NIKO HALLIKAINEN: When The Poetry Project had its annual New Year’s Day marathon reading in virtual form in 2021, you read a snippet from I Wished that came out later that year. The novel centers around your deceased friend George Miles, who was the titular influence behind the cycle of your first five novels as well, or would you even call I Wished a novel?
DENNIS COOPER: I think if it’s anything, it’s a novel. It’s certainly not autobiography.
NH: Do you think it has a relation to poetry?
DC: I mean, all my stuff has a relationship to poetry, because I worked for so many years on poetry. I wanted to be a fiction writer originally, but when I moved more directly into fiction, it was because I didn’t think I could do what I wanted to do with poetry, so I was basically trying to do the same thing that I was doing in poetry.
I think maybe because I Wished is so not linear and it’s using form in this particular kind of way, maybe it has a little bit more relationship to poetry than some of my other books. I didn’t write it from beginning to end, I wrote just sequences, I let myself intuit what felt right about writing about George. I just wrote different sections at different times and then eventually figured out how to structure it. Each piece of it is kind of a distinct fitting, so in a certain way it could be a book of prose poems, except that there’s too much narrative for it to be poetry.
NH: Could you elaborate how the book uses form in a particular way?
DC: In the sense that the book is very promiscuous in its use of form. Generally with my books I map them out a long time in advance, so they have a very strict form that I’m working with that I’ve already pre-planned, but because I worked completely differently with I Wished, because I wanted it to be very much a personal and very emotional book, I just let myself do whatever felt right.
So if I felt like I wanted to approach George in this very terse and cold way, I did, if I wanted to put him in a fairy tale, I did, so each of those approaches I would just devise what was the right form for that part and I didn’t think how is this going to fit with the other ones. So it was basically constructing these individual pieces that I figured would unify because they were all completely dedicated to the same thing or the same person or the same subject.
NH: How did all those different parts finally become so harmonized, because the final form is very tight, yet very porous?
DC: Different ways in different points in the construction. Some of them followed one another. I got this idea: if there was a Santa Claus, what would Santa Claus have done with this poor kid who’s doomed and so fucked up, and on the other hand with this guy who so much wants to help him? And while I was constructing that I thought he would make a fairytale, because Santa Claus is a fairytale, and he would think that that would be the solution. And I wrote a certain number of them.
The one where George transfigures from a little abused Russian boy through a musician and ends up being himself, that was deliberate because I wanted to evolve him from George the character that he had been in my books into George the real, so I thought I’ll have him make these transfigurations to sort of construct him through these layers. Then there was a point when I had a certain number of them.
I say it in the novel and it’s true, I wrote an entirely other novel first, which was a very direct, very straightforward recounting of my relationship with him from when I met him to when I found that he had killed himself, and I spent like a year, year-and-a-half, working on that, and it was extremely emotional and very disturbing kind of experience to live all that. Then I put that aside and came back to it and it was terrible, just dead, it didn’t have anything in it that I had thought.
There was a certain point when I thought I also need to have that kind of directness too, so I ended up pulling the very beginning of that novel out and that’s in I Wished, it’s the night when I met George, it was originally the beginning of the other novel.
It was just like that. It’s like I need to put something here, and then I thought I need to be really personal, and so I wrote those diaristic ones.
You make these decisions, it’s like it needs to get really cold and tight to balance.
My favorite one is the second Crater chapter, when he kills himself and his brother discovers him. I wanted the Crater to continue from my getting the axe in the head to George blowing his head up. It didn’t solidify that throughline, so that was the last thing I wrote.
NH: In comparison to the original George Miles cycle, those five books read as the enfleshment of a blueprint. You can feel that there’s a preplanned form that they bring to life or manifest. But in I Wished, there’s a different type of quality or atmosphere, there’s kind of a sense of discovery from the author’s end. First George’s blown-off head forms a muted crater, then later on James Turrell’s Roden Crater artwork is given a voice to speak, and finally the scene of George killing himself returns with his hollowed skull now gaining the ability to voice thoughts. The act of discovering happens on the page. It feels like you’re on a quest towards something.
DC: That’s exactly what it felt like and what I wanted it to feel like. I mean, I like video games, so I wanted it to feel like being in a video game. I wanted it to be constantly refreshing itself through refreshing me, and I was just trying to keep completely locked into the feeling, try to explore all the different complicated feelings and that it would sort of feel very private. It doesn’t have strict boundaries, it almost feels very loose, even though it’s really, really not loose. Basically I’m just saying what you’re saying. That was my hope and that was what I made sure I felt and wanted to have that kind of reading experience as well.
