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The Missing Men
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
64 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
106 books1,842 followersDennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 9, 2013
The Missing Men. A rare slim copy of 28 pages. Autographed by Dennis Cooper. Converted into PDF format by an unknown lover of books, writers and dark sayings. Distributed via an internet source that revels in putting out pirate digital versions of books one cannot easily locate or afford to buy. Thus, it appears before my eyes.
Cooper is famous now an integral item in the lists of great homosexuals who have achieved heights in Art and Literature. He began writing poetry as a teen deeply influenced by the lives and writings of the likes of Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade and Baudelaire, a potent cocktail. The Missing Men reflects these influences but also foregrounds his powers of keen observation, ability to open himself up to extreme experiences and wrestle with language to attain mastery just before he embarked on his life-time task of writing the George Miles novel cycle across a span of 20 years.
Somehow, when it comes to the making of forms of art, or so it seems to me, homosexuals accentuate the intensities of their peculiar relationships and experiences of love and sex in ways that heterosexuals are hard pressed to imitate or come close to, in terms of form and substance.
Is it because a sense of being an “outsider” forever remains deeply embodied in them even after they have fought to come out of the closet and be “themselves” and have been accepted and even lauded by society for their exceptional abilities, at least in the case of artists? Even the ordinary “gay” feels empowered in the company of such aesthetes! But then I am reminded of the “cartoon by Rick Fiala in the 1970s showing a bearded man wearing a T-shirt on which are printed the words ‘Walt Whitman Oscar Wilde Sappho Alexander the Great Gertrude Stein Cole Porter Radcliffe Hall Socrates Leonardo Da Vinci Colette Valentino George Sand Tchaikovsky . . . and Me’. Fiala satirizes the slightly preposterous effect of ordinary gay people including themselves in the company of the great queers.”
And, then again, why and how does the “outsider” seek to express oneself? Are the artistic acts of such Sisyphean efforts to understand ones being and becoming? Or are these plaintive cries to the general undiscerning insensitive public to come to a deeper understanding of humanity? Is it the thrill of exhibitionism? Is it to preserve the memories of their “strange” experiences or relationships? Or, perhaps, a combination of all these?
So, reading through Cooper’s The Missing Men suddenly opened up for me the fragrance of memorable lines penned by the great British gay film-maker Derek Jarman from the text of his last film Blue:
I hear the voices of dead friends/Love is life that lasts forever./ My heart’s memory turns to you/ David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul….
And following Cooper through his little tome, took me to a place where lay, behind the openness to experience and a certain exuberance of life, a terrible sense of sorrow, of alienation, of isolation, or dissipation and a foreshadowing of pitiful extinction made all the more an abominable horror by that special sense of awareness not often available to ordinary mortals but always accessible to the outsider. Cooper too writes obituaries for friends, lovers and the gay prostitutes he picked up (“I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there…”).
That which is so fleeting can be inscribed both in the body and on parchment to defy the ravages of life. Thus Cooper is also scribe and witness. Excerpts, for instance, from his piece Ten Dead Friends:
Mervyn Fox, 56, spent the night in the pool house at his estranged wife’s house in Altadena. He had looked ill for several weeks. He read part of Aldous Huxley’s THE DEVILS, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and lay dawn on the bed.
Bunker Spreckles. 28, was at a party. He thought he had come down off the heroin heid shot earlier that evening, so he excused himself from his friends, walked out to his car and shot up twice as much.
Robert Benton, 43, was having trouble with his lover, John Koenig. They argued and Koenig left. Benton’s oldest friend, Annetta Fox, came by and attempted to comfort him. They drank a bottle of champagne and she went home. Soon after she left, he shot himself in the chest. Annetta said that at that moment her car jerked sharply to the left.
David Sellers, 17, met an older man at a bar and went home with him. They had sex and the man gave him some money. Afterwards he walked to a nearby phone booth and called his roommate to ask for a ride. Midway through the conversation, a blood vessel in his brain burst.
There is always the shadow of decadence and death hovering in and over the spaces Cooper haunts – the underbelly of gay singles bars, punk rock concerts, alleys and corridors and toilets and hotel rooms where shadowy sexual trysts take place, and one scans the work carefully to touch – LOVE. Yes, thankfully it is there, hidden by the skilful hand of the write, tucked away underneath as innuendo, sometimes as joy, insight, celebration or just a knowing touch or gesture, but also, most, as inspiration.
