Cole Swensen's Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat Books, 2015)

Some favourite passages from Swensen's new book. I so look forward to her reading tonight at Burdall's Yard in Bath--it begins at 8 p.m.--join us!


Light. All accident. Across a rolling green, soft in animals.

*

Stream down sun in little coins.

*

A church too big for its hill. And cows easing down the slope. Slows its calm, and
More little sun goes on among selves.

*

                                                                                                                          A
Train across open land opens night. (A train lands all night across an open field.)

*

        Tree with light painted on. Then tree with points of dark which
Are birds or fruit that build slowly up into a night.

*

As the eye strikes a far thing, a
Small thing, a thing at this distance becomes distance alive all alone.

*

                                                                                                  Evening results
In a motion of sorts, a sort of splintering air.

*

                  Mistletoe crowding the emptiness of the empty branches
Of emptied trees.

*

              Making the water walk over the meadow like a line of bare
Poplars walks over a field.

*

The sun is a thrush, thrust up against, is falling in sheets, it falls in and sees....

*

You slide the screens to change the world.

*

                                                                         Season extant, season
Alarmed. The surface of water: a matter of light.

*

Birds toward the sea, a sea of them. 

*

The lights of a landing plane the streams of lights lining a road of a town the lights
Of a single light of a farm. Everything cannot be light, a light, we pass through
Miles of dark.

*

Down. To a sound, which has no shore.

*

Rain rains down upon rