Tenderness of the Wolves

by Dennis Cooper

Introduction by Edmund White. Poetry. 1st paperback edition.

Genres: Poetry, Gay, Queer

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Dennis 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.

Reviews

[Roof Beam Reader (Adam) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tenderness of the Wolves is Dennis Cooper's second collection. It is made up of two parts: the first is a collection of very short stories and poetry; the second is a short story titled "A Herd." Many of the pieces in Part I are found in other Cooper collections, but I had not encountered "A Herd" elsewhere and it is this piece which is the crowning acheivement of the collection. Cooper's early inclination toward the sexually deviant and grotesque are certainly found in the shorter pieces - fiction and poetry - but "A Herd" seems to be the true starting point for what will later become Cooper's signature "George Miles Cycle." The horrible fasciniation with "the underworld" in plain view - drugs, burnouts, the wish to die and to kill in ways so as to make life, or at least the human form, have some kind of meaning. Slicing up a worthless identity in search of something sub-surface, and acting out sexual fantasies in the process. As always, disturbing and terrible, yet in such a blase fashion - as if these lives are only worth something in their destruction. These bodies are to be worshiped to death. These boys are meant to be sacrifices. And God witnesses and laughs.

[Trapper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1982, interestingly includes a piece dedicated to Michael Silverblatt, “No God.”

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Men are drawn to my ass by
my death-trance blue eyes
and black hair, tiny outfit,
while my father is home with
a girl, moved by the things
I could never think clearly.

Men smudge me onto a bed
drug me stupid, gossip and
photograph me till I’m famous
in alleys, like one of those
jerk offs who stare from
the porno I sort of admire.

I’m fifteen. Screwing means
more to the men than to me.
I daydream right through it
while money puts chills on
my arms, from this to that
grip. I was meant to be naked.

Hey, Dad, it’s been like this
for decades. I was always
approached by your type, given
dollars for hours. I took a
deep breath, stripped and they
never forgot how I trembled.

It means tons to me. Aside
from the obvious heaven
when cumming, there’s times
I’m with them that I’m happy
or know what the other guy
feels, which is progress.

Or, nights when I’m angry,
if in a man’s arms moving
slowly to the quietest music—
his hands on my arms, in my
hands, in the small of my back
take me back before everything.”
—
“It will be my gift, paid up
until morning, and I’ll try
to talk with him first, then
just give up and rattle him
orders that he’ll understand
or embellish, teaching me love
the easy way: arms obligated
to take me, repaying each kiss,
caressing by reflect. I’ll be
nice to him, hoping he might
contract my desire, knowing he’ll
ditch me when his watch strikes
day, anxious for a real fuck or
someone who speaks his language,
as and slurred as that is.”
—
“We snort all our coke
on the way to the party.
We bring the new album.
We dance while we listen.

The band is two women
whose husbands control them.
They do not speak out language.
Each syllable’s an obstacle.

They are in love with a man.
He is in love with another.
But they’re in no hurry.
They could wait forever.

And when they are out
on the make for a lover,
they’ll always find him.
They are the tigers.

We are too stoned to.
We dance till we’re tired
and listen to lyrics
we mouth like a language.

What we feel, when we
hear them, is inexpressible.
We can’t put it in words.
Maybe our dances show it.

abba lives for their music.
We long for each other.
They see what we’re doing.
They put it on record,

They play it, we listen.
We are absolutely stunned,
We feel, and they know
more than anyone can say.”
—
“A friend dies one night,
swallows too many pills
on his way to a party
and grows pale as dust
in a shaft of moonlight.
You long to reach him
again all your life.
A priest says you’ll
find him in the future
under the cover of death;
you will stand and sing
near his glowing side.
We tell you to join us,
get loaded, forget him.
One day you shoot so
much stuff you fall over.
You hope to see him but
only grow clammy, more
stupid, like someone on
quaaludes. Now you and
he walk the same clouds
only when we’ve been
stoned and think back
on our lives, full of
dead bodies, and bright
now as heaven behind us.”
—
“Sometimes I go to the pornos,
look through films for a face
I remember from youth, grow
distracted, drive the street
till I find it drawn in shadow”
—
“When God thinks, ‘Your turn,’
light soaks the grass in your pipe,
hat’s pulled down over your head
and you groove into the ground.

And then He is confused:
‘Did I make the right decision
Was the child an appropriate scapegoat?
What did it do to deserve this?’

His anonymous, grey head
drops in puffy, shopworn hands:
the palms of a dilettante
who does his work by suggestion.

He loves the glimmering earth.
He loves all that springs upon it.
He hates to slip one thing into darkness.
Thus, when He does, He is tortured.

He is bored, pissed, feeling strange,
His eyes hard to read clearly,
His hips dark with a longing;
a child dims where it’s beaten.

