[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Cole Swensen minutes

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Thu Apr 21 12:16:17 EDT 2005



April 21, 2005

Dear Friends,

First a reminder that we are indeed meeting to discuss the work of 
Robert Creeley tomorrow at our usual place.  More on that at the end of 
the minutes.

On Friday, April 15, the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and 
Poetics convened for a special session, a discussion with Cole Swensen, 
one of the most important younger poets in the U.S.  The discussion 
centered, at least at first, around Swensen’s essay “Garden War,” which 
had been circulated earlier.  Swensen puts the two phenomena-—war and 
sculpted gardens—-into conjunction with one another because (as she 
notes in her essay) she noticed in the process of writing poems about 
gardens the idea of war kept inserting itself.  In her essay and in our 
discussion, a kind of nondiscursive discourse was used.  In that sense 
the work of bringing war and gardens together was a thought experiment 
rather than a specific, logical argument.   Swensen explained that for 
her very often the process of putting two concepts or tropes alongside 
one another might be made to reveal a perspectival shift because of the 
juxtaposition of two radically distinct things (not discontinuous with 
Walter Benjamin’s notion of dialectical images). This might be one 
advantage that poetry has over rhetoric in that it suggests 
possibilities rather than explains a psoition or proposition 
didactically.

In illustration of her sense of the connection between gardens, war, 
and perhaps poetry, Swensen showed slides of the massive garden Vaux-le-
Vicomte, designed by Andre Le Notre (1638-1715) that is created (or we 
might say composed) with a one point-perspective in place.  That means 
that the garden’s full effect is designed to be seen from one specific 
vantage point and in that way is conceived not unlike a painting.  To 
achieve this effect the architect made use of anamorphosis, or a kind 
of controlled visual distortion used to compensate for the distortion 
that occurs because of refraction, perspective, and so forth.  A useful 
primer for understanding anamorphosis (with a series of examples) can 
be found at www.anamorphosis.com

Although at first any conection mbetween agrdens and war might seem 
counterintuitive, at the same time, it became clear that there were 
some links between war and gardens that did arise by way of our 
conversation in that both possibily can be seen as being anti-natural 
with both evincing a will to power, no matter how benign landscape 
architecture might otherwise seem.  Given the example of Le Notre, the 
architect exercises his dominion over the material, natural world but 
does so even at the level of sense perception. These gardens are not 
bucolic or pastoral but are evidence of Reason’s attempt to overwhelm 
nature. Moreover, there are any number of arguments about the 
aesthetics of warfare that might also echo through the kind of 
incredibly elaborate and control gardening that we discussed.  Although 
we touched on the fact that poetry seems to touch on both war and the 
garden, we didn’t pursue the ways that poetry might be complicit in 
these anti-natural tendencies.  Swensen did suggest that poems offer a 
kind of anamorphosis or counter-distortion that manipulates perception 
(in a non-moral way) so that one can see the world more clearly and 
directly by seeking at a nontraditional or unconventional, even 
indirect way, of looking at a thing.

The conversation shifted to discussing the limitations of logical 
arguments, which only allow one type of perspective based as it is on 
certain formal and rhetorical conventions.  Swensen said that poetry 
was able to avoid having to make a definitive stance.  It was pointed 
out that there are prose poems in her body of work and that there is a 
brief essay in her book park that could be read as prose. Perhaps her 
essay “Garden War” is closer to prose poem, then, following a logic of 
image and intuition, which might be one way out of the “will to power” 
previously cited. In any event, Swensen discussed the ways that poetry 
can pursue even to the point of exhaustion a single object or trope.  
This leads to the fascinating question of what follows in the wake of 
that exhaustion—does the trope get discarded (as Wallace Stevens 
suggests) or does then fresh, new unapprehneded relations between 
things (a la Shelley) become possible?

We ended on a discussion of the current state of contemporary poetry, 
or what Jean-Jacques Poucel calls “the extreme contemporary.”  There 
was a suggestion that there is unsettled sense of what be construed as 
a aesthetic shift from the conservative values of what Charles 
Bernstein calls “official verse culture” being more or less predominant 
to a more dynamic, open-ended, disjunctive poetics being “coin of the 
realm.”  The group discussed the problems of various labels (such 
as “avant-garde” or “experimental”); innovate seems the least 
problematic, despite it being vague and somewhat self-congratulatory.  
However, Swensen did say that her sense of the term suggest a poetics 
that is principally motivated by a restlessness and that the poet 
herself or himself feels an imperative to jettison not just tradition 
or genealogy but to beyond even his or her own impulses.  Thus, the 
exhaustion Swensen mentioned earlier seems to operate not only 
thematically or in terms of subject matter but at the very level of 
form itself.

It was a fascinating and dynamic conversation and we greatly thank Cole 
Swensen for joining our group. Our only regret is that we didn't ask 
her to read more poems. Just as a note, she will be returning to Yale 
next fall to read at the Beinecke as part of the Yale Collection of 
American Literature’s reading series, curated by Nancy Kuhl.

The group will be meeting tomorrow at 1.45 in the WHC for our last 
session of the academic year.  We will be discussing the work of Robert 
Creeley.  The reading packet is available at the WHC and there is no 
shortage of work to be found online (see the previous e-mail for 
specific links).  

“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other 
Friday at 1:45 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale 
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within 
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric 
poetry. All are welcome to attend.”  

---R. Deming, group secretary





More information about the Wgcp-whc mailing list