Dennis Cooper

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Dennis Cooper

Born 1953 (age 54–55)
Pasadena, California
Occupation Novelist, Poet, Critic, Editor, Blogger, and Performance artist
Subjects Sexual fantasy, troubled teenagers, the inadequacy of language
Influences
Influenced

Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is a novelist, poet, critic, editor, blogger, and performance artist.

Contents

[edit] Career

Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Arcadia, 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, Joe Brainard, and Eileen Myles.

In 1979, Cooper published his first book of poetry, Idols, and became the director of programming at an alternative poetry space, Beyond Baroque, in Venice, California. He held that position for three years. Cooper's second book of poetry, Tenderness of the Wolves, published in 1982, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1984, Cooper moved to New York City where he experienced the publication of his first book of fiction, a novella titled Safe, and began work on a cycle of five interconnected novels, a project he had been thinking about and planning since the age of 15. In 1987 he moved to Amsterdam where he finished writing the first novel in what would later be called the George Miles Cycle, Closer which later won the first Ferro-Grumley Prize for gay literature.

While in Amsterdam he also wrote articles for different American magazines including Art in America, The Advocate, the Village Voice and others. He returned to New York in 1987 and began writing articles and reviews for Artforum, eventually becoming a Contributing Editor of the magazine. He 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 in 1990, Cooper collaborated with a number of artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others. For several years, he was a Contributing Editor and regular writer for the rock music magazine Spin. In 1994, he founded the "Little House on the Bowery" imprint for the independent publisher Akashic Books, which has published works by Travis Jeppesen, Richard Hell, Trinie Dalton, Benjamin Weissman, Derek McCormack and others. He completed his ten years in the writing 'George Miles Cycle' with the novel Period in the year 2000. The cycle has been translated into 17 foreign languages. Since then he has written three novels: My Loose Thread, The Sluts (winner of the 2007 Prix Sade in France, and winner of the Lammy Award for best book of gay fiction of 2005), and God Jr..

Since the summer of 2005, Cooper has spent most of his time in Paris, France. While there, he has worked on his blog, which Cooper considers his current major artistic project[citation needed], and has collaborated with the French theater director Gisele Vienne and composer Peter Rehberg on four works for the theater, I Apologize (2004), Un Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), KIndertotenlieder (2007), and a stage adaption of his novella Jerk (2008). These theater works have been highly acclaimed and have toured extensively in Europe, the UK, and Asia. While in France, Cooper finished a new book of poetry, The Weaklings, which was published in a limited edition by Fanzine Press in March 2008, and a collection of short fiction titled Ugly Man that will be published by Harper Perennial in 2009.

[edit] Influence

Cooper's work has been acknowledged as an influence on a number of younger American writers, including Travis Jeppesen, Tony O'Neill and Noah Cicero [1].

[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):

"… [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 [2]

"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 [3]

[edit] Other books

Fiction

  • Antoine Monnier (fiction, Anon Press, 1978)
  • My Mark (fiction, Sherwood Press, 1982)
  • Safe (novella, SeaHorse Press, 1985)
  • Wrong (short fiction, Grove Press, 1992)
  • My Loose Thread (novel, Canongate, 2002)
  • The Sluts (novel, Void Books, 2004 / Carroll & Graf, 2005)
  • God Jr. (novel, Grove Press, 2005)
  • Ugly Man (short fiction, Harper Perennial, 2009)


Poetry

  • The Terror of Earrings (Kinks Press, 1973)
  • Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978)
  • Idols (SeaHorse Press, 1979; Amethyst Press, 1989)
  • Tenderness of the Wolves (The Crossing Press, 1981)
  • The Missing Men (Am Here Books/ Immediate Editions, 1981)
  • He Cried (Black Star Series, 1985)
  • The Dream Police: Selected Poems '69-93 (Grove Press, 1994)
  • Thee Tight Lung Split Roar Hums (w/ Thurston Moore, Byron Coley; Slow Toe Press, 2004)
  • The Weaklings (Fanzine Press, limited edition, 2008)