NH: It’s widely acknowledged that I Wished is a very vulnerable work. In comparison to the original George Miles cycle too, people often call it emotionally raw. When you’ve spoken about the cycle in the past, you’ve said that Try is the heart of that cycle, the emotionally rawest book of the cycle, so did you think about Try while writing I Wished?
DC: No, I never think about my older stuff really at all. I know that obviously people are making a strong association between I Wished and the cycle, and I understand that and I brought that on it, but my goal is not to do anything that’s a sequel to the cycle. When I was going to write about George, my original idea was that I would not talk about the cycle at all, but then I ended up having to, because I just couldn’t do it without bringing that earlier representation of him into it.
If you know the cycle, then reading I Wished has one experience. If you don’t, it has a different experience. I was thinking about the cycle in general, the way he was represented there, but no, I wasn’t thinking about Try, that’s such ancient history to me, I wouldn’t even write that book now.
Every time I write a novel I try to absolutely start from scratch again, because I have a very limited kind of talent, so I have to work within a certain range, but I always try to completely surprise and shock myself when I write a novel.
NH: Did it surprise you that you returned to the subject matter of George, when you felt the urge to start writing I Wished?
DC: I wanted to write a really personal and a very emotional novel. I had wanted to do that for a while, because I had never done it. I always try to challenge myself, especially after The Marbled Swarm because that was a really different kind of book. So that was all I really wanted to do. Ultimately I came to the point where I had to accept that if there’s anything that’s really, really emotional and very, very, very difficult for me to deal with, it’s George. It’s very painful for me, this whole thing. I didn’t want to write a book about George.
I thought if I’m going to do this, I have to be George, because otherwise he’ll end up being some kind of underlying reference. That’s like the most convulsing experience I’ve had.
I felt like I had no choice.
After I decided it was George, I then began to think it would be really nice to have people know who George really was and not think George was this little hot boy who let people cut him up, that he wasn’t like that at all. I thought it would be nice to pay tribute to him in that sense. That happened after I realized that I had to write about him, it wasn’t my original goal.
NH: All of your books are sort of puzzles, but The Marbled Swarm more than anything is a mystery to be solved by the reader, and I feel like the ending of I Wished has that same tone, but in a totally different manner. The last chapter is the most puzzling part of the whole work, because it flips the whole novel in a subtle way.
DC: I’m very happy to hear that, I did want it to flip the novel. I do that in different ways every novel, but specifically in I Wished that’s very clear that that’s happening.
NH: That ending haunts me, because you clearly fulfill the goal of being emotionally raw and extremely vulnerable, but there’s something else going on there, some enigmatic presence. Nothing feels like the way it felt up to that point. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but something’s not stated openly. In terms of emotional vulnerability, it’s not what it seems to be. Can you elaborate on that at all?
DC: Ha. Well I mean, gosh it’s been a while since I wrote it. I mean it had to do more than one thing. It had to be very emotionally raw and it is, but it also had to complete the novel. That it ends with the volcano erupting, it’s not an accident because there’s been craters and all that stuff. There are things that are there that I’m bringing in to it to formally unite some of the disparate approaches of the book, but initially it was just catharsis, just like the first novel, then I kind of fiddled with it, to sort of try to keep that, but have it have a more formal relationship to the rest of the book.
I mean, it is odd, I’m happy that you see all those things, because I think that’s really true, and people haven’t really said anything about that.
It’s not something that I thought about, but I think you’re right, what you’re saying is correct. Again, because I make decisions in such a strange way, yes, it’s true that the last section would have that effect and that purpose.
I can’t take it apart for you really.
The way I write is so laborious, I change things so much and I rewrite and rewrite, it’s a little difficult for me to go back and remember why I made a decision. I make so many decisions while I’m making them, they become this collage of decisions, there’s not like a pure original decision, it’s constantly being revised, so it’s hard to talk about the original motivation, because it shifts all the time.
NH: That’s very beautifully said and also captures the difficulty for me in asking questions, because what I would like to talk with you the most about is the editing, as I know that’s what you spend most of your time working on when you write novels. But it’s a very difficult process to describe what actually goes on in that. Initial goals and motivations are easy to elaborate, but the editing, which is the majority of the work itself, is very hard to talk about.
DC: Yeah, because I mean a lot of it comes out of just this minutiae to fix, because I’m very obsessed with the sentence, the rhythm of the sentence, the structure of the paragraph, so I do these constant little adjustments in the writing to make the rhythm work or fail in a certain way, and that ends up causing shifts in other things.
So much of it is this weird combination of being really intuitive and really formal at the same time. I’ve always worked that way. I don’t know why I do it or how I do it. I just learned how to do that, so that I can be totally intuitive but I can also be this complete structuralist, formalist monster too, and I found some kind of way to do that, shift back and forth. I’ll make a change, another change, then I have to sit back, and think is this working emotionally, so then I’ll fix it emotionally, and then I’ll have to go back and make it work formally.