There’s a face in the back of my mind like a/ stained glass window that throws its light on/ my lines. Brian Winchester’s its name/….. My hand is falling/to earth. As it touches it scribbles poems/lit from inside/…Writing a poem in his likeness/
I make it as light as the feelings that form/in his wake./… I’ve carried these words for/a while, and throw them like rice when he/enters. A mechanical glow from my writing/is changing from heaven to hell with the love/that has colored my lines. Brian Winchester/come home. It feels like a cathedral now. (Winchester Cathedral)
But it is also about sex, its tenderness, violence, even pain of perversion, the distancing and reflecting upon the acts of lust that are perhaps obsessive-compulsive, sometimes satiating and sometimes not, always the seeeking for the experience that does not gell but which also transports the being, becoming or undoing, inside of what Anais Nin calls the “little death” and the hardcore calls “cumming”.
Men smudge me onto a bed,/…I’m fifteen. Screwing means/more to the men than to me./…I took a/ deep breath, stripped, and they/ never forgot how I trembled. (Being Aware)
I wash my ass/ in a basin, rolling my eyes, while following them/ to a pillowcase, which lowers me in its sights/ and pushes me forward, shyly,/…with a sigh as my body is lifted up on its toes, and,/ in honor of their having known me, looms forward. (Kevin Creedon)
And there is more of Cooper’s sensitive poignancy and musings over love and sex in the piece 10 Bedded Friends who, of course, the writer knows, will soon at some time in some way, be ten other dead friends. There are too the stronger poems that deal with what some may think are the coarser, perverse elements, but those who have savored the throes and thrashings of blind alcohol and drug-driven passions know to be the deeds of heightened moments, the crossing of thresholds, the transgressions, for better or worse, as being or in becoming. So, one is able to recline, after such episodes or events, remember, smile or even laugh out aloud if not cry.
Such is the content of poems like Song of the South (about “rimming”), Drugs (need I say more?),George (story of an encounter), Kip (He has been/ fucked hundreds of times. Naked,/ his value is present, and a well-fucked/ hole is its presence./…This is/ the flesh that belongs to the face/ I decided I needed. So I fuck it …) and the brutal James (somebody kneels behind him. puts a fist up his ass to the elbow,/…James snorts from a small vial of/ cocaine and trles to stay conscious./ This is his first time in pain and/ he hopes to embrace it, like a/dummy does its ventriloquist).
With James and the last poem titled ? one comes to a type of denouement that leaves one pondering over the Janus-faced nature of those who inhabit the twilight zones of the queer outsider, no matter how brightly the sun shines or how legit everything is. Deep sensuality, sensitivity and even the ability to soar spiritually in moments of epiphany still cannot prevent the return to Stygian shores, that harsh realisation of “a lack of real feeling in anyone” and then, of course, the stark reality of having to face the death of one’s lovers and friends, “when he’s down in/a hole in the earth, and his/body, as black as a miner’s,/is backing, slowly, away.”
In this sense, perhaps what Cooper establishes yet again is establishing for queers the simple home truth that we are all part of a single humanity and queers in themselves are not unique. This then is that insight, which Jarman too acknowledged as he was dying of AIDS – “all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within me.”
This is the soliloquy all poets sing, queer or otherwise.
(c) Ampat Varghese Varghese 2013
Cooper is famous now an integral item in the lists of great homosexuals who have achieved heights in Art and Literature. He began writing poetry as a teen deeply influenced by the lives and writings of the likes of Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade and Baudelaire, a potent cocktail. The Missing Men reflects these influences but also foregrounds his powers of keen observation, ability to open himself up to extreme experiences and wrestle with language to attain mastery just before he embarked on his life-time task of writing the George Miles novel cycle across a span of 20 years.
Somehow, when it comes to the making of forms of art, or so it seems to me, homosexuals accentuate the intensities of their peculiar relationships and experiences of love and sex in ways that heterosexuals are hard pressed to imitate or come close to, in terms of form and substance.
Is it because a sense of being an “outsider” forever remains deeply embodied in them even after they have fought to come out of the closet and be “themselves” and have been accepted and even lauded by society for their exceptional abilities, at least in the case of artists? Even the ordinary “gay” feels empowered in the company of such aesthetes! But then I am reminded of the “cartoon by Rick Fiala in the 1970s showing a bearded man wearing a T-shirt on which are printed the words ‘Walt Whitman Oscar Wilde Sappho Alexander the Great Gertrude Stein Cole Porter Radcliffe Hall Socrates Leonardo Da Vinci Colette Valentino George Sand Tchaikovsky . . . and Me’. Fiala satirizes the slightly preposterous effect of ordinary gay people including themselves in the company of the great queers.”