He is amused and then guilty.
His lips are lava which has cooled,
HIs mind as wild as the tree tops,
as dope touched to match, breath.”
—
“They knew you were born to win the Olympics ‘cos once,
crossing the quad at school, they saw a spotlight fall
out of the noon, traced its gaze to the gym, through a
skylight, where you practiced as gymnast. At first you
seemed heroic, but talking with you saw your limits: the
sports world, one primitive concept. You never gave War-
hol a change. And with all your movement came muscle,
then to that the eyes of dark strangers. Once, after work,
someone tails you. You are raped, strangled and dropped
in the Des Plaines River. The man who does it feels
spiritual and light. Your friends are down wind at the
high school: doused faces, dim shouldered. Aliens where
jocks fire up taller and stronger each day. The girls
dream of you on the crossbars. They saw you naked;
they can see what he did to you. Guys will never touch
the Des Plaines again until you are pulled out, wrapped
in a black towel and the light goes on under the ripples
again. Then they’ll water ski. First, friends heard
you had run away and pictured you well lit, neck deep
in blue ribbons. But then they found out how you slither,
a grey stretched out version of you mixed I with the
fishing. Now they doff their good sense in remembrance,
quit night jobs, drop classes. Grades spin in their
upper right hand corner like a slot machine’s. It only
lets up when they talk with each other, your name on
their lips, in whispers. It’s simple to turn those to
kisses. While you turn endlessly in water beneath the
world, your pals are behind, dating your girlfriends,
seduced by your buddies. They French and roll across the
things that you loved, like they’re putting out fire.”
—
“When a boy was undressing in his room, after a full day of school, his homework, a meal and a single smoked joint, he was relaxed. And if he was watched through a window, cut in three parts by the partly closed shades, by a viewer who had nothing gentle or worthy to do, it was very much like that boy was performing a striptease, although he paid no attention to what he was doing, and how, and in what order his clothes hit the carpet, or in what direction he faced. Everything was seen and judged from the window. It was as if when the boy turned away or walked for a moment behind his desk chair, obscuring his hips, it was done for a reason.
The man outside mulled an aesthetic to fit the occasion and fashioned rewards from these limits.”
—
“The woods were dark and cool at times. They invited people in at their edges. But miles and miles deeper they stretched and congealed. No one went there. Animals retraced their steps for this or that foggy belief. Little else knew or availed itself of that beauty. Someone would stagger in lost, starving or wounded, fall and die then disappear into the animals’ mouths. Then, one day much later, maybe men would hike in and carry away the white sketch left behind. They would speak angrily but nothing around them could understand. So they left things as they were.
If there was a God, He would have liked to lift the cities up in the air with a wave of huge hand and plunge them into the woods, leave them there a month then drop them back at their seasides and in their valleys. He liked the idea of that mixture and grew tired of both cities’ sharpness and the woods’ sleep. Wake the woods up, calm the cities down. But He couldn’t do this, for unknown reasons. He could only pour rain on the buildings, or snow when He was angry. And into the woods He pointed a hunter once in a while, to stick a sharp pin in its side.
He leaned way over and looked at the town where Bruce lived. A white car was taking uninteresting young men inside it, then driving them to a tract house which God has to mark with an X to remember. The man who drove the car was happy as humans could be. Deep in the house, he turned boys over and over like things on fire. And examined them. And opened them up. The man was learning real secrets and he was growing too powerful. God was jealous. Stripping a boy, killing him would not give God much pleasure. Humans were small. God would have to look through the spyglass until His arm ached.
God wanted to cover this city with ice but thought better of it. Sow down, He told Himself. God lifted the roof off the man’s house while he was busy over his victim. There was the man rummaging through a drawer full of tiny sharp objects. God barely understood them. There was the boy covered with blood. There they were together making love. God lowered the roof in its niche. He leaned back until the though, then its city became a small dot on the earth. Less than a dot. The earth was a dot, the most interesting one of the planets. God was flying backward through space, arms and legs stretched out before him like streamers. He looked a little like Martin Balsam when he flailed the front stairs in Psycho. But God was laughing, not shrieking. And was how he would stay.”
—
“If there was a God, he watched this and wallowed. Not that He didn’t have head colds to decongest elsewhere and better monsters on earth and in space, but he’d grown obsessed, for imperious reasons. The greed and resentment still perked in His eyes but His alternate choices were snuffing this interesting scene, which would be fruitless, or slipping some clue to the police, and that would be meddling. Better, He knew, to let it go on as it had: incomprehensible, beautiful.”

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish someone had given me this book when I was a young punkrocker in 1982.

[Geo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish that I had come across this kind of poetry when I was much younger, it would have prevented me from seeing poetry as cringe and I would have fallen in love with it much faster. I love Dennis Cooper, and while I do feel like his fiction work is better than his poetry, I still liked this. I love how he constantly explores a specific brand of queer male darkness and transgression, and isn’t concerned with catering to the heteronormative lens or readership. I love how raw and honest this was. The standout poem to me was “Drugs” as it resonated with my feelings about my friend Josh who died from a drug overdose a few years back. I’ll always miss you, Josh.

“A friend dies one night,
swallows too many pills
on his way to a party
and grows pale as dust
in a shaft of moonlight.
You long to reach him
again, all your life.
A priest says you'll
find him in the future
under cover of death;
you will stand and sing
near his glowing side.
We tell you to join us,
get loaded, forget him.
One day you shoot so
much stuff you fall over.
You hope to see him but
only grow clammy, more
stupid, like someone on
quaaludes. Now you and
he walk the same clouds
only when we’ve been
stoned and think back
on our lives, full of
dead bodies, and bright
now as heaven behind us.”

[Samuel Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very tender. I love the jfk junior poem.

[Isaak]

very well crafted and truly disturbing - will not re-read this ever.
CN rape, gore

[Raffy Rillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The shift that occurs from a book of poetry to the beautiful, compelling prose (A Herd) is immensely disturbing, dark, and unsettling.

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me t'aime Dennis Cooper

[Ruth]

still reading it... !

[Steph Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time.