Singing the Bay of Fundy Blues:
An interview with author Allan Cooper

(First published in the Gaspereau Press 2001 Omnibus Reader)

Allan Cooper, poet, musician and publisher, lives and works in Alma, New Brunswick, a small village on the Bay of Fundy. He has published 10 books of poems. His most recent book is Singing the Flowers Open, published by Gaspereau Press. Cooper has been writing for 30 years and has been playing music for as long. For the past several years he has been one third of the popular blues trio, Isaac, Blewett and Cooper. But for Cooper all roads eventually lead back to poetry.

Singing the Flowers Open was a long time in the making. "I work for years on some of the poems," says Cooper. "For example, the first poem was written in 1984 and the last new poem in the book was written in July 2000 – there’s 17 years worth of material in this book."

Cooper writes in series, or, as he says, "sequences," but these groupings don’t always work as books.

"Singing the Flowers Open is made up of at least three abandoned manuscripts," he says. "I did a book of political poems, for example, and I put that aside. There’s one poem in this book called ‘Ethiopian Father Bending Near his Child.’ That is the only surviving poem from the book of political poems."

Another sequence used the challenge of writing a single poem every day. "I was influenced by William Stafford, who wrote a poem every morning, before he did anything else." Stafford wrote his poems before sunrise, but Cooper’s approach was different. "I wrote evening poems, because I’m not much of a morning person," he laughs. "I wrote about 40 poems, and I saved 12." Those 12 make up a section of Singing the Flowers Open called "A Voice that Rose Like the Wind."

That sort of ratio – writing 40, publishing 12 – is typical for Cooper. "What I do is write a lot, probably a lot more than I need to," he says. "When I was just starting out, I wanted to publish everything. Now I work over a long period of time."

Cooper understands this concern from the other angle as well – that of publisher. He took over the poetry magazine Germination from poet and journalist Harry Thurston in 1982. For almost 10 years Cooper maintained Germination as a forum for new and emerging poets. "The whole idea was to publish new and out-of-the-mainstream poets – Canadian, American and poets in translation," he says. The format of the magazine was such that Cooper would publish large selections of work and write introductions to each selection.

"Around 1990," recalls Cooper, "I had pretty well done all I could do with the magazine." He began to publish books of poetry, and Germination evolved into Owl’s Head Press. That press is still reasonably active, but it’s his own poetry and music that drive him these days.

One of the things Cooper works at is poetic translations from literal translations of other poets. In fact, he credits his work at poetic translation with steering him toward a poetry of landscape.

"My early poetry was influenced by the ancient Chinese and Japanese poets who had a great love for the natural world," he says. "Now, if you read a lot of translations of ancient Chinese poetry, it seems just plain description and little else," he explains. "But that’s because a lot of translators didn’t know how to approach ancient Chinese poetry. All they saw was the description and not the expression – the expression got left out."

In the mid-1970s Cooper decided to try his hand at his own translations, and has been doing so ever since. "I was amazed because there were nuances and undercurrents in the poems that were not coming across in translations I’d read," he recalls. "Those Japanese poems and ancient Chinese poems that I translated developed my eye for the natural world."

For Cooper, the landscape is a vehicle for understanding, and he felt that the poets he was translating were after something similar. "Instead of saying that the grass is green, one of the ancient Chinese poems said, ‘Light at dusk and the scent of grass may seem ordinary, but if you work hard they will bring a radiance to your poems’," Cooper says, reciting most of the poem from memory. "All of a sudden the word ‘radiance’ opens up the entire poem. I started looking for moments out there in the natural world that would transform the experience I had and make it accessible to other people."

Cooper also uses translation as a means of enriching his own poetry. "I do my translations when I’m not writing myself, when I hit a roadblock," he says. "It seems to be a way back into my own work."

That early fascination with translation continues. Singing the Flowers Open contains a section of 15 translations from the Chinese poet Lin Chu, who died in 1907. He has plans to publish a book of selected translations. "There’ll be all kinds of poems – Japanese haiku, some versions from the Book of Psalms, ancient Chinese poetry, Lin Chu, some of the Sufi poets. I keep squirreling these away."

