Stephen Kessler | Robert Coover, teacher I met at a crucial time – Santa Cruz Sentinel

When I transferred from UCLA to Bard in 1966, the first course I signed up for at this small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley was a seminar on “Don Quixote” taught by a young writer named Robert Coover. Coover had just published his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, an apocalyptic social satire that won PEN’s Faulkner Award. So he was a rising star at the start of a major career as a restlessly innovative, daring, provocative, critically acclaimed postmodern metafictionist.

In other early novels such as “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor” (an irreverent expanded theological interpretation of a dice-throwing God as the inventor of a tabletop baseball game) and “The Public Burning” (an epic account of (The Execution of the Condemned Atomic Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, narrated by Richard Nixon), Coover established himself as an American original.

In 1968, his slapstick story “The Cat in the Hat for the President” brought cheerfully anarchic chaos to a U.S. presidential election. Eventually, his experiments with deconstructed fairy tales, borderline profanity, comic violence, and hypertext (don’t ask) lost me as a reader, but as one of the first real writers I ever met, he made a huge impression on my 19-year-old self. old spirit. I’m thinking of him now because I just read his obituary in the New York Times; He died last Saturday at the age of 92.

Coover’s father, I learned from the Times obituary, was a newspaper editor in the small Iowa town where he grew up. There he must have learned the mechanics of layout and production, which he applied to The Bard Papers, a tabloid-format campus magazine that he organized and edited to publish student writing. On the front cover of the first issue was an essay I had written for a literature course on the book of Ecclesiastes: “The Sufferings of Wisdom,” my first critical essay to appear in print.

Back then, there were no creative writing classes at Bard, no poetry or fiction workshops, but during the winter season—a six-week break from upstate New York weather—my chosen project was to read and write poetry, which is what I’m currently doing had just begun in earnest and in something resembling modern verse. What I wrote were weak imitations of EE Cummings, WH Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rupert Brooke and others. I still remember Coover’s written comment on these poems: “The ease with which you absorb other people’s voices and use them for your own consistent use makes me believe that sooner or later you will find your way to long prose.” This poetry, as clever and perceptive as it is, still feels like “hobby poetry”; the deeper areas still seem unexplored.” That wasn’t exactly praise, but it was an honest answer that seemed to take me seriously as an aspiring writer. Years later, long after we had both left Bard, in an act of extraordinary generosity he nominated me for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

But his greatest gift to me when I was his student in that Cervantes seminar was that I would show up during office hours just to hang out with him. He tolerated my company, probably because of my curiosity and enthusiasm, and told me all sorts of stories and thoughts, reading recommendations and literary gossip, and as I got to know him a little, I became more and more in awe of his insatiable intellect and the wide range of interests that existed inspire his imagination. His mind brimmed with creative energy, ideas, ambition and passionate commitment to his art. He was a living example of what it meant to be a writer. I would leave his office after one of our meetings with my mind charged, my brain glowing with associations.

We haven’t been in touch for about 40 years, but I remember him with gratitude for the time and attention he gave me when our paths briefly crossed at such a defining moment.