Robert Bly in New Brunswick: The Cross-Border Poetics of Allan Cooper

ABSTRACT New Brunswick poets have a history of looking to the United States for literary models. A recent example is Allan Cooper, the Alma, New Brunswick writer, editor, publisher, and translator, who since the late 1970s has spent much of his career emulating both the poetics and literary activities of the Minnesota poet, editor, and translator, Robert Bly. Not only did Cooper adopt Bly’s Deep Image poetics and the concept of the twofold consciousness: he also modeled the editorial policies for his creative-writing journal, Germination, on the editorial approach employed by Bly in his poetry magazine, The Fifties. Cooper also followed Bly’s example by performing translation as a means for improving his own poetic craft. Taken together, Cooper’s embrace of Bly as literary mentor corresponds to the beginnings of a larger shift away from Canada’s entrenched cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s toward more internationalist cultural interventions by the mid-1980s.