My first drafts are terrible, I’m not a natural writer, I mean William Burroughs was wrong. It’s really constructed stuff.
I really don’t like writing first drafts, that’s my least favorite thing in the world. I just want to get this mess down, so then I can organize it. I truly have no idea how other people write, because I never went to school, I never studied writing, I never learned how to write fiction. Coming out of poetry, the fiction that I was interested in was all very experimental, avant-garde, so even the fiction I liked was like poetry in the sense of being very complicated and abstract.
I just found this way of making things that was my own way of making things, and I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t know how to compare it to how other people make things, because I don’t know how these people write those novels that are so sensible and normal.
NH: Did having different editors at different publishing houses play a major part in the novels coming together?
DC: I barely get edited. I just get line edits. Only with Closer, I was living in Amsterdam and I sent it to Grove Press, and I really wanted to be published by them, because it was like the greatest press to me in that age, and the editor said, “We really like it but the first chapter is wrong,” because the first chapter was much more complicated than it ended up being. He said, “If you’ll be willing to simplify the first chapter, then I think we’d be very interested,” and I agreed with him and I simplified the chapter and he was absolutely right. But since then, people don’t even ask, I send them the books, then they go through them and literally just look for typos. Sometimes they’ll say, “Do you realize you’re repeating this word, do you mean to repeat this word,” and I’m either like yeah you’re right, that’s a mistake or no, I do really want to repeat that word.
I write in a particular way and I don’t think people really know how to edit me, because it’s very difficult. Sometimes people have said, “If you change the order a little bit, it would be a little bit more accessible,” but I have no interest at all in being more accessible.
NH: I’m jealous of your confidence.
DC: I’m not overconfident at all, I’m very aware of the limitations of what I do, but I’m very confident in my skills and know how limited they are and I know how to work with them.
I think I understand my own talent better than anybody else does, so I know what I can and can’t do, and I work very hard to make things work within the range that I can work in.
I understand I could make this a little bit more narrative and put some more plot and intention in this story. I don’t know how to do that and I don’t want to know how to do that.
NH: Eileen Myles edited this anthology called Pathetic Literature that came out in 2022, and I found it interesting that out of all the things you’ve written they chose a snippet from God Jr. to be included in that book. How did you feel about that, because in terms of how Eileen Myles defines pathetic literature, I felt that I Wished would have fit perfectly into that.
DC: I don’t think Eileen had read I Wished when they were doing the anthology. Yeah, I was surprised, I’m very fond of God Jr. and think it’s a bit overlooked. Eileen is really not into the transgressive, so it didn’t totally shock me that they picked something like that. I was happy—it’s always nice to have someone do a kind of an out-of-left-field kind of a choice.
NH: Also the part that Eileen took out of God Jr. is surprising. I feel like there are other parts that are very emotional especially towards the very end of the book.
DC: Yeah, the third section of God Jr. is my favorite thing I’ve ever written, but it’s very hard to excerpt.
NH: Why did you decide to dedicate I Wished to Zac Farley?
DC: Just because he’s my collaborator, my best friend, and he’s very influential on me. I talked to him a lot about it. Of everyone I’ve ever worked with, we’re the most like-minded, we have really similar interests and similar goals, he understands what I’m doing extremely well.
NH: When you work on films together, it’s not executed in a traditional sense that you’re the scriptwriter and he’s the director. I’ve seen that you’re part of the casting, you’re on set as well, when you were shooting your upcoming film Room Temperature.
DC: It’s an entirely collaborative experience. When we do the scripts, I’m the more dominant force in the scripts, and when we shoot the film, he is the more dominant person in the directing, because he’s a more visual person, but we discuss everything. Everything is very much in agreement. The casting, the thinking it out, the editing, and everything else is entirely collaborative. It’s strange to be so simpatico with someone about things, but we just luckily are.
NH: When you’re editing the films, is it similar to editing the novels in a sense that it takes the most time?
DC: Yeah, especially because we do it ourselves, we spent almost 6 months editing our new film. It’s a difficult, complicated film and we wanted to try every single possibility of what we’d shot. We don’t work with editors, it’s like we’re edited by ourselves and no you can’t fucking touch this. My art is in editing.
We just finished the edit last week, finally got to the point where it’s as far as we’re going to go. In every turn we’re thinking about what will this be like when we edit it. I love shooting, we had an absolutely amazing crew, it was just a joy to have performers embody your work, but the editing is the best part.
NH: I listened to a Frances McDormand interview where she said that she considers cinema an editor’s artform.