And, then again, why and how does the “outsider” seek to express oneself? Are the artistic acts of such Sisyphean efforts to understand ones being and becoming? Or are these plaintive cries to the general undiscerning insensitive public to come to a deeper understanding of humanity? Is it the thrill of exhibitionism? Is it to preserve the memories of their “strange” experiences or relationships? Or, perhaps, a combination of all these?
So, reading through Cooper’s The Missing Men suddenly opened up for me the fragrance of memorable lines penned by the great British gay film-maker Derek Jarman from the text of his last film Blue:
I hear the voices of dead friends/Love is life that lasts forever./ My heart’s memory turns to you/ David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul….
And following Cooper through his little tome, took me to a place where lay, behind the openness to experience and a certain exuberance of life, a terrible sense of sorrow, of alienation, of isolation, or dissipation and a foreshadowing of pitiful extinction made all the more an abominable horror by that special sense of awareness not often available to ordinary mortals but always accessible to the outsider. Cooper too writes obituaries for friends, lovers and the gay prostitutes he picked up (“I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there…”).
That which is so fleeting can be inscribed both in the body and on parchment to defy the ravages of life. Thus Cooper is also scribe and witness. Excerpts, for instance, from his piece Ten Dead Friends:
Mervyn Fox, 56, spent the night in the pool house at his estranged wife’s house in Altadena. He had looked ill for several weeks. He read part of Aldous Huxley’s THE DEVILS, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and lay dawn on the bed.
Bunker Spreckles. 28, was at a party. He thought he had come down off the heroin heid shot earlier that evening, so he excused himself from his friends, walked out to his car and shot up twice as much.
Robert Benton, 43, was having trouble with his lover, John Koenig. They argued and Koenig left. Benton’s oldest friend, Annetta Fox, came by and attempted to comfort him. They drank a bottle of champagne and she went home. Soon after she left, he shot himself in the chest. Annetta said that at that moment her car jerked sharply to the left.
David Sellers, 17, met an older man at a bar and went home with him. They had sex and the man gave him some money. Afterwards he walked to a nearby phone booth and called his roommate to ask for a ride. Midway through the conversation, a blood vessel in his brain burst.
There is always the shadow of decadence and death hovering in and over the spaces Cooper haunts – the underbelly of gay singles bars, punk rock concerts, alleys and corridors and toilets and hotel rooms where shadowy sexual trysts take place, and one scans the work carefully to touch – LOVE. Yes, thankfully it is there, hidden by the skilful hand of the write, tucked away underneath as innuendo, sometimes as joy, insight, celebration or just a knowing touch or gesture, but also, most, as inspiration.
There’s a face in the back of my mind like a/ stained glass window that throws its light on/ my lines. Brian Winchester’s its name/….. My hand is falling/to earth. As it touches it scribbles poems/lit from inside/…Writing a poem in his likeness/
I make it as light as the feelings that form/in his wake./… I’ve carried these words for/a while, and throw them like rice when he/enters. A mechanical glow from my writing/is changing from heaven to hell with the love/that has colored my lines. Brian Winchester/come home. It feels like a cathedral now. (Winchester Cathedral)
But it is also about sex, its tenderness, violence, even pain of perversion, the distancing and reflecting upon the acts of lust that are perhaps obsessive-compulsive, sometimes satiating and sometimes not, always the seeeking for the experience that does not gell but which also transports the being, becoming or undoing, inside of what Anais Nin calls the “little death” and the hardcore calls “cumming”.
Men smudge me onto a bed,/…I’m fifteen. Screwing means/more to the men than to me./…I took a/ deep breath, stripped, and they/ never forgot how I trembled. (Being Aware)
I wash my ass/ in a basin, rolling my eyes, while following them/ to a pillowcase, which lowers me in its sights/ and pushes me forward, shyly,/…with a sigh as my body is lifted up on its toes, and,/ in honor of their having known me, looms forward. (Kevin Creedon)
And there is more of Cooper’s sensitive poignancy and musings over love and sex in the piece 10 Bedded Friends who, of course, the writer knows, will soon at some time in some way, be ten other dead friends. There are too the stronger poems that deal with what some may think are the coarser, perverse elements, but those who have savored the throes and thrashings of blind alcohol and drug-driven passions know to be the deeds of heightened moments, the crossing of thresholds, the transgressions, for better or worse, as being or in becoming. So, one is able to recline, after such episodes or events, remember, smile or even laugh out aloud if not cry.
