Thanks to Julie R. Enszer who posted these two poems by Jane Cooper. Cooper was born in Jacksonville, FL, my hometown.
Being Southern
1
It's like being German.
Either you remember that yours was the defeated country
(The South breeds the finest soldiers, my uncle said,
himself a general in one of his incarnations)
or you acknowledge the guilt, not even your own guilt, but
Can any white person write this, whose ancestors once kept slaves?
2
Of course there were "good" Germans.
My father was still under 30, a passionate Wilsonian, when he was named a delegate to the 1916 Democratic Convention. By the end of the first evening he had discovered that eleven of the other Florida delegates were members of the Klan, he couldn't answer for the twelfth, he was number 13.
Only a few years later he argued for, and won, token black representation on the Jacksonville school board.
And my aunt as a girl went into the sweatshops to interview Cuban cigar workers, all women. She found the first Girl Scout troop in the South for, as she put it, colored children. True, it was segregated. But it was the first.
Take your guilt to school. Read your guilt in your diplomas or the lines of the marriage ceremony. Face your guilt head-on in the eyes of lover, neighbor, child. Ask to be buried in your guilt.
Of course they were paternalistic. I honor their accomplishments. What more have I ever done?
When is memory transforming? when, a form of real estate?
3
Transplanted "north" in 1934 I never questioned
a town that received its distinguished refugees
with a mix of pride and condescension: the specialist in Christian iconography
in her man-tailored suits, Einstein like a disembodied spirit
pacing our leafy sidewalks. Only because my best friend lived next door
would I glimpse him, sometimes at twilight, tuning his violin
as his back yard filled up with tents
But why can't I remember the actual men and women who slept in those tents, among patches of ragged tigerlilies? the children with skinny arms, who would soon be passed along. . . ?
All he could vouch for. Not famous. At their backs
the six million.
Hotel de Dream
Justice-keepers! justice-keepers!
for Muriel Rukeyser and James Wright
Suppose we could telephone the dead.
Muriel, I'd say, can you hear me?
Jim, can you talk again?
And I'd begin to tell them the stories they loved to hear:
how my father, as a young boy, watched Cora Crane
parade through the streets of Jacksonville with her girls
in an open barouche with silver fittings;
how the bay haunches gleamed as they twitched off flies,
polished hooves fetched down smartly into the dust,
ostrich feathers tickled the palates of passers-by.
Muriel, I'd say, shall we swing along Hudson Street
underneath the highway and walk out together on the docks?
.the river would be glittering, my grandmother
would be bargaining
with a black man on a dock in Jacksonville;
grapefruit and oranges would be piled up like cannonballs
at the fort in Old St. Augustine. . . .
I'll never put you in a nursing home, you said early that year,
I promise, Jane, I'll never put you in a nursing home.
Later Cora Crane showed her dogs right next to my aunt's.
They had a good conversation about bloodlines
amidst the clean smells of kennel shavings and well-brushed dog
but never, of course, met socially
although she had dined with Henry James.
Jim, I'd say, remember that old poem "The Faithful"
you helped me by caring for? How what we owe to the dead
is to go on living? More than ever
I want to go on living.
But now you have become part of it, friends of my choosing years,
friends who magnificent voices
will reverberate always, if only through machines,
tell me how to redress the past,
how to relish yet redress
my sensuous, precious, upper-class,
unjust white child's past.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Being Southern
Monday, October 29, 2007
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Obituary
Jane M. Cooper, Poet, 1924-2007
Jane Marvel Cooper, poet, Professor and Poet-in-Residence Emerita at
Sarah Lawrence College, died peacefully at Pennswood Village, Newtown,
PA, on October 26th from complications due to Parkinson's Disease.
Family were with her at the end.
She was the daughter of the late John C. Cooper Jr. and Martha Marvel
Cooper, and sister of the late Rachel C. Baker, all formerly of Armour
Road, Princeton. Jane Cooper was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1924.
She spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida and then moved
with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. There she went to Miss
Fine's School where, in her senior year, she won the Leslie Shear Poetry
Prize for two works: "We are the Generation of War" and "I have Sung
Solitary Various Worlds", early signs of future acclaim.
She attended Vassar College 1942 to 1944 and earned a B.A. from the
University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the faculty of Sarah
Lawrence College in 1950, where she remained as a teacher and poet in
residence until her retirement in 1987. Over that period, together with
Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, Muriel Rukeyser and others, she helped
develop and enhance a writing program that became one of the most
distinguished in the country.
In 1953-54 she took a year off to get a M.A. at the University of Iowa,
where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. She received
much recognition in her lifetime including awards from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Bunting Institute and the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
Jane Cooper maintained her links with Princeton over the years, but she
lived most of her adult life in New York City. She also spent several
summers at Yaddo and the McDowell Colony, working on her own poetry. Her
first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, appeared in 1969 and was
followed at intervals by four others: Maps and Windows (1974),
Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1984), Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994)
and The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000). She was named
State Poet of New York for 1995-97.
She is survived by her brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, AZ, five
nephews, two nieces and three grandnieces. There will be a service at
All Saints Church, Princeton on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m. All
are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Immune
Deficiency Foundation, 40 W. Chesapeake Avenue, Suite 308, Towson, MD 21204.
(Prepared by the family of Jane M. Cooper, October 2007)
