Colorado State University Professor Matthew Cooperman begins the titular poem of his 2024 poetry collection “the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless” with a paradox: “the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless / but we smell it anyway.”
This contradiction is a keystone of the philosophy Cooperman said he was fascinated by in the course of writing this 93-pagelong “series of odes” that he began in 2003. This philosophy, which drew inspiration from Timothy Morton’s explorations of hyperobjects — objects that are so vast and omnipresent that they render themselves difficult to comprehend — is explored in the form of oil in the collection’s title poem.
“The (hyperobject) that the poem is really corresponding to is oil,” Cooperman said. “This desk is made of oil; the carpet is made of oil. You know, anything plastic here is made of oil — my shirt is made of oil. But we don’t see it that way. … That’s the extensiveness of this kind of, like, energy dispersal of this thing into all of these other forms, and yet that’s driving our life and obviously driving our climate crisis.”
To live in atmosphere that is odorless yet is still able to be smelled is indeed a contradiction, yet so is the unending dependence on fossil fuels that has accelerated climate change. The creative writing professor stressed that he believes the role of the poet is to “turn that lens” on topics like this that pervade contemporary society.
Cooperman began his tenure at CSU in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1998 and teaching at Harvard University; University of Colorado, Boulder; and Cornell College. Following the 2024 release of “the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless,” he has published 12 poetry collections and chapbooks while teaching at the Fort Collins university.
His next project, “Time, & Its Monument” will be aided with the financial support of the Guggenheim Fellowship, which Cooperman was awarded in April of this year. One of only six to win the award in CSU’s history, he said the fellowship is a refreshing recognition of a body of work that seeks the experimental over the mass market.
“It was sort of a validation of a career of work that’s relatively experimental, and that that work was being seen alongside, say, maybe more mainstream stuff,” Cooperman said. “I have long ago given up writing toward some idea of what the market is or what is going on, per se. I have to follow my own compass with that.”
In his work, Cooperman’s experimentation with form and content often bursts from the seams. Poems like “Gun Ode” exemplify this exploration, with its interspersing lines between the stanzas losing their magnetism to the left alignment of the page and beginning to shift in fonts as Cooperman writes of the horrors of gun violence while conversing with Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America.”
The Guggenheim Fellow said his poetic methodology is one that been a result of years of learning and close noticing. In reference to the poet’s role as a translator, he emphasized that his responsibility is to reject the compulsion to embellish in order to remain authentic.
“(The desire to embellish) is one of the most pernicious things that poetry has to deal with because it doesn’t resemble what contemporary poetry sounds like,” Cooperman said. “We get caught in that kind of impulse to beautify, but I think that betrays the subject if we do that. … The impulse to sing or be vatic was there early on in my poetry life. I identified poetry with that in some way, and that’s probably kind of quieted down and become less outward and declamatory and more inward and sort of contemplative”
While Cooperman’s poems have moved toward the more inward and contemplative, his work is far from reclusive.
His upcoming book will feature visual elements added in by two artists: Peter Richards, an artist and fellow poet, and Simonetta Moro, a painter and president of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Cooperman also published a poetry collection titled “Imago for the Fallen World” in 2013 with fellow CSU professor Marius Lehene, who teaches drawing in the department of art and art history and provided images to work in conjunction with the collection’s poems.
“In this new collection, I’d written the poems for this piece called ‘Black Star Pieces,’ and … I felt like it had a visual analog to it,” Cooperman said. “I looked for a long time … until I found this person Peter Richards, and his work kind of corresponded to the poems and changed the poems in sort of looking at these images. And so then there was a sort of second round of revision that happened off the back of that.”
In 2020, Cooperman published a chapbook in response to and conversation with an exhibition of Moro’s work titled “A Little History of the Panorama,” a show that was hosted by Lehene, whom Cooperman has worked with extensively and referred to as his “best friend at the university.” The poet said his work with Lehene elucidated the power of collaboration between artists across disciplines.
“Collaboration is just such an enriching process,” Cooperman said. “You end up with more than two, you know. The sum of the whole is far vaster than two people just sort of talking to each other, and certainly that’s been my experience with Marius.”
On Thursday, Nov. 6, Cooperman, along with CSU professors Dan Beachy-Quick and Devon Fulford, will be reading at the Lory Student Center’s University Ballroom as part of the 2025 Creative Writing Reading Series’ Writers Harvest. The event, which is hosted annually, features readings from three university creative writing faculty in order to collect donations for the Food Bank for Larimer County.
While the Writers Harvest is nothing new to CSU’s campus, this year’s food drive has an unfortunate added layer of political necessity to it in the wake of the removal of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits from the shutdown of the United States government. On Nov. 4, President Donald Trump said he will not pay any SNAP benefits during the shutdown, despite two federal judges ruling the administration must continue nutritional aid during the shutdown. An estimated 42 million Americans receive aid from the program, including more than 600,000 Coloradans.
Cooperman said one of poetry’s responsibilities is to stand up and instigate change during times in which these issues are placed in front of our faces.
“That’s part of my responsibility, and part of poetry’s responsibility, again, to speak truth to power,” Cooperman said. “Poetry can foment, you know, dissent that is out right now in the streets. … Poetry is enough of a kind of marginal art that it understands the margin, so that doing work about, you know, food scarcity and hunger on a local level feels incredibly close to, in a way, poetry’s own mission. And (the Writers Harvest) feels like something we can do as writers and as creative people, where it’s often like, ‘What do creative writers or creative people do to make change in their communities or their country?’ I think this is a practical way of doing that.”
Reach Willow Engle at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
