THE PAREMPHASIS MAGAZINE

Some artists are sculptors, some screenwriters, some songwriters, and some poets, but Baskin Cooper, multidisciplinary creator from Chatham County, North Carolina, is all of the above and more. For him, these interests aren’t so much a lens that shapes how he views the world, but rather a reflection of how he views it to begin with.

“I have always seen life through a blend of words, images, rhythm, and story…It is simply the way I move through the day,” Cooper said. “I often joke that everything is a potential art supply. It might be a piece of metal found on the side of the road, an oddly shaped branch, a conversation heard in a checkout line, or a spider web in autumn. I notice things and immediately feel the urge to do something with them…”

What Cooper does with these art supplies, whether poem, sculpture, or screenplay, depends on the discipline he is currently working with. Instead of focusing on everything at once, he works in “seasons,” focusing on one creative outlet until an idea is finished and then moving on to another.

            “It is less multitasking and more of a creative migration,” Cooper said.

            While Cooper doesn’t have one favorite type of art, drawing is what he said he feels most natural coming back to. This is why, he said, the illustrations for his poems usually come after they are written:

            “It feels like I am squeezing out the extra images that have been playing in my mind while I write, giving the story one more way to come to life for both me and the reader.”

            Having lived in both Ireland and the South, Cooper said that “place shapes everything [he] writes,” and that his voice as a writer shifts based on where he is and the environment that surrounds him.

            “Every place offers a different way of seeing, and the writing follows,” he said.

            Despite living in these two different locations, Cooper said he finds lots of similarities between the two and the way they have both shaped his poetic eye.

            “Both cultures sit slightly outside the mainstream, hold tight to their own histories and carry a friendly wariness toward anything that comes from too far beyond the community. There is a strong sense of place in everyday life, and that naturally becomes poetic to me,” he said.

            “Southerners and the Irish both have a gift for clever euphemism and tall tales. In the South, the strange is treated as ordinary, politely shrugged into daily life. In Ireland, the ordinary is retold until it becomes almost legendary. Living within both worlds has taught me to value tradition, and also to feel free to bend it. In Ireland, breaking tradition is practically a tradition itself, and I carry that spirit into my writing.”

            When it comes to Cooper’s writing, he said his biggest influence have been the books he loved growing up, like Aesop’s fables, The Arabian Nights, Grimm’s Fairytales, and Greek and Norse mythology.

“Those stories felt like a hidden world I could step into, as if everything ordinary had a secret version of itself someplace else,” he said. “When I feel that same spark while writing, I know I am getting close to something real.”

           Another influence on his writing is folklore, as seen illustrated in his poem “Oren’s Possum,” which follows the story of two brothers dealing with the grief of their mother’s passing and the revelation that she has been reincarnated in a possum that shows up one day in their attic.

            A large part of folklore’s influence on Cooper is because of its ability to paint everyday life as something mysterious, as well as carry hidden meaning. He said poetry works similarly, highlighting the way objects, animals, and people can hold symbolism we overlook in everyday life. But another part, Cooper said, is because he’s “drawn to stories where transformation feels natural.”

            He explained, “Someone becomes an animal, or a spirit, and people accept it as part of their world. That quiet acceptance shapes how I write.”

            While Cooper said his writing contains a lot of “imagination,” it almost always stems from a real place. What starts as a memory or observation becomes a starting point for expansion. This is true with the poem, “Magnolia Cola Bottling Works,” which is based on a childhood memory of Cooper looking at a cinderblock building near Fitzgerald, Georgia, out of his car window while his father helped a turtle cross the road.

            “When my father got back in the car, I asked if we could get drinks there. He told me [the building] used to be a soda factory, but it had been closed for years…” he said. “That tiny exchange stayed with me. The building felt sad and mysterious at the same time, as if a place meant for sweetness had been abandoned. When I finally wrote about it, other memories from that time surfaced too, including relatives and road trips from the same stretch of years. Childhood memories tend to overlap like that.”

            Cooper’s poem, “The Shillelagh Maker,” on the other hand, was entirely autobiographical, following an experience he had in Ireland where he traded a medallion for a Shillelagh: (“a traditional Irish walking stick…made from blackthorn or oak.”)

            Having the Shillelagh as the focal point of the poem stemmed from Cooper watching it be made and the transformation from branch into something “beautiful.”

“I have always been drawn to that kind of transformation,” he said, “where human hands turn ordinary material into something meaningful. The shillelagh I received that day eventually became a gift for my father, so it carries more than wood and smoke. It holds a moment, a craftsman, and a bit of Ireland inside of it.”

         It wasn’t until years after the experience that Cooper wrote the poem, upon seeing a branch in someone’s yard that shared a resemblance, and, still, Cooper said that this poem, out of three selected for publication in Paremphasis, is the one he feels most close to.

            “It takes me back to a time in my life when everything felt possible simply because I had no plan. I was young, traveling alone, without expectations…”

            He continued, “It felt like the kind of moment that arrives without warning and stays with you anyway. For me, the poem feels like a page torn out of the diary I never kept.”

            Having poems such as these published, Cooper said, is as equally exciting as it is vulnerable. He said:

“When a poem feels personal, it is like sharing a glimpse of your inner life and hoping it resonates with someone you have never met…. You want the reader to feel something true in it, and there is a strange courage in letting a private experience become public.”

            “At the same time, there is also a deep sense of gratitude. Knowing that someone chose to print a poem because it meant something to them is humbling. It reminds me that the way I see the world can connect with others, and that is the best reason to keep writing.”

         

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