These days he’s trying to ease into a new sequence of poems. After the intensity of putting together his most recent book, he’s finding it a bit of a struggle. Singing the Flowers Open brought together so many themes that Cooper feels that he’s ready to start afresh.

"I’m trying to get back into writing every day. I’ve found it takes me weeks and sometimes months to get the new material started. I work over long periods of time. I hit a major block last fall and didn’t start writing again until early May this year. I was finishing my book and I couldn’t seem to get into the new material, but the new material is starting."

Not surprisingly, Alma has special meaning for Cooper. "I live in the old family home," he says. "It was built in 1887 by my great-great uncle." Cooper’s parents first brought him to Alma when he was six weeks old, and for the rest of his childhood he made regular trips to his grandparents’ home. "All through my childhood, my growing up, I came here on weekends," he says. "In 1991 the house became available. It needed a lot of renovations but both my wife Laurie and I were ready for a change, our daughter was about to start school, and so we moved here. For 10 years now I’ve been living in the place where the poetry began."

For Cooper, the landscape is a means by which the poet’s experience is transformed into something the reader can share. He speaks of seeking moments of focus and clarity. The clarity that he finds in the work of poets he admires, he seeks in his own. "I know that someone isn’t going to pick up Singing the Flowers Open and relate to every single poem in the book. When I write a poem, I hope that somebody will find two lines where everything comes into focus, where things come clear for them."

Clarity can be a double-edge sword, of course, for we don’t always want to see too clearly. Cooper realizes that there may be a dark side to seeing things in focus, and in Singing the Flowers Open he consciously explores the darker areas of his vision:

My favourite poem in the book is the prose poem "The River." That poem, which was the last poem written for the book, talks about aloneness and separation. I was walking down to the Annapolis River from the cabin where we were staying, and my daughter decided to go to the river at the same moment; but she went for her reasons and I went for mine. I let her go ahead, and it was as if we were following our aloneness down to the river, so I thought I’ll start the poem, "My daughter and I follow our aloneness to the river," and it goes from there. She disappears at the end of the poem, and it’s as if she disappears into her aloneness. I think that poem has a sort of dark script to it. When I put this book together, I tried to gather poems that had a dark script, that sort of untranslatable shadow side that we feel, rather than actually see.

I don’t think that the other books were put together as consciously as this one, in terms of looking for that dark script – although I think it’s there, in some books more successfully than others. I hadn’t really thought about it until I wrote the poem "November." In that poem there is the idea that the planet is a place of pain and grief, which is one of the tenets of Buddhism. We have to acknowledge that so we can truly live on the planet. I go into the grief of things eating and being eaten, and I talk about a rabbit being pounced on by a coyote. It comes down to the line: "All summer the slugs grazed on the dahlias and now the slugs are small gray stones beneath the leaves." When I wrote that line, I immediately followed it with: "Is there something that feeds on us? What if all our creative acts are dark ciphers for a language we know nothing of?" And then that transformed itself into: "Do our words feed the white and black angels of the air? Do they feed the hundreds of beings whose forms of light we can hardly begin to imagine?" After I wrote about the dark cipher, I realized what I was doing with this book. I was trying to offer a clear surface, like a lake, so that people could look down into it and feel some of the darkness beneath."

However, Singing the Flowers Open isn’t a bleak book, and this "dark script" is really more like the shadows under the trees as seen from a sunny field – mysterious but not immediately threatening. Perhaps the darkness is no more than the shadow of time passing. By building his poems around moments of clarity, Cooper strives to share moments of immanence, moments where the world seems to make sense. "I think poetry is a transformative thing," he says, "and where experience is transformed to the point where it does bring things into clarity, then I think it’s successful."

Music has been almost as much a part of cooper’s life as poetry, and as a child it was his intention to be a musician.

