The Poet and the Rock Star : All He Wants to Do Is Write Some Poems ... And Now, Thanks to Sheryl Crowe, Many of Us Can Recite at Least One ... Until the Sun Comes Up Over Santa Monica Boulevard

My memories of Wyn Cooper are few, but good.

For one summer in my 20s, we were both part of a loose social circle, people with whom I spent time generally avoiding work. We frequented a bar called the Villager in North Bennington, Vermont, and Wyn was always a million laughs, his own loud, higher in pitch than most, and infectious. One night Wyn told us he had discovered a quarry. The next day everyone was diving off the 40-foot sheer stone walls. Except me. I froze at the edge. I looked down at the clear blue-green water--an impossibly long drop.

“Promise me I’m not going to die, Wyn,” I said.

“You’re not going to die,” he said, then leaped, howling, into the abyss.

Name five living poets. Think fast. Some of you will blurt out Maya Angelou, what with her inauguration address and best-selling book. That’s an easy one. But who else? Four more. Living poets, remember. Rock stars don’t count. Neither does Bob Dylan.

Let’s try something else. Name five supermodels. Name five television actors. Name five professional athletes. Piece of cake. Now try poets again. Nothing? Nada? A blank? Is poetry that outdated and obsolete?

Maybe. But there is one poem that has become part of the national consciousness in a way that could change our collective lack of interest in American poetry. You hear it every day. You might even be able to quote a few lines.

Well, sing a few lines, more likely.

*

On the campus of Vermont’s Bennington College there’s a building called Tishman, a modern wood-and-steel box built into a gentle, sloping hill. Inside, there are rows of tiered benches that are not particularly comfortable to sit on for more than five or 10 minutes at a time. At the base of the seats is a podium with a microphone. Each sweltering summer, a series of readings takes place here under the auspices of the Bennington Writing Workshops. In 1985, when I was a student with considerably more idealism than I have now and a seemingly unending interest in other writers, I sat on those benches for hours and listened to poets, essayists and novelists read from their work.

This wasn’t Justine Bateman reading a short story in which the main character is a cigarette. One night John Updike read a short story. Then another. Then another. Almost two hours on the bench and I couldn’t feel anything in my legs during the reception held afterward. Another night William Styron read. Joyce Carol Oates read something about boxing on a particularly hot July evening. Tishman Hall has no air-conditioning and Vermont is, I am convinced, the birthplace of all mosquitoes. But I was in college trying to become a writer, and I’d put up with anything, even convince myself that it was fun to be there, on those hard benches, in the humid and stale room, slapping my neck every so often to kill a bug.

One summer a few years back, I found myself in Bennington again, killing time and trying to work on a novel at the workshop. I attended few readings that summer except those of my friends, people who faced the same kind of life I had chosen--solitary, day after day facing nothing but blank pages and some self-imposed obligation to fill them. Most of the time, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing them. I would have much preferred a Xerox copy, to read at my leisure, lying in bed. But I figured that if these people were spending so much time alone in front of their typewriters or computers, maybe they’d like to be acknowledged in some way, if only by me sitting on those impossibly hard benches in Tishman for an hour, the bugs and humidity driving me out of my mind.

This is when I met Wyn Cooper. Then a 33-year-old graduate student and poet, he was teaching poetry in a high school summer program, something he’s done for years. Assembled at Wyn’s reading were all of the students from his class and a handful of his friends. He wasn’t William Styron, after all. Wyn stood at the podium, as always in jeans and a T-shirt, looking like neither a poet nor a professor. I don’t remember much about the poems he read. What I do remember is sitting next to a writer friend, Michael Drinkard, who looked at me and rolled his eyes when Wyn told the audience that he was going to read a poem called “Fun.”

“What?” I whispered to Mike.

“He’s reading ‘Fun,’ ” Mike said, slapping at a bug on his arm.

“So?”

“So he always reads ‘Fun.’ ”

And Wyn looked down at his book and began to read.

*

It is now fall of this year and I’m driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, back from a two-month trip to England. It’s good to be in America, and I turn on the radio. There’s a song I’ve heard a couple of times since I got back, and they’re playing it again, and it is so familiar. “All I want to do is have some fun. . . .” It takes me a while, but I make the connection. I call up Michael Drinkard.

“Is this Wyn’s poem I’m hearing?” I ask Mike.

It is.

“The one he read that summer?”

“It’s his favorite one,” Mike says. “He reads it every summer.”

I honestly thought I’d never hear “Fun” again. And now I’m certain that I won’t stop hearing it for a long time to come.

