Exploring Uncertainties and The One Certain Thing with Peter Cooley

Ryan Mayer

Exploring Uncertainties and The One Certain Thing with Peter Cooley

Peter Cooley served as Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2015-2017 and is currently the Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature, as well as Professor Emeritus at Tulane University, where he was the Director of Creative Writing from 1975-2018. He has authored eleven books, the most recent of these being The One Certain Thing—a collection of elegies dedicated to his late wife and first reader, Jacqueline Cooley.

Ryan Mayer received his BA in English from Loyola University New Orleans and is pursuing his MFA at The University of New Orleans. He is an emerging poet and writer.

On February 2nd, Peter Cooley kindly agreed to discuss The One Certain Thing with me; our conversation took place April 26th via email.

RM: The title poem of your previous book, World Without Finishing, reads, “That we live again is certain.” In what ways does The One Certain Thing uphold, or push against, this notion?

PC: A great question! The One Certain Thing upholds the notion “that we live again is certain.” Both my wife and I believe in the immortality of the soul, in some kind of afterlife, and I hope the whole book makes Jacki “live again” in art for the reader.

RM: “There really is no word for it.” This is the first line in the opening poem, “Widower.” You have previously spoken about poetry as a means of naming. How does naming inform “Widower” and other

poems in your new book?

PC: The whole book is an attempt to name the emotion of grief and all the concomitant emotions surrounding it.

RM: The speaker of The One Certain Thing exercises as a means of “muscling out” his emotions during his grieving process. How important is physical activity in your writing process?

PC: For me, the writing process is very physical! That’s why I start all my poems with pencil and paper or pen and paper, so I can make immediate corrections and keep the poem an extension of my fingers and my hand.

RM: Some people wait years before addressing a personal loss through art. At a few points in the book, you mention struggling to write about your wife and her passing, even throwing away poems. Did you need to foster distance from your traumatic loss to write these elegies? Or did some element of process help you treat this subject matter?

PC: I thought I could not write this book—or even a single poem on the subject matter. But resistance for me is always a part of the writing process, for every single poem and every book I write, so I knew I had to jump in the water and teach myself to swim once I got in the water, which was deep from the start.

RM: Numerous poems in this book possess a prayer-like quality, such as “Letter to God, Letter to Jackie, a Romance.” Do you see them more as poems or as prayers?

PC: I see poetry as a form of prayer.

RM: The spiritual overlaps with the concrete in The One Certain

Thing; you depict the afterlife as indelibly entwined with this life. To what degree does the poet have an obligation to capture the abstract when writing about the concrete?

PC: We can’t know the afterlife except by intuiting it through our present life, can we? I don’t feel the poet has an obligation to write about the abstract. It will occur inevitably with the concrete.

RM: You once said that the visual in your poetry has become less significant for you. The poems in your new book emphasize sound. For example, we have poems with music-related titles: “Epithalamium,” “Barcarolle,” as well as the Étude poems. What incited this focal shift from the visual to the auditory?

PC: I think this is because volume is more concerned with death and the afterlife and finding words for the presence of the lost one in present experience. These concerns are necessarily less visual, aren’t they?

RM: Of the book’s visual imagery, live oaks reign as one of the most common; they also frequently appear in your work outside of this book. What draws you to them?

PC: Live oaks! They fascinate me! Legend says that some live oaks in City Park predate the birth of Christ! That aside, they are all so different in their configurations, each having its own individuality. Many of them, too, look like trees in fairy tales such as “Hansel and Gretel.”

RM: New Orleans has an intimate and dualistic relationship with death: it provides a reason to celebrate as much as it provides a reason to mourn. How did this duality influence you while writing this collection of elegies?

PC: The intimate and dualistic relationship of death in New Orleans is

embodied in my book, yes. But once again, this was the result of intuitive apprehension. I have lived here since 1975, and this ambience has become a part of me. I did not choose to take on the dualism: it chose me.

RM: Étude, Visitation, Canonical Hour and Romance—these labels can be used to categorize many of the poems in The One Certain Thing, since they appear in over half of the titles within it. How did these categories come to form the collection’s structural backbone?

PC: These are not “labels,” exactly, but structural devices I used to give the book an armature. And like many if not most of my “choices,” these were intuitions. I sensed that the book would be better with some “backbone,” as you put it, and I started with the notion of visitation, since that was literally occurring with a sense of presence of my wife in my life. I am not Roman Catholic, but I have always been intrigued with the canonical hours, so they came next. Then came Romance, which can be configured in different ways throughout literary history. Finally, my grandson played me an étude on his baritone on Zoom, so I added that.

RM: You divide the book into five sections. Do they parallel KüblerRoss’s model for the stages of grief?

PC: I am familiar with Kubler-Ross and thought about the five stages a lot in the early stages of my grief. There may have been an unconscious influence here.

RM: A quote from Faulkner, C.S. Lewis, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion and Paul Éluard preface each section of the book, respectively. What made you use quotes from these authors as section epigraphs?

PC: Lewis, Barthes and Didion all lost a loved one and wrote a book about it, all books I read and love. I chose the Faulkner and Éluard quotes

because I loved them, too, and knew them already.

RM: You mention several other writers in this collection, from Keats to Louise Glück, and you subtly nod to Poe in two poems with the word tintinnabulation. Which poets did you read while composing this book?

PC: Of course, I stole that word from Poe. How can we not all love Poe from junior high on? I read so much poetry that I honestly cannot remember what poets I was reading while writing the book.

RM: When did you know that this book was “complete”—that it gave a name to those unnamable emotions?

PC: The answer is impossible to fully articulate. I knew by intuition.

RM: Although it is a collection of elegies, each poem contributes to an overarching narrative; we see the speaker’s life change, his attitude change and ultimately the speaker himself change. How much of this change was consciously implemented by Peter Cooley the poet and how much of it was the influence of Peter Cooley the person?

PC: The overarching narrative you mention was created by me both as a person and a writer. I was very much aware of writing it. The speaker in the book finds purgation of emotion and healing through articulation. And I did, too, in “real life.”

RM: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to share about The One Certain Thing or about poetry in general?

PC: Because of its subject matter, I hope the book will reach a general audience, not simply a “poetry audience.” Everyone has suffered grief. I feel poetry—all poetry—is more needed now than ever before, not

just because the world is in crisis, which is nothing new, but because electronic communication has fractured our attention spans and placed us in a peculiar relationship to intimacy in relationships.