Jane Cooper



Jane Cooper (October 9, 1924 - October 26, 2007) was an American poet.

Life
Cooper was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, spent her early childhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and then moved with her family to Princeton in the mid-1930s. She attended Vassar College from 1942 to 1944, and earned a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. In 1953–54 Cooper took a year off to get an M.A. at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Robert Lowell, and John Berryman in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Cooper joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, in 1950, and remained as a teacher and poet in residence until her retirement in 1987. She held the post of New York State Poet from 1995 to 1997. She died on October 26, 2007, of complications due to Parkinson's Disease.

Writing
Grace Paley, (Scaffolding):"This is a beautiful and stubborn book of poems. The poems say only what they mean. They have about them a great deep patience for the whole truth, a waiting in quietness for tremor and explosion."

The New Yorker (''The Flashboat): "Cooper handles with equal assurance public statement and private reflection."

Mark Doty: "To perform the alchemical work of translating a human presence into paper and ink: that is the deam of the book, a dream fulfilled her[e], in this beautifully assembled life's work. Jane Cooper has been engaged in a long patient act of making a consideration of self-in-the-world vigorous, humble, and fierce all at once."

Recognition

 * Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
 * Maurice English Poetry Award (1985)
 * Shelley Memorial Award (1977)
 * Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College - Fellowship
 * Guggenheim Fellowship - (1960)
 * Ingram Merrill Award
 * National Endowment for the Arts - Fellowship
 * Lamont Poetry Prize (1968) for The Weather of Six Mornings

Books

 * The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.
 * Maps and Windows (1974)
 * Scaffolding: Selected Poems (1993)
 * Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
 * Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (W. W. Norton & Company, 1999)

Edited

 * Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers (1982)
 * The Sanity of Earth and Grass: Complete Poems of Robert Winner (1994)

Memories

 * Memories of Jane Cooper, Denise Duhamel, American Poetry Review, May 12, 2008
 * Memories of Jane Cooper part 2, Denise Duhamel, American Poetry Review, May 14, 2008

External references

 * Jane Cooper (1924 - 2007), The Poetry Foundation
 * Jane Cooper, Poets.org
 * The Blue Anchor; The Earthquake; Ordinary Detail; In the Last Few Moments Came the Old German Cleaning Woman; Rent; The Winter Road (Part 4); The Flashboat, Norton Poets online
 * Jane Cooper, Norton Poets