"When I was a child I used to love to sing Al Jolson songs. I carried around a record with me everywhere I went. I slept with it under my pillow, and if we went on vacation that record came with me. When I was about 10, I started writing lyrics. Later, when I was about 12 or 13, my mother read me a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about the ocean. I was on the beach with her, and I made an immediate connection between the two and thought, ‘I don’t just want to be a musician when I grow up, I want to be a poet as well.’ The two are very different worlds for me. The ideas for writing poems and the ideas for writing songs come from very different parts of me."

While attending Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Cooper decided to concentrate on poetry. "I’d been in bands since I was 10," he says, "but when I was in university, I felt that I had to make a decision – this was about 1973 – about whether I was going to pursue poetry or music, and I decided to choose poetry."

After that decision Cooper took 10 years off from music, except for a little "tinkering with a piano now and then." In the mid-1980s he reentered the music scene, playing with a number of Moncton-area musicians, such as Travis Furlong (now of the Glamour Puss Blues Band). "When I moved to Alma I hadn’t planned to play music again," says Cooper. "What happened is I ran into these characters down here and we decided to put together a blues trio." The "characters" were Jim Blewett and Tim Isaac, Cooper’s bandmates in Isaac, Blewett and Cooper. The three came from different backgrounds – Blewett’s was as a jazz rhythm guitarist, Isaac’s training was as a classical cellist, and Cooper was the Mississippi Delta blues – but managed to gel into a solid blues band.

"My musical roots go back to when I first heard John Mayall’s Blues Breakers on CBC Radio in 1966 or ’67. I was immediately drawn to blues music. I went right downstairs, sat at the piano and started figuring out the blues scale. All through my high school years I played a lot of old blues, Skip James and Robert Johnson tunes – that kind of thing. In 1994, I decided I wanted to start exploring the blues form again. I went back and drew on the repertoire I had used in high school. I wanted to try and bring the delta blues form alive for a contemporary audience. Walk On [Isaac, Blewett and Cooper’s first recording] was an attempt at that. Then I decided that I couldn’t do delta blues forever, so I started writing the other material."

Walk On features some original compositions as well as blues standards by Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, among others. The band’s second CD, Mud River, contains more original material, as well as a broader range of musical styles; not Delta blues anymore, more like Fundy blues.

Although Issac, Blewett and Cooper disbanded in early 2001, Cooper continues to pursue his interest in music. He has just released a solo project called Seclusion, a five-song EP, done to commemorate the 20th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

"When I was in Bermuda in March of 2000, I realized that I was just a couple of miles from where he wrote his last songs, the ones from Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey. So one afternoon I went down to the beach and I set myself the task of writing a John Lennon-influenced song. I wrote it there on the beach. I had to change the lyrics, change the structure of the song a bit when I got back. I realized that I had three or four other songs that would fit in that grouping."

Last fall Cooper went into Studio Staccato, where he had been recording before, and recorded this solo project. He plans to revise the EP, re-record the five songs and add new ones, to create a full-length Lennon tribute CD.

For the future, Cooper is planning two translation projects, in addition to the selected translations he hopes to publish. Singing the Flowers Open includes one poem, "Van Gogh," by the Chinese poet Feng Chih. "That’s from a sonnet sequence that was very popular. I’ve done 10 of them that I’m happy with so what I’d like to do now is complete decent drafts of the whole sequence and publish that as a separate entity," he explains.

He’s also finishing up a few Lin Chu translations which he would like to collect into a volume of selected poems. Besides the 15 in Singing the Flowers Open, Cooper has translated 28 poems from Lin Chu’s first collection (which were published in Heaven in Small Moments), 23 poems from her second collection, and has drafts of 20 others from Lin Chu’s third collection.

Cooper expects that translating will also lead to new poems of his own. "I’ll see, out of all this translation work, what new poems appear," he says. "After writing for 30 years it seems to get harder every time to get the new sequence started, but once it gets started it seems to be stronger than the previous sequences – so, I guess I’ll see what happens."