Dennis Cooper
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Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is a poet, writer and performance artist, most noted for transforming the visual/verbal aesthetic of punk into its written counterpart.
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[edit] Career
Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Pasadena, California. His literary aspirations were explored early on and often took the form of imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, De Sade, and Baudelaire. He wrote poetry and stories in his early teens that explored scandalous and often extreme subjects. As a teenager, Cooper was an outsider and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners and writers. After high school he attended Pasadena City College and later Pitzer College where he encountered a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning.
In 1976 Cooper went to England to become involved in the nascent punk scene In the same year he began Little Caesar Magazine which included among other things an issue on and dedicated to Rimbaud. In 1978 with the success of the magazine, Cooper was able to found Little Caesar Press which featured the work of, among others, Brad Gooch, Amy Gerstler, Elaine Equi, Tim Dlugos, and Eileen Myles.
In 1979, Cooper became the director of programming at an alternative poetry space, Beyond Baroque, in Venice, California. During his tenure such artists as Tim Miller, Eric Bogosian and Jessica Hagedorn gave performances. He also curated shows that included works by Sherrie Levine and Bob Flanagan, Peter Schjeldahl, Kenward Elmslie, Gerard Malanga, and Jack Skelley. In 1984, Cooper moved to New York City. In 1987 he moved to Amsterdam where he finished writing Closer which took as inspiration a postcard that featured an image of Mickey Mouse carved onto the back of a young boy. Cooper later won the Ferro-Grumley for gay literature for Closer.
While in Amsterdam he also wrote articles for different American magazines including the Village Voice. He soon returned to New York and began writing articles for Artforum and began working on his next novel, Frisk. In the next few years Cooper worked on several different art and performance projects including co-curating an exhibit at LACE with Richard Hawkins entitled AGAINST NATURE: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men.
After moving to Los Angeles from New York for the final time, Cooper has collaborated with a number of artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others. He is the editor of the Kathy Acker Reader.
[edit] George Miles cycle
In the spring of 2000 Cooper published Period, the last of a series of five novels known as the George Miles cycle (ISBNs refer to the Grove Press paperback editions):
- Closer (1989), ISBN 0-8021-3212-X
- Frisk (1991), ISBN 0-8021-3289-8
- Try (1994), ISBN 0-8021-3338-X
- Guide (1997), ISBN 0-8021-3580-3
- Period (2000), ISBN 0-8021-3783-0
"… [I]n the ninth grade Cooper met his beloved friend George Miles. Miles had deep psychological problems and Cooper took him under his wing. Years later, when Cooper was 30, he had a brief love affair with the 27-year-old Miles. The cycle of books … came later, and were an attempt by Cooper to get to the bottom of both his fascination with sex and violence and his feelings for Miles."
— 3:AM magazine, November 2001, "American Psycho: An Interview With Dennis Cooper" by Stephen Lucas [1]
"George in Closer, whose room is full of Disney figures, himself becomes the toy of two forty-year-old men obsessed with the beauty of pain and suffering. In Frisk, an ex-friend is writing Julian letters: reports or fantasies of sex and violence. The description of the sexual murdering of young men is a melange of blood and slippery internal organs, too unappetizing to quote. The letters are being sent from a Holland windmill, in its isolation an ideal place for exploring the raw reality of sex, violence and death."
— VPRO Television; article in Dutch [2]
[edit] Other books
- "Wrong" (short fiction, Grove Press, 1982)
- "The Dream Police: Selected Poems '69-93' (Grove Press, 1994)
- "Jerk" (collaboration with artist Nayland Blake, Artspace Books, 1994)
- "Horror Hospital Unplugged" (graphic novel, Juno Books, 1997)
- "All Ears" (criticism, journalism, Soft Skull Press, 1997)
- "My Loose Thread" (novel, Canongate, 2002)
- "The Sluts" (novel, Void Books, 2004 / Carroll & Graf, 2005)
- "God Jr." (novel, Grove Press, 2005)
- "Dennis" (CD, 2006)
[edit] See also
- Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Press
- Leora Lev, editor, "Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper" (2006)
- Todd Verow
- Passagen Verlag
[edit] External links
- denniscooper.net
- denniscooper.blogspot.com Dennis' old blog (hacked)
- denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com Dennis' current blog
- Dennis Cooper Papers at Fales Library, New York University
- Little House on the Bowery Series for Akashic Books
- www.passagen.at
- 3:AM magazine, November 2001 interview by Stephen Lucas
- 3:AM magazine, December 2001 interview by Dan Epstein
- Review of Jerk by Matias Viegener in Artforum
- Frisk at the Internet Movie Database — 1995 film version of novel
- (Dutch) VPRO Dutch television site — article and link to streaming video segment on Dennis Cooper
