Bowery Poetry Club introduction for Corina Copp, 10/18/03

One discovers very quickly in Corina Copp’s first ever and fancifully titled new book, Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite, the enchanting (enchanted) conceit that sits behind the title, and indeed behind the whole book. Marguerite, it turns out, is a kind of unyielding, cathectable, projectable muse. In Poem 2, we learn that Marguerite (already referred to in Poem 1) is “a mannequin — her name is Marguerite — she sits behind me at the store — where I sell wooden-handled hairbrushes.” Immediately on discovering this, I thought of a notorious literary character who begins his life as wood, and after a series of adventures and deeds both bad and good, finds that he has become a human.

The analogy to Pinocchio is not as frivolous as it sounds. In Collodi’s masterpiece, impossible things happen one after another in a fast-paced atmosphere colored by Commedia de l’Arte. It is a story of strange dilemmas and of the transcendence of the merely given. In it, slapstick and pathos coexist equally. Plus, in the story, you never know what is going to happen next. This description could serve just as well for Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite.

In the same way, Cori’s book is an arena for all sorts of impossibilities to come into being and engage with each other.

Example:

Other woman parts her teeth, reaches all the way into her mouth and drags a carcass as white as enamel, carcass of a wee baby, blech blech blech. Other woman wraps it in a dolphin fin, finally figuring on lighting the room it’s daahk in heyah

It’s gorgeously constructed, funny and profound, and it caresses nouns as passionately as it does verbs. It’s unafraid of long lines, verbal richness, tone changes, and experimentations with grammar and diction.

Example:

If men with pitchforks in their eyes

were serving dead birds to sad girls, okay or for naught

or for nay or no or as punishment nearly worthy or no?

By the composure vested in me I’ll throw them all out as unmentionable as

an onlooker in a drain may drip as a pipe would by the by

a stance so sore appear decipherable

and plain like our elegant sane in a lane in the rain.

Its acumen regarding gender, the psyche and the socius flows freely. It doesn’t trade wit and lightness for that acumen.

Example:

…Marguerite

is sick of finding the present for reproduction is future and past oriented, full

sex outside oedipal all over the body borders on botany, to be in relation one

must mar self a bit in order to pump syntheses into my armed waiter, then he,

I’ll need a he to multiply self, I’ll need a he to her having a person…

Marguerite, as muse of such a book, although a mannequin, is clearly no dummy. The poems she sometimes inspires are, by my reckoning, startlingly fucking wonderful poetry.