the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless
by Matthew Cooperman
(Free Verse Editions, 2024) Reviewed by Michael McLane
In the notes for the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless, Matthew Cooperman describes his newest collection as a “curiously durational project,” a twenty-year work built on odes that explore the vulnerabilities and complicities of being American in the twenty-first century. These odes act as the collection’s tender, beating heart as well as its sedimentary and interrogative core. Questions are key to the idiolect of the poems. Their exploration of the roles of difference, activism and love in modern American life offer an accretion and momentum that sustain the durational scope of the work and, at times, offer possibility, perhaps even hope, as a counterpoint to the memorial nature of odes.
The scope of Cooperman’s work manifests early in the book. “Snow Globe” introduces us to the poet as a child living in a politically active home in the midst of another profoundly dangerous time for the nation:
It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it
the 60s, and it was snowing
Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Ma and Pa
distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.
This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written in 2003 or 2004 in response to the hubris of the Bush administration. Cooperman admits the choice of January 6th was made at the time primarily for a kind of numerological alliteration, but the prescience of this choice is unnerving and haunts the rest of the collection as the far more insidious actions of the Trump administrations come to bear on the poems. This snow globe of childhood is predictive of coming storms that are multilayered and multivalent—from the tumult of the 1960s, in which both of Cooperman’s parents were politically active, to literal weather of climate change to the inundation of whiteness that lead to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This progression is confirmed in the subsequent poem, “No Ode,” where:
On a Wednesday at the Capitol something did happen, not the dream
again deferred, not the righteous bear not the know nothing snake
just the sickening spell of blood…
The poem weaves in and out of these two periods of monumental shifts in the body politic and violence on both institutional and individual levels. William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg are interwoven with 9/11, calving glaciers, and school shootings. The poem asserts and negates, asserts and negates, undercuts itself like a clumsy nation that doesn’t quite earn its ode. So, it is a “No Ode,” a longing to come to terms with atrocity only to find its accretion and recurrence, ending in the acknowledgment:
This is a history poem This is not true In my country there is
no history but the lesson we didn’t learn
Cooperman collects, scours, and recontextualizes these lessons, salvaging bits of wisdom from the eternal return of American hubris and violence. The poems are often iterations of a nation in conversation with one another or talking past one another. Two of the most poignant examples occur in “General Context” and “Major Lure,” poems that apply cut-up and erasure techniques to speeches given by General Douglas MacArthur, including his “Farewell Address to Congress,” in the years immediately following World War II. In “General Context,” he writes:
Americans never quit, 24/7 openness, we will be prepared to say
something, do things…
Our government has kept us within borders, as do governments
do by law. Part of the American Dream is in the borders, where they
hover. The best of luck is to be born into some kind of dream.
This disconnect between sleeplessness and dreaming, paranoia and vigilance continues in “Major Lure,” where:
One cannot wage war with old soldiers. Under no circumstances
should their sleeping be disturbed. Our country is now fit
for an ailing king. There is no substitute for the facts…
Sandwiched between these two remixed warnings from a departing general is the poem “Gun Ode,” which operates with the breakneck speed of its titular character and offers us an ode at its most heartbreaking. What is abundantly clear but goes unsaid is that this is, again, no ode (“No Ode”) in the conventional sense, but an examination of the catalyst for tragedy, a poem to the facilitator of odes rather than their recipients. It opens with a reference to Kent State, “a dollar with a gun in its mouth, a daisy with the sun / in its mouth,” as well as a callout to Pete Seeger in the lines “where have all the flowers gone // Gun—what have you done to our bodies?” The rate at which this machine births fascists is exponential in the modern era, as Cooperman understands all too well:
My hands don’t fit the bitter hasp
As in naked and afraid, without means of protection, we were
forced to love and evolve
As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode, why don’t you
ever use your Kevlar® shield?
O First Responder, thank you also for being America
It is a poem that spares us no violence in its repetitions, its sonic qualities, its product placements and, most of all, in its complicity and sadness:
I can’t think of one happy memory ever associated with a gun
Disarm Disarm Disarm Disarm
If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love
We are doomed to a garden of graves
If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?
Cooperman can envision a grace beyond fear and armament, and he does so again and again in this collection. Perhaps the most vivid example is in the alternative history he offers in “Country Mulligan,” where the hanging chads of the 2000 election fall differently and we have a President Gore and a “kinder enclosure […] / the planet turns cooler, greener, bluer […] / A Moslem spring flowers in poly-Arabian nights / Scheherazadism, Two Stateism, 23andMe goes viral.” All the dead poets and dancers and artists return; Sandy Hook is a place of community rather than mourning; the mass shooter at an Aurora theater finds love rather than profound loneliness. The poem is sad and hopeful, distraught and in love with possibility all at once.
The hope that manifests in bits and pieces in “Country Mulligan” is more fully embodied in “Difference Essay,” a ten-page poem that is simultaneously an ode to difference in all its forms—corporeal, cultural, political—and a study of being the parent of an autistic child, which shapes Cooperman’s understanding of the necessity of difference in American life. In a recent interview with the Laurel Review, Cooperman says of the poem, “atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year-old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference… the disease of homogeneity is actually—at least in my lifetime—an American disease.” Cooperman is unflinching in his indictment of this disease:
But then I’d come to write of a terrible relentless
sameness. The monochrome in the chromosome, the color
of some and not others. Who is not other in the infinite
catalogue of difference? To be riven is a state. “The shades
of the prison-house close round about us all”
And he is not alone. Voices and influences accrete as the book moves along, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than “Difference Essay.” In the passage above, he channels Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of “hyperobjects” plays a recurring role in this and other books by Cooperman. In the same way that different versions of America talk to each other through these poems so, too, do different versions of the poet converse and illustrate how influences and mentors converge and diverge in these versions of ourselves. Whitman is a constant companion in these poems, as is Ed Dorn. The projective verse and proprioception of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson manifest in Cooperman’s use of the full “field” of the page as well as varying font sizes, colors, and other typographical techniques to score the poems. The result is a piece like “Difference Essay,” a work so layered and polyphonic in its influences that it emulates the differences and possibilities the poet calls for in his nation as well.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that, after the blizzard of violence, schism, and creeping homogeneity of the last twenty American years, Cooperman should offer up the final say of this collection to two poetic forefathers, Pete Seeger and Louis Zukofsky, in a poem called “Bouquet.” It ends on a couplet that ends on an ellipsis that echoes those past tragedies while planting literal and metaphorical hope in a new generation:
the markings of progress
by hook and drive
anthem anodyne aloud
the little hands
the little hands stitch new flowers…
The scope of Cooperman’s work manifests early in the book. “Snow Globe” introduces us to the poet as a child living in a politically active home in the midst of another profoundly dangerous time for the nation:
It was January 6, I was six years old, which would’ve made it
the 60s, and it was snowing
Snow filling trash cans like ashtrays. Ma and Pa
distantly fighting the giant snowstorm.
This is one of the oldest poems in the collection, written in 2003 or 2004 in response to the hubris of the Bush administration. Cooperman admits the choice of January 6th was made at the time primarily for a kind of numerological alliteration, but the prescience of this choice is unnerving and haunts the rest of the collection as the far more insidious actions of the Trump administrations come to bear on the poems. This snow globe of childhood is predictive of coming storms that are multilayered and multivalent—from the tumult of the 1960s, in which both of Cooperman’s parents were politically active, to literal weather of climate change to the inundation of whiteness that lead to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This progression is confirmed in the subsequent poem, “No Ode,” where:
On a Wednesday at the Capitol something did happen, not the dream
again deferred, not the righteous bear not the know nothing snake
just the sickening spell of blood…
The poem weaves in and out of these two periods of monumental shifts in the body politic and violence on both institutional and individual levels. William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg are interwoven with 9/11, calving glaciers, and school shootings. The poem asserts and negates, asserts and negates, undercuts itself like a clumsy nation that doesn’t quite earn its ode. So, it is a “No Ode,” a longing to come to terms with atrocity only to find its accretion and recurrence, ending in the acknowledgment:
This is a history poem This is not true In my country there is
no history but the lesson we didn’t learn
Cooperman collects, scours, and recontextualizes these lessons, salvaging bits of wisdom from the eternal return of American hubris and violence. The poems are often iterations of a nation in conversation with one another or talking past one another. Two of the most poignant examples occur in “General Context” and “Major Lure,” poems that apply cut-up and erasure techniques to speeches given by General Douglas MacArthur, including his “Farewell Address to Congress,” in the years immediately following World War II. In “General Context,” he writes:
Americans never quit, 24/7 openness, we will be prepared to say
something, do things…
Our government has kept us within borders, as do governments
do by law. Part of the American Dream is in the borders, where they
hover. The best of luck is to be born into some kind of dream.
