Books by Cole Swensen
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry
by David St. John, Cole Swensen
This spirited anthology of contemporary American poetry focuses on the new poem--the hybrid--a synthesis of traditional and experimental styles. As Cole Swensen argues in the introduction to this comprehensive new anthology, the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from accessible lyricism to linguistic exploration. The focus in American Hybrid is on the blend; the more than seventy poets featured here--including Jorie Graham, Albert Goldbarth, and Lyn Hejinian--have found new and often unique ways to reconfigure the innumerable and sometimes conflicting voices of the past thirty years. The editors have crafted short introductory essays on each of the poets in the anthology, providing biographical backgrounds and positioning them within the current of contemporary poetry. This new anthology is essential reading for those who care about the present moment--and the future--of American verse. 3
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Sleep Preceded by Saying Poetry
by Cole Swensen, Jacques Roubaud
These restless poems meditate on sleep, night, darkness, and silence. And on sleeplessness, on waking up in the middle of the night, and on silence interrupted. Making tight loops and insistent returns, the words split and dissolve into silence, just as everything falls quiet and still, just as sleep begins to wash over you―when the light comes on, or the faucet drips, or a branch scratches the window. A slightly different pattern emerges as the words are reassembled, one with its own unique pattern of interruptions. Saying Poetry is a brilliant reflection on this state of distraction, which, Roubaud suggests, is essential to poetry.
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On Walking On
by Cole Swensen
On Walking On looks outward onto―or rather, walks through―the work of various writers for whom walking was or is an important element of daily life. The number of writers who were or are serious walkers is striking, and the connection goes back to antiquity, more recently including Woolf, Nerval, Sand, Debord, Sebald, and many others.
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Landscapes on a Train
by Cole Swensen
Influenced by the history of landscape painting, Cole Swensen’s new book is an experiment in seriality, in the different approach and scope that language must take to record the way that fluctuations of minutiae transform a whole. These poems meditate on what it is simply to look at the world, without judgment, without intervention, without appropriation. Swensen’s lyric observations, lilting and delicate, distill the act of seeing. “Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’―light of the mind―by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”―Anne Waldman
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Gravesend (Volume 36) (New California Poetry)
by Cole Swensen
“Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face” (p. 65)
The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society’s actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.
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Best American Experimental Writing
by Cole Swensen, Seth Abramson, Jesse Damiani
BAX compiles the best writing inspired by an experimental ethos written in North America in 2013. It features 75 works by a diverse range of emerging and established writers. The anthology is a vital teaching tool and a must-read for anyone interested in innovative concepts.
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Stele
by Cole Swensen
Poetry. "Cole Swensen's STELE goes forth with an artful, graceful balancing as in a minuet, stopping, bowing and then moving towards new thought. This reading 'presumes a crossing' of empty space in each line. This crossing is a waking dream, linking action with image. The interval grows until it changes how one reads this work. Simple rhythmic constraints of diction and of space construct a fluid but uneven chiasm where one starts to read down and across at once, too eerily different musical scores. Sophisticated, in a refined, unhurried measure, the more STELE gains restraint, the more ardent it becomes."—Norma Cole
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Ours (Volume 24) (New California Poetry)
by Cole Swensen
These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.
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Gave (Omnidawn Pocket Series)
by Cole Swensen
A river is a rift that joins what it divides, and so, logically, mythically, it’s always a river that cuts this life off from every other. A river determines every layer of all the lives along its entire length―the industry, the agriculture, the cultural possibilities, the historical imperatives, the reigning aesthetics, and so much more that cannot be or simply never happens to be traced. This account of a river attempts to embrace them all.
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