New American Canon

A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper

Diarmuid Hester

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781609386924
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper's unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper's life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper's fifty-year career,   Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper's singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper's status as a leading figure of the American post­–War avant-garde.

Index

Abbott, Steve, 46, 77–78, 91–93, 102, 109; “Notes on Boundaries/New Narrative,” 99–101; SOUP, 98, 103

Acker, Kathy, 129, 253; correspondence with Cooper, 86–88, 90, 134; and Grove Press, 135; and New Narrative, 96, 99; and “transgressive writing,” 147–148

adolescence, 23–29; choreography of, 199–200; egocentrism of, 31–32; high school, 23–24, 171–176; as influence, 6, 184; in My Loose Thread, 175; poetics of, 23–32; and Rimbaud, 26–29, 31, 60; temporality of, 24–31. See also teenagers

AIDS, 106–107, 123; activism, 125, 141, 237–238, 245; and Cooper’s work, 82, 131; deaths, 132, 145–146, 167, 181; exploitation of, 167, 178–182

AIDS Awards for Poetry (Clark and Dorn), 77–79, 82, 91, 111

Albert, Laura. See LeRoy, JT

Allen, Karen, 111

Allison, Dorothy, 171

Amnasan, Mike, 92, 99, 101–102, 104–106, 109

anarchism, 30–31, 63–64, 245; and community, 62, 204, 206; friendship as a form of, 269; literary engagements with, 66–71, 152–164; networks, 206–208, 227; and punk rock, 60, 115, 120, 124, 125; sex radical, 112–115. See also Cage, John; commons, the; Gay Anarchist Circle, the; Goldman, Emma; Goodman, Paul; Mac Low, Jackson; Proudhon, Joseph

Apfelschnitt, Carl, 130, 146

Araki, Gregg, 123

Ashbery, John, 216, 253

asses, 27–28, 77, 82; anal sex, 83; fisting, 72; rimming, 14...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One: Wrong | The Adolescence of an Iconoclast
• Two: Sturm und Drang | Rimbaud and Sade
• Three: A Poetics of Dissociability | The Punk Poets of Los Angeles
• Four: “I’m Yours” | Frank O’Hara, Paul Goodman, and The Tenderness of the Wolves
• Five: Safe and the Aesthetics of Distance
• Six: “If There Actually Is Such a Thing as New Narrative . . .”
• Seven: “Fuck Sexual Conformity” | Anarcho-Homo Radicalism in the 1980s
• Eight: The George Miles Cycle
• Nine: JT LeRoy and My Loose Thread | “I Had No Other Choice”
• Ten: The Automated and the Eerie | Collaborations with Gisèle Vienne
• Eleven: Dennis Cooper’s Blog
• Twelve: Reading for Queer Subculture in The Marbled Swarm
• Thirteen: Asignifying Desire | HTML Novels and Feature Films
• Afterword | Starting with Friendship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List