<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><img apple-inline="yes" id="3805FF5B-C2C3-4F0D-805E-20F8DDD7BFD9" height="300" width="200" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" class="" src="cid:DA1BF39D-07AA-4FC0-8DBB-4BAEDC0BBC0F@att.net"></div><div class=""><br class=""></div>Dear Poeticians,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Just a reminder that we will be meeting tomorrow, Friday 11/13, from 3 pm - 5 pm in the Whitney Humanities Center, room B04. This will be our first of two discussions of the latest book of poems by Cole Swensen<i class="">,Landscapes on a Train</i>. There are still 3 copies of this beautifully designed book available—these can be found on a shelf in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center. These are available to any member of the WGCP.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">We will meet again on 12/4, when the poet herself will join us. Below I’ll post a brief review that appeared in Publishers Weekly. Below that I will paste a short poetics statement Swensen wrote about this new book.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Here is her official bio: </div><div class="">Cole Swensen is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and a
collection of critical essays. Various books have been awarded the Iowa
Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the
National Poetry Series, and have been finalists for the National Book
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow,
she was the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology "American Hybrid" and
is the founding editor of the translation press "La Presse." She is a
translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism, and
won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary translation. She taught at both
the University of Denver and the Iowa Writers' Workshop before coming to
Brown. Her poetry is project-based, often focusing on the visual arts
and/or historical subjects.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><img apple-inline="yes" id="D9FCB342-5655-4CDC-B6EF-12B9888429E5" height="200" width="144" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" class="" src="cid:A8D85A3B-424D-43C5-9DFA-FE9E9AFE786A@att.net"></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">As always, the WGCP is open to any interested parties, so feel free to spread the word.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Onward,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Richard Deming, Co-cordinator </div><div class="">From Publishers Weekly:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Swensen (<em class="">Gravesend</em>) leaves behind the scholarly bent of her
recent work in favor of something more elemental and empirical,
resulting in a book-length sequence of austere and hypnotic beauty. The
title is quite literal: each of the book’s 57 poems depict, in just a
handful of long lines, a landscape glimpsed on a passing train. But
Swensen’s swerving syntax and quicksilver imagery imbue each scene with
lyric verve. “Cows turn to crows in a field alone,” and “a road
disappears,” becoming “a curve, that in curving, carves.” Drawing on
Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and Lyn Hejinian, Swensen explores the
fault lines between seeing and saying, subject and object, and her
investigation of perception deepens as the book “turns back on itself”
in surprising ways. The sequence’s progression is often akin to
minimalist music: highly constrained yet keenly melodic, it develops by
accretion and repetition, building drama through small variations, with
notes of humor or eeriness providing texture. If the project has a
flaw, it is that Swensen’s focus is so acute that the work can seem
slight or esoteric. But Swensen’s powers of description transform what
could easily be an academic exercise into an aesthetic journey that for
many readers will be worth taking for the sights and sounds alone. <em class="">(Oct.)</em></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">++++++++++++++++++++++++</div><div class=""><header class="">
<h6 class="">Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics (Issue 31, July 2013—Mixed Form Issue)</h6>
<h4 class=""><span class="author-ewc">Cole Swensen</span><br class="">
<span class="essay-poem-title">No End is Unplanned</span></h4>
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<div class="essay-poem" id="eveningwillcome"><p class="">Any mixing of forms presumes that the interaction of disparities is a positive thing—that<br class="">unalikes ignite, that they create sparks that illuminate all their parts—and other things<br class="">besides. We’re in an age that likes disparity, and this seems a very positive thing, a very<br class="">optimistic response to inevitable social pressures. The mixing of genres and of formal<br class="">principles in contemporary literature offers many minor examples of this, ones that extend<br class="">the options for current creative work considerably.</p>
<div class="block"><p class="line">that things very formal</p><p class="line">extend considerably</p>
</div><p class="">In a few recent books (<em class="">The Glass Age</em>, <em class="">Greensward</em>, <em class="">Ours</em>),
I’ve worked with forms that splice prose sections in with sections of
verse, and in those cases, the poetry and the prose are visually
distinct, though the prose passages are, in fact, somewhat misleading.