This disconnect between sleeplessness and dreaming, paranoia and vigilance continues in “Major Lure,” where:
One cannot wage war with old soldiers. Under no circumstances
should their sleeping be disturbed. Our country is now fit
for an ailing king. There is no substitute for the facts…
Sandwiched between these two remixed warnings from a departing general is the poem “Gun Ode,” which operates with the breakneck speed of its titular character and offers us an ode at its most heartbreaking. What is abundantly clear but goes unsaid is that this is, again, no ode (“No Ode”) in the conventional sense, but an examination of the catalyst for tragedy, a poem to the facilitator of odes rather than their recipients. It opens with a reference to Kent State, “a dollar with a gun in its mouth, a daisy with the sun / in its mouth,” as well as a callout to Pete Seeger in the lines “where have all the flowers gone // Gun—what have you done to our bodies?” The rate at which this machine births fascists is exponential in the modern era, as Cooperman understands all too well:
My hands don’t fit the bitter hasp
As in naked and afraid, without means of protection, we were
forced to love and evolve
As in, O America, aren’t you tired of being an ode, why don’t you
ever use your Kevlar® shield?
O First Responder, thank you also for being America
It is a poem that spares us no violence in its repetitions, its sonic qualities, its product placements and, most of all, in its complicity and sadness:
I can’t think of one happy memory ever associated with a gun
Disarm Disarm Disarm Disarm
If the impulse to destruction is greater than the insight to love
We are doomed to a garden of graves
If freedom is money spent on guns, what is American grace?
Cooperman can envision a grace beyond fear and armament, and he does so again and again in this collection. Perhaps the most vivid example is in the alternative history he offers in “Country Mulligan,” where the hanging chads of the 2000 election fall differently and we have a President Gore and a “kinder enclosure […] / the planet turns cooler, greener, bluer […] / A Moslem spring flowers in poly-Arabian nights / Scheherazadism, Two Stateism, 23andMe goes viral.” All the dead poets and dancers and artists return; Sandy Hook is a place of community rather than mourning; the mass shooter at an Aurora theater finds love rather than profound loneliness. The poem is sad and hopeful, distraught and in love with possibility all at once.
The hope that manifests in bits and pieces in “Country Mulligan” is more fully embodied in “Difference Essay,” a ten-page poem that is simultaneously an ode to difference in all its forms—corporeal, cultural, political—and a study of being the parent of an autistic child, which shapes Cooperman’s understanding of the necessity of difference in American life. In a recent interview with the Laurel Review, Cooperman says of the poem, “atmosphere is a durational project, and that duration has also been the duration of my now eighteen-year-old autistic daughter. So the poem functions as a hinge of sorts. What happens to our country happens to us. And I didn’t really realize what was difference until I saw difference… the disease of homogeneity is actually—at least in my lifetime—an American disease.” Cooperman is unflinching in his indictment of this disease:
But then I’d come to write of a terrible relentless
sameness. The monochrome in the chromosome, the color
of some and not others. Who is not other in the infinite
catalogue of difference? To be riven is a state. “The shades
of the prison-house close round about us all”
And he is not alone. Voices and influences accrete as the book moves along, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than “Difference Essay.” In the passage above, he channels Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of “hyperobjects” plays a recurring role in this and other books by Cooperman. In the same way that different versions of America talk to each other through these poems so, too, do different versions of the poet converse and illustrate how influences and mentors converge and diverge in these versions of ourselves. Whitman is a constant companion in these poems, as is Ed Dorn. The projective verse and proprioception of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson manifest in Cooperman’s use of the full “field” of the page as well as varying font sizes, colors, and other typographical techniques to score the poems. The result is a piece like “Difference Essay,” a work so layered and polyphonic in its influences that it emulates the differences and possibilities the poet calls for in his nation as well.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that, after the blizzard of violence, schism, and creeping homogeneity of the last twenty American years, Cooperman should offer up the final say of this collection to two poetic forefathers, Pete Seeger and Louis Zukofsky, in a poem called “Bouquet.” It ends on a couplet that ends on an ellipsis that echoes those past tragedies while planting literal and metaphorical hope in a new generation:
the markings of progress
by hook and drive
anthem anodyne aloud
the little hands
the little hands stitch new flowers…
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