Jane Cooper, at 83; poet who explored the lives of women
NEW YORK - Jane Cooper, a prominent poet whose work explored women's struggle to maintain meaningful artistic lives in postwar America - or in the America of any era - died Oct. 26 in Newtown, Pa. She was 83 and had lived in Manhattan for many years.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, her nephew Richard W. Baker said.
At her death, Ms. Cooper was professor and poet in residence emerita at Sarah Lawrence College, where she had taught for nearly 40 years. From 1995 to 1997 she was the official poet of New York State.
Ms. Cooper's output was small, five volumes of poems in as many decades, but her work was praised by colleagues for its jewel-like language, quiet power, and meticulous concern with form, all of which seemed to draw the reader into the very act of constructing a poem.
Her published collections include "Maps & Windows" (Macmillan, 1974); "Green Notebook, Winter Road" (Tilbury House, 1994); and, most recently, "The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed" (Norton, 2000).
Some of Ms. Cooper's poems were overtly autobiographical, recalling the Jacksonville, Fla., of her girlhood or, in later years, illuminating aging. Others trained a wider lens on a generation of postwar women. Still others were inspired by the lives and work of great women in the arts. Among the best known of these are "The Winter Road," about the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and "Vocation: A Life," about novelist Willa Cather.
Jane Marvel Cooper was born on Oct. 9, 1924, in Atlantic City and was reared in Jacksonville and Princeton, N.J. After two years at Vassar College, she earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. She joined the Sarah Lawrence faculty in 1950; in 1954, on leave, she earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa, where her teachers included Robert Lowell and John Berryman.
Ms. Cooper's first book, "The Weather of Six Mornings" (Macmillan, 1969), was that year's Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship.
At Sarah Lawrence, Ms. Cooper - together with writer Grace Paley, poet Muriel Rukeyser, and others - helped develop the college's widely respected writing program. Ms. Cooper retired from the faculty in 1987.
Besides her nephew Baker, of Honolulu, Ms. Cooper leaves a brother, John C. Cooper III, of Tucson, Ariz.; and several nieces, nephews, and grandnieces.
Ms. Cooper's abiding concern with form, structure, and space is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her collection "Scaffolding" (Anvil Press, 1984), whose title is a window onto her preoccupation. Here is "Rent," a poem from the collection: If you want my apartment, sleep in it but let's have a clear understanding: the books are still free agents. If the rocking chair's arms surround you they can also let you go, they can shape the air like a body. I don't want your rent, I want a radiance of attention like the candle's flame when we eat, I mean a kind of awe attending the spaces between us--- Not a roof but a field of stars.