Though they run from the left to the right margin with what appears to
be an arbitrary line cut at the right margin—i.e., the line seems to end
arbitrarily at whatever word happens to hit the right margin—in fact, I
often rewrite the prose passages until I can get all the lines to end
at effective places in terms of sound, stress, and sense. So,
technically, I never write prose because I can never give myself up to
the accident that prose requires, to the “leap of faith” that the line
will end at a good spot. And I can’t do it because it’s not a leap of
faith (that I might manage); instead, prose requires a blind refusal to
see the line as a physical thing, which is perfectly fitting with prose
because there the line is not, in fact, an object in its own right. The
basis of prose is not visual, is not corporeal. Prose exists somewhere
other than the page, which is demonstrated by the fact that if the
typeface, point size, or page format changes, the text block does as
well—and thus so do all the line breaks, which creates a complete shift
in all the sound relationships. Because, on the one hand, I cannot
imagine where that “somewhere other” might be, and on the other hand, I
can’t stop hearing the sounds, I can’t write prose. But to appear to do
so, and yet deny prose its arbitrary quality—to refuse chance its
role—while maintaining the illusion of accident interests me greatly. So
I often “fake” prose. It looks like it’s ruled by the chance that
directs all prose, but in fact, the rhythm of each line is constructed. </p><p class="">In those works, the sections of poetry (lines broken short of the
right margin) intervene for a contrapuntal shift and visual drift or
jolt. A page is so importantly a visual experience, and the shift from
poetry to prose can be used to fine-tune the visual in a way that
directs the timing of the entire piece. But a few projects ago, I got
interested in formal blending for its own sake, and so have been working
with forms that blend poetry and prose more fully, trying to access
added tension through forms that seem to go both directions at once. </p><p class="">The form I used in a recent project titled <em class="">Gravesend</em> takes from prose the fully justified right and left margins, while it takes from poetry the traditional form of the couplet:</p>
<div class="block"><p class="line" style="text-align: justify;">Ghost: <em class="">gast,</em> as in soul-sprite, breath-life, sliced <span class="indpad1-5">wreath</span> of a waning break it rears
</p><p class="line" style="text-align: justify;">from all over <span class="indpad2"> has</span> been called the back-comer <span class="indpad-5"> the</span> night-child <span class="indpad-5"> the</span> guest
</p></div><p class="">This form also observes other prose conventions, such as beginning
with a capital letter and using the sentence as the base unit, but it
also makes use of the fragmentation and dominant sound play more often
associated with poetry. But the determining feature of the form is the
blank spaces within the lines, which, while sometimes seen in poetry,
are a standard feature of neither. But the subject matter of the book,
ghosts, seemed to demand both inner absence and internal pressure—and
the pressure of absence. The blanks within the lines grow until they
press up against the limits of the margins on both sides, creating what I
hope is a pressured prose full of sudden emptinesses.</p><p class="">I’ve been using a different kind of mixed form in another recent project titled <em class="">Landscapes on a Train</em>. It replicates prose in its long line; in fact, I think of them as one-line paragraphs: </p>
<div class="block"><p class="stanza">A window opens a train. Now on whiter air. Other measures drift. Quick, hasp </p><p class="stanza">And fast the green comes back, innumerably strong. Swung the sky off light. Light </p><p class="stanza">The one comes down. To a single ray in a single field. Divides and buries on. A </p><p class="stanza" style="margin-bottom: .7em;">Train across open land opens night. (A train lands all night across an open field.)</p>
</div><p class="">And yet at the same time, because the lines all end at approximately
the same place at the right margin, the whole also has the visual effect
of a paragraph with an unjustified right margin; on the other hand, it
has visual aspects of a stanza, except the blank line-space between each
line prevents that—so in this case, instead of its being both poetry
and prose, the form is not quite prose and not quite poetry. It’s always
heading toward something, but never gets beyond the not-quite, which
seemed to me to echo traveling by train. Of course, a train does,
necessarily, eventually, end up somewhere, which is a shame; that’s not
the part I’m interested in. I’m interested in the indeterminacy of
location that travel occasions, so an indeterminate form seemed
appropriate.</p><p class="">There’s an additional visual element in this series that I hope
further destabilizes and sets in motion its relationship to form—the
series contains lines of photographs taken from the windows of
high-speed trains, so they thematically echo the verbal snapshots and
formally echo the emphasis on line. Their arrangement in lines raises
the issue of syntax, putting pressure on the relationship between and
among the images, while it also implicates the visual realm in the
temporal demands of sequence that language cannot escape, but that
visual art usually can. The project’s main agenda is seriality and
representation, and it seemed to me that contrasting the possibilities
and limitations of visual art with those of verbal art could address
these issues in concrete terms.</p><p class="">My main interest in mixing forms, hybridizing them, etc., is to get to <em class="">writing</em>.
If one is writing a poem or a prose-poem or a play or a novel or
whatever, one is not just writing, and it’s that form-free,
non-preconceived event that I’m always trying to get to—in short, I
don’t want to write anything; I just want to write, which is impossible,
of course, but I think there’s a productive kind of suspension that
offers a greater openness if one can, even if just for a moment, forget
what one is writing and simply write. </p>
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