that “morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning” or when Juri Lotman posits that “a clearly formulated question or even a profoundly experienced doubt turns out to be more productive than customary answers reiterating customary truths.” Matthew Cooperman’s new book demonstrates the importance of asking questions. In the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Matthew Cooperman proves what Maurice Blanchot proposes, namely that “Questioning places us in relation with what evades every question and exceeds all power of questioning.”