*

Several years ago, two writers, Bill Ripley and my old friend Wyn Cooper, sat drinking late into the night. Bill wanted to continue, but Wyn reminded him that they were both scheduled to teach classes in a few hours, and they had better call it an evening.

“All I want to do,” Bill said, “is have a little fun before I die.”

Wyn wrote down the line. He used it as the first line in a poem he wrote the next day, a 300-word poem that took all of two hours to compose. Two hours is short by his standards, as some of his poems take up to two years to get just right. Shortly thereafter, he published a collection of his poetry, including “Fun,” in a slim volume titled “The Country of Here Below,” through Ahsahta Press at Boise State University. He went on with his life, pursuing and abandoning his Ph.D. work at the University of Utah, then moving to a life of teaching at places like Southern Vermont College, Bennington College and Marlborough College, also in Vermont. He continued to write, publishing poems in small literary journals--The Antioch Review, Harvard Magazine, Agni, Quarterly West. “Fun” was not included in any of these publications. Wyn Cooper was, like most other American poets, largely unknown to the rest of us and content to stay that way.

Poets are not usually prone to public lives. Most of the fiction writers I know live in a world of agents and giant publishing houses and contracts for movie rights. They live in New York or Los Angeles. They’re doing serious work, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always the chance that one of us will hit some button with the public, maybe even become famous. We’re in the game, and someone’s bound to score. Some of us have.

But Wyn? Wyn Cooper? He was a poet. Poets, by their very definition, are apart from all that. Poets don’t play the game. They aren’t even aware that the game is taking place.

*

In late January of last year, Wyn gets a phone call from Judy Stakee at Warner/Chappell Music, a division of Time Warner. They have a singer who wants to record one of Wyn’s poems. He was thrilled. “I was so amazed that somebody had even read my book,” Wyn tells me over the phone. “I’ve never seen my book in a bookstore except for bookstores in towns where I lived or colleges where I taught.”

“The Country of Here Below” had a first printing of 500 copies and, at that point, not all of them had sold.

“And we’ll pay you, of course,” Stakee told Wyn. “We’ll pay you very well for this.”

“The most I ever got paid for a poem before this was $100,” Wyn tells me.

It is not inconceivable that “Fun,” all told, will bring Wyn somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000; $75,000 an hour.

Wyn’s not doing so bad.

“I literally was so happy that I probably would have just given it to them for free,” Wyn says.

It’s a good thing that he didn’t, I say. And Wyn agrees.

The year before, Bill Bottrell, a record producer, had stopped by Cliff’s, a used-book shop in Pasadena, and picked up a bunch of poetry books, including one of the 500 copies of “The Country of Here Below.” He brought it to a sort of informal weekly meeting he attended, called the Tuesday Night Music Club. One of the members, a singer/songwriter named Sheryl Crow, had written a song titled “I Still Love You.” She liked the music but was unhappy with the lyrics. Bottrell showed her Wyn’s poem, and bam--like that--American poetry took one giant step into the mainstream. Crow changed some of the words in “Fun,” added a refrain and came up with “All I Wanna Do,” which sailed to the top of the Billboard charts, where it remained in the No. 1 position for weeks. While Crow, a former music teacher from Missouri, had enjoyed some success with “Tuesday Night Music Club,” her first album, the release of “All I Wanna Do” as a single quickly vaulted the album toward the double platinum (2 million) mark in sales. The song has been featured on “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place,” and was the background music for a “20/20” piece on Ronald Goldman, ill-fated friend of Nicole Brown Simpson.

I’m thinking of hitting Wyn up for some cash, but he keeps talking on the phone.

“I went to see Sheryl play in Boston, and the first thing she said to me was, ‘Did you bring any poems?’ ” Here Wyn’s laugh comes back from the past. “Of course I had a huge envelope-full in my back pocket.”

I spoke with a friend of mine, Andy Factor, director of A&R; at Virgin Records, just to check something that had been nagging me since I found out about all this. Is it possible that Wyn Cooper, writing and literature professor at Marlborough College, might, through some inexplicable series of events, win a Grammy Award?

“Sure,” Andy told me. “That song has a real shot of being nominated for best song this year. Extremely popular. And the songwriters get the award.

“And that’s just the Grammys. There are the awards from BMI and ASCAP, the Billboard Music Awards, the American Music Awards. There’s a ton of these things given out.”

When people speak the name Whitney Houston, it is invariably preceded by the term Grammy winner. Grammy winner Wyn Cooper? This, I’m thinking, is getting out of hand.