DC: I think that’s really true. But if you wanna take the idea of editing, then the performers are editing what you give them, too. We work with non-actors, they don’t have any skills, they have no background in how to be these characters. Like Zac and I came to film with no experience as filmmakers, it’s like that, they have to completely on their own accord figure out how to be these characters and how to represent that with their bodies, when they have no expertise whatsoever. In terms of the editing, they’re taking what we give them and then editing it with their bodies—into their bodies or something.
NH: You said in a recent interview that you haven’t written a poem in 15 years and maybe becoming a filmmaker has supplanted the poet in you. What is about making films with Zac Farley that may have replaced the tendencies you used to have while writing poetry?
DC: It’s funny I said that. I don’t know what I was thinking about when I said that.
There’s the purely labor thing, in the sense that I was fading out of writing poems, what I was feeling and thinking about wasn’t going there anymore. There was a kind of transition, because there was a part where I realized I was never going to be a good enough poet, I couldn’t make my work get there and I never would, it’s just not a form that I was able to do enough in for me, I needed to have prose.
But I think there’s a transition, I did these GIF novels, I took animated GIFs and I organized them into these stories, narratives or whatever. I think that was a kind of transition into the films. Even though I call them novels, they were still accessing the poet in me very much. There’s some kind of a transition from the GIF novels into the films because I was able to do visual representations of my ideas for the first time. I just used found GIFs so they’re just these preset blocks, these jittery little images that you can only do so much with.
Because the poet’s impulse was at work in the GIF fiction, it came so in the film.
I don’t write poems anymore, I may someday, but I always wrote poems that were very emotional, it was very much an emotional thing for me, and I think my emotions are too locked or something nowadays. I don’t have that kind of free-floating emotional life that I had. But I mean, if you’re working with performers and you have faces, it’s all about emotion.
The fiction it’s all very dry, and I don’t think of the characters as real, I just think of them as configurations in the prose and I’m using them as representations of my emotion.
But if you’re making a film, you’ve got these people, you want people to look at them and see the feeling on their faces, because our films have lots of faces in them, it’s very true in the second film and the new one.
NH: You also come from these milieus from Los Angeles and New York, where being a poet was a very communal life, the poems were constantly being performed and reflected upon collectively, so there was this vibrant social environment around the writing of the poems. To an outsider, it makes sense that films kind of replaced that, where you have a more collaborative experience. Especially with your scripts and your style of writing, where little is said about gigantic things being expressed, which is poetic.
DC: I think that’s one of the reasons I got really excited about being a poet. When I was just starting to go to college I found the New York school poets, the second generation especially like Berrigan, Padgett, Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer. I was just obsessed, I loved their work, it was all about communal experience. To me they seemed like a family or something, The Poetry Project and all that. And that excited me just to think they collaborate, they write these poems and the poems kind of have a relationship to each other. Then in Los Angeles we constructed this, my poet friends and I built this kind of community around Beyond Baroque, which was kind of modeled on what we thought The Poetry Project was like.
NH: You used the word impulse, having this impulse to make poems, but not channeling it into poetry. That also makes sense, because I think that the more you read poetry, the more you aspire to write poetry.
DC: For me poetry is a very lofty form. I like to read poetry and then think about writing fiction, because I’ve always been very influenced by other forms anyway. I’ll read a poem and think like, oh I want to do that, but I don’t want to write a poem, because I don’t think I’m good enough, but I’m a fiction writer, I do feel like maybe I can get that quality in paragraphs or something, you know.
NH: You’ve also written a novel with Zac called The Has-Been.
DC: It’s going to be sound-only, a cross between an audiobook and a radio play, so it is a novel, but it’s going to be performed and we’re not going to publish the text. The main character is this female ventriloquist and her dummy, so we have to find someone whose either an extremely genius ventriloquist because the dummy is an extremely complicated character, or we have to find someone who can change their voice and do two different, very complicated characters, and then find a ventriloquist to do the sounds of the wood clacking. The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to record that and try to find someone who will release it, maybe have a kind of book-like object, but then it would have like a download code. Yeah, that is kind of like a novel, so there is that, but I keep forgetting about that for some reason.
NH: Are you going to write more fiction?
DC: I want to. I’m working on a collection of older short fiction that’s mostly like bits and pieces and experiments and I’m trying to polish them up, so that’s not new stuff. I originally had this idea that I would write five cycle novels and five non-cycle novels, I really liked that idea. I thought that was a lot and it is a lot. Writers are lucky to have one book even remembered. It’s such an extreme pleasure to write a novel that when I was working on I Wished I thought I do really want to write another novel, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t. The thing is I have to reinvent what I do every single time, I have to find something that feels completely new to me, where it’ll be this huge challenge to me, and I haven’t found that yet. I’m waiting for something that dawns on me that needs to be a novel rather than a film or a blog post.