Miscellaneous

  • Jerk (collaboration with artist Nayland Blake, Artspace Books, 1994)
  • Horror Hospital Unplugged (w/ artist Keith Mayerson, graphic novel, Juno Books, 1997)
  • All Ears (criticism, journalism, Soft Skull Press, 1997)
  • Violence, faits divers, littérature (non-fiction, POL, France, 2004)
  • Dennis (CD/book, Don Waters Editions/AK Press, 2006)
  • Two Texts for a Puppet Play by David Brooks (w/ Stephen O'Malley, Jean-Luc Verna, DACM, limited edition, 2008)

[edit] Works written for the theater

  • Jerk (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; world premiere, March, 2008)
  • Kindertotenlieder (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2007)
  • Une Belle Enfant Blonde (Co-written with Catherine Robbe Grillet, Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2005)
  • I Apologize (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2004)
  • The Undead (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Score: Tom Recchion; Visual Design: Robert Flynt; 1990)
  • Knife/Tape/Rope (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sets: John De Fazio; 1985)
  • Them (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Score: Chris Cochrane; 1984)

[edit] Editor

  • Little Caesar Magazine #s 1 - 12 (1976 - 1982)
  • Little Caesar Press (1978 - 1982)
    • Dennis Cooper 'Tiger Beat' (LCP)
    • Gerard Malanga '100 Years Have Passed' (LCP)
    • Arthur Rimbaud' 'Travels in Abyssinia and the Harar' (LCP)
    • Tom Clark 'The End of the Line' (LCP)
    • Tim Dlugos 'Je Suis Ein Americano' (LCP)
    • Tim Dlugos 'Entre Nous' (LCP)
    • Joe Brainard 'Nothing to Write Home About' (LCP)
    • Elaine Equi 'Shrewcrazy' (LCP)
    • Amy Gerstler 'Yonder' (LCP)
    • Elieen Myles 'Sappho's Boat' (LCP)
    • Oswell Blakeston 'Journeys End in Young Man's Meeting' (LCP)
    • Dennis Cooper, editor 'Coming Attractions: American Poets in their Twenties' (LCP)
    • Ron Koertge 'Diary Cows' (LCP)
    • Peter Schjeldahl 'The Brute' (LCP)
    • Donald Britton 'Italy' (LCP)
    • Jack Skelley 'Monsters' (LCP)
    • James Krusoe 'Jungle Girl' (LCP)
  • 'Discontents: New Queer Writers' (Amethyst Press, 1994)
  • 'The Kathy Acker Reader' (w/ Amy Scholder, Grove Press, 2004)
  • Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Press (2004 - ?)
    • Travis Jeppesen 'Victims' (LHotB)
    • Benjamin Weissman 'Headless' (LHotB)
    • Derek McCormack 'Grab Bag' (LHotB)
    • Martha Kinney 'The Fall of Heartless Horse (LHotB)
    • Richard Hell 'Godlike' (LHotB)
    • Trinie Dalton 'Wide Eyed' (LHotB)
    • James Greer 'Artificial Light' (LHotB)
    • Dennis Cooper, ed. 'Userlands: New Fiction from the Blogging Underground' (LHotB)
    • Matthew Stokoe 'High Life' (LHotB)
    • Derek McCormack 'The Show That Smells' (LHotB, forthcoming)

[edit] Works about Dennis Cooper

  • James Bolton, director, Dennis Cooper, a 20 minute documentary film (2000)
  • Leora Lev, editor, Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006) Includes essays on Cooper's work by William Burroughs, Michael Cunningham, Dodie Bellamy, John Waters, Kevin Killian, Matthew Stadler, Robert Gluck, Elizabeth Young, and others.
  • Paul Hegarty and Danny Kennedy, editors, Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper (Sussex University Press, March 2008)

[edit] External links