Desert City reading: Cole Swensen and me

If one can agree that both trees and governments are "things in the world" and see their relationships sans metaphor, then one begins to see one's seeing of these things and to focus one's curiosity and questioning on seeing and thingness. Sometimes one loses sight of the actual trees and actual governments -- they become blindspots. Cole Swensen is not one of these people.

Cole is one of my favorite poets and translators. I've enjoyed Goest and Oh very much, particularly the middle section of Goest, and I am forever in her debt for translating Olivier Cadiot's Art Poetic'. Most of all I appreciate her applications of poetry to the social world, like in this essay on cities and poetry, and her comments on nouns, verbs, energy, and stasis in this interview in an issue of Free Verse.

Another thing I appreciate about Cole -- people are always misspelling her last name. Swensen is right. Swenson is wrong. When your name is frequently abused in this way you can't help but separate from it a bit -- it's not you so much as it's next to you all the time. It falls back down to being just a word, which, I think, gives you a different awareness of the relationships between words and things. You can look at the tree, and say "tree," and bust out laughing about that and you're not crazy.

Anyway, I had the pleasure of being Cole's opening act on Saturday at the Desert City reading series. Iris and I worked up a projection for before the reading. Originally the plan was to hang a sheet over the front window of the bookshop and back-project onto it so people walking by on the sidewalk could see it. But there was enough light inside the already-claustrophobic bookshop that I figured I'd just hang a sheet up behind the podium and project onto that. We made a film loop on super8 by photocopying text onto the film. When projected, it looked like an endless descending close-up pan of a page of text. We also had an overhead projector with some black&white medical cross-section slides on the platen beneath a glass baking dish filled with water and 3 live fish. We put a rectangle of paper on the platen to make a solid dark rectangle onscreen, and aimed the text film at that rectangle. It was a bit dim, and the overhead bulb's heat made the fish sluggish, but it still looked pretty good. (The fish, by the way, survived nicely and now live in Iris' aquarium.) Then I read for a little while, and then Cole read.

Cole read poems from three different projects. The first is "The Book of 100 Hands," which will come out this Fall -- all poems about or having to do with hands. Titles like "Hold," "Juggle," "The Hand As Anchor," "The Hand That Caresses," "The Hand As Ideogram." Here are two lines I wrote down, from different poems:

Memory is every muscles' sovereignty. Enormity is a thumb.
--
What recognizes the suffering of another is the movement of a hand.

I'm fascinated with the way Cole draws these kinds of conclusions in her poems. I'm tempted to say that she could write any conclusion statement and it would make sense within the context of the poem but this isn't true. Her statements are precise, drawing on observation not textual predisposition. It's not just poem-sense.

I've seen enough modern dance with text in it that sometimes writing about the body or about body parts immediately makes me squirm in my seat and look for the exit. But these poems were shrewd and useful. Nothing even remotely indulgent about them.

Then Cole moved on to read poems from a manuscript in progress about Andre LeNotre's formal baroque gardens. He designed the Tuilleries and the Versailles garden. Cole's set of concerns in these poems: "gardens and the military; control and nature; growth and precision." I listened so closely that I forgot to write things down while she read -- all I got were three lines, again from different poems:

There's a flower in the wall that falls out when the wall flowers.
--
A long series of outsides.
--
Holes in air.

I wasn't writing lines down because I was thinking hard about how she gets her language to shimmer. She's not describing the garden; she describes the code of the garden through a description of the garden. This sounds subtle (my explanation there is a bit ham-minded, sorry) but it's self-evident at the surface of the poem. Every line has analysis behind it, a warm analysis only possible when the poet participates in the code rather than standing back at sight's-length from everything. The text of the poem is not a scrim between reading/writing and direct experience. Nor is it a description, simulation, or representation of experience. Nor is it a choreographed experience-in-itself crafted to be parallel to or in unison with the experience of these gardens. What are these poems? What is the nature of experience?

I mean, does Cole wrestle with language to get it into these poem-shapes? They don't sound like they were easy in the least, nor are they in the least self-consciously crafted or wrought in that way that makes so much conventional poetry (and poets) so obnoxious. How the hell does she do it, anyway? She has a clarity that I don't understand. I'm talking in circles around it in hopes that I'll negatively define it. The activity of writing lines like these, for me, is like rummaging through an attic or basement -- pushing boxes and heavy objects and furniture out of the way, looking for something that I don't know what it is yet but I'll know it when I see it. I think I need to concentrate more.

Anyway I capped my pen for her reading of "The Invention of Streetlights" from the middle part of Goest that I like so much. And then it was over, and it felt like she'd read for only 4 minutes. Leave 'em wanting more.

On the drive up to the Blue Door at Todd and Laura Sandvik's I called Vicki (she and a sleepy Iris had left after I read), and Vicki told me that Iris composed poems during the drive home. Usually when Iris does this she makes you be quiet because she's delivering a poetry reading, and then she praises God and John Kerry (where does the God stuff come from?), but I like to think that my influence was at work on Saturday night. Here was what Vicki remembered:

I feel the blood moving through my body
I say: It is good to be alive
Mommy says: It is good to be alive

...if I may be allowed to format her speech in exactly the way I would format those lines in Irresponsibility.

Evie Shockley read several poems at the Blue Door -- among them a chilling Tuskegee Experiment poem that had us all thinking about the nature of humanity. Evie reads very well -- I think she should, seriously, try to get a gig narrating documentary films. I was trying to make a metaphorical understanding of her poems work in my mind while she was reading -- they are like a map, with the geography unifying them and making them singularly visible, but that we are on the surface, on the ground, where at best only a tiny area of the map is relevant, yet the overall map forms our understanding of our immediate environment and is the basis of our intentional movement... Anyway, this theorizing isn't worth much. Plus Todd had moonshine. I'd like to hear her first poem, for Stephan, again.

An outstanding evening, as usual. Desert City nights never fail.