Wyn’s been interviewed by a dozen or more magazines and newspapers, and he was going to be the ABC News Person of the Week but was bumped. He’s also taken his place in the endless stream of pop culture that appears in People magazine.

“The photo shoot was kind of long,” Wyn says. “Four hours. They had me doing all kinds of weird things. They like to have you interacting with your spouse or your pet, and I don’t have either. They ended up taking pictures of me and a dead mouse I found in my cabin.”

I honestly was at a loss for words.

“I kept wondering why all these people wanted to interview me. The thing that I find interesting about all this--”

I interrupt him. “Besides the royalty checks?”

The laugh again. “Besides those. It’s interesting because the thing that springs immediately to mind is the clash of high culture and low culture. The esteemed world of serious literary poetry meeting the crass corporate world of pop music. And the funny thing is that it’s mirrored in the publications that have done pieces on me. On one end of the scale, there’s the Chronicle of Higher Education and National Public Radio, and on the other, there’s me holding up a dead mouse in People.”

I tell him something I remember from high school, a day when my English teacher asked his students about their favorite modern poets. Names came popping up, but it was soon apparent that none of us were very familiar with any of them. What about Bob Dylan? the teacher asked. Aren’t songwriters poets?

I ask Wyn the same thing.

“I’ve had this problem over the years in teaching poetry, both poetry workshops and poetry-as-literature classes, with students who think Jim Morrison is the greatest poet who ever lived. Or that Bob Dylan is, or Leonard Cohen. And on paper, those songs don’t really work as poems.”

Isn’t there something to be said for those artists’ having made poetry accessible?

“Yes, yes. The popular music that I like the most is the music that has very intelligent words as lyrics. I mean, if you go back far enough, poetry started as song. It’s kind of nice that it could come back to that, in more serious ways. And that’s something that I’m really trying to promote. Now that I’ve had this incredible good luck.”

I ask about other poems of his and if he likes the idea of more of this exposure. He’s been approached by another singer, popular Israeli recording artist David Broza, who’s now recording in the United States. Bill Bottrell and Sheryl Crow are interested in working with him again. “Of course I’d like it to happen to more of my poems. I’d like for it to happen to other people’s poems, too.”

Believing that there’s a downside to everything, I ask what that could be for Wyn. His answer: stress. Is he serious? It’s hard to feel bad for the guy. Is this awful stress mitigated in any way by the fact that he’ll receive many times his teaching salary from this one poem? Wyn’s too busy laughing to answer.

And what about Bill Ripley? What are his thoughts on all this?

“He’s very upset because he claims that I should give him one-fortieth of my profits because the poem is 40 lines long and he wrote the first line. He said, ‘You know, Wyn, all you had to do was sit down and take my brilliant line and write some stupid little poem in two hours, and now you’re making all the money. I had to pay with my liver.’ ”

Then Wyn assures me that they’re still good friends. Ripley gets some flack nowadays because the song is, more or less, about a couple of losers.

“And you’re not losers,” I say.

“No, no. The poem isn’t really about him. Or me. They’re different people. They’re people you can sort of see as. . . well. . . objective correlatives. Symbols of people like us, or what we could have been, or what we would have become if we continued to drink and do nothing with our lives. And, fortunately, that didn’t happen. Bill stopped drinking, and he published a novel and I published this book, and everything’s going along fine.”

FUN

“All I want is to have a little fun Before I die,” says the man next to me Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says His names’s William but I’m sure he’s Bill Or Billy, Mac or Buddy; he’s plain ugly to me, And I wonder if he’s ever had fun in his life. We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant carwash. The good people of the world are washing their cars On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing As best they can in skirts and suits. They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks Back to the phone company, the record store, The genetic engineering lab, but not a single one Appears to be having fun like Billy and me. I like a good beer buzz early in the day, And Billy likes to peel the labels From his bottles of Bud and shred them on the bar. Then he lights every match in an oversized pack, Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers Before blowing and cursing them out. A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close To one another, like this is a motel, But they clean up their act when we give them A Look. One quick beer and they’re out, Down the road and in the next state For all I care, smiling like idiots. We cover sports and politics and once, When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp, The bartender looks up from his want-ads. Otherwise the bar is ours, and the day and the night And the car wash too, the matches and the Buds And the clean and dirty cars, the sun and moon And every motel on this highway. It’s ours, you hear? And we’ve got plans, so relax and let us in-- All we want is to have a little fun.