Stephen Cope

Areas

• Writing (Poetry and Non-Fiction)
• American Literature
• Modernism
• Poetry and Poetics
• Textual Studies
• Critical Theory

Degrees

• B.A. Literature (highest honors in the major and the college), University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996.

• M.A. Literature, University of California, San Diego, 1999.
• PhD Literature, University of California, San Diego, 2005.

 

Biography

Stephen Cope is the editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (University of California Press, 2007), selections from which originally appeared in Jubilat, Facture, The Germ, and The Best American Poetry 2004 (edited by Robert Creeley). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Postmodern Culture, The Germ, Sagetrieb, Mirage: A Period(ical), XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere. He served for years as an editor at We Press in Santa Cruz, California, where he earned a BA with Highest Honors in Modern Literary Studies in 1996 from UC Santa Cruz. Cope received his PhD from UC San Diego in 2005, and has since taught at UCSD, Drake University, Ohio University, and (of course) Ithaca College, as well as serving on the summer faculty of Bard College's Workshop in Language and Thinking. Cope is co-founder, with Eula Biss and Catherine Taylor, of Essay Press (www.essaypress.org), an imprint that publishes innovative, culturally relevant essays in book form. For many years, Cope hosted a public radio program called "Conference of the Birds" that featured music from Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, and the Americas. His chapbooks of poetry include Versiones Vertiges (Meow Press, 1999), and his poem “Bellerophonic Sonnet” earned a PIP-Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2005. Cope has also received numerous grants and awards for research in American poetry archives, and has given lectures, papers, and readings widely in the United States (most recently as a keynote speaker at a conference celebrating the centennial anniversary of George Oppen's birth at the University at Buffalo). He is currently completing a manuscript of poetry entitled “Bellerophonic Letters” and is at work on two critical projects, one of which addresses the ethics of ineffability in Modernist literature, and the other of which is an investigation of poetic language and/as social antagonism. 

Selected Publications

• Editor, w/ notes and Introduction. George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. Berkeley: U. of California P. 2007.
• Review of Alan Gilbert's Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics. 19 (Summer 2008), 151-155.
• Review of Ed Roberson's City Eclogue. Jacket. 33 (July 2007), unpaginated. <http://jacketmagazine.com/33/cope-robertson.shtml>
• "Bellerophonioc Sonnet," "Bellerophonic Letter," Bellerophonic Elegy," "Dear Bellerophon." Denver Quarterly. 40:2 (Spring 2005), 19-22.
• Guest Editor, Review of Contemporary Fiction (special issue on David Antin). 21:1 (Spring 2001).
• Versiones Vertiges. Buffalo: Meow Press. 2000.