Such is the content of poems like Song of the South (about “rimming”), Drugs (need I say more?),George (story of an encounter), Kip (He has been/ fucked hundreds of times. Naked,/ his value is present, and a well-fucked/ hole is its presence./…This is/ the flesh that belongs to the face/ I decided I needed. So I fuck it …) and the brutal James (somebody kneels behind him. puts a fist up his ass to the elbow,/…James snorts from a small vial of/ cocaine and trles to stay conscious./ This is his first time in pain and/ he hopes to embrace it, like a/dummy does its ventriloquist).
With James and the last poem titled ? one comes to a type of denouement that leaves one pondering over the Janus-faced nature of those who inhabit the twilight zones of the queer outsider, no matter how brightly the sun shines or how legit everything is. Deep sensuality, sensitivity and even the ability to soar spiritually in moments of epiphany still cannot prevent the return to Stygian shores, that harsh realisation of “a lack of real feeling in anyone” and then, of course, the stark reality of having to face the death of one’s lovers and friends, “when he’s down in/a hole in the earth, and his/body, as black as a miner’s,/is backing, slowly, away.”
In this sense, perhaps what Cooper establishes yet again is establishing for queers the simple home truth that we are all part of a single humanity and queers in themselves are not unique. This then is that insight, which Jarman too acknowledged as he was dying of AIDS – “all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within me.”
This is the soliloquy all poets sing, queer or otherwise.
(c) Ampat Varghese Varghese 2013
June 10, 2024
“The rise of rimming
has been a gradual one, not some
craze, more a permanent fixture
of bedside, the "sesame" part of
the phrase which opens an entrance
to fucking, seen from a distance,
clouded with blue jeans. So let
us welcome this rise like the wind
it resembles, simply, one hand
gesturing this way to guys with
their pants halfway open, whose
eyes become dark, reflective as
the idea on a stop sign, posted
by the old entrances into their
bodies. We sneak down the back
while they're smoking cigarettes
down to the filters with sullen
expressions that look like black
rectangles set across criminals’
photos - drains the intelligence
out of their faces, "Rim us,"
they seem to be drawling, half-
seriously, to no one of us in
particular, 'cos like employees
of that idea, wild for its sec
-retaries, we lower what blinders
we have, and what eyes, then what
candles and noses we hold to
the scrawnier bodies apove us
mouthing the au courant password
which loosens our tongues, their
foundations.”
—
“I'm being too clinical. This is
the flesh that belongs to the face
I decided I needed. So I fuck it,
make the most of the "Kip" who's
available, whose resemblance to
something I own is striking, whose
ass I am striking with the palm
of my hand, whose eyes, vaguely
mascaraed, keep what they believe
close to then, like a tenement
child with its one scrawny talent,
protecting it, as if lovers wanted
to steal it. They want to see it
flawing his eyes with an endless
-ness, which leaves him like this.”
has been a gradual one, not some
craze, more a permanent fixture
of bedside, the "sesame" part of
the phrase which opens an entrance
to fucking, seen from a distance,
clouded with blue jeans. So let
us welcome this rise like the wind
it resembles, simply, one hand
gesturing this way to guys with
their pants halfway open, whose
eyes become dark, reflective as
the idea on a stop sign, posted
by the old entrances into their
bodies. We sneak down the back
while they're smoking cigarettes
down to the filters with sullen
expressions that look like black
rectangles set across criminals’
photos - drains the intelligence
out of their faces, "Rim us,"
they seem to be drawling, half-
seriously, to no one of us in
particular, 'cos like employees
of that idea, wild for its sec
-retaries, we lower what blinders
we have, and what eyes, then what
candles and noses we hold to
the scrawnier bodies apove us
mouthing the au courant password
which loosens our tongues, their
foundations.”
—
“I'm being too clinical. This is
the flesh that belongs to the face
I decided I needed. So I fuck it,
make the most of the "Kip" who's
available, whose resemblance to
something I own is striking, whose
ass I am striking with the palm
of my hand, whose eyes, vaguely
mascaraed, keep what they believe
close to then, like a tenement
child with its one scrawny talent,
protecting it, as if lovers wanted
to steal it. They want to see it
flawing his eyes with an endless
-ness, which leaves him like this.”
Read
February 12, 2023HIGHLIGHTS (and * a cut above)
Winchester Cathedral
Kevin Creedon*
10 Dead Friends
10 Bedded Friends*
Song of the South
Missing Men: George
Winchester Cathedral
Kevin Creedon*
10 Dead Friends
10 Bedded Friends*
Song of the South
Missing Men: George
February 18, 2026
one of my favorite things ive ever read literally dont know what to do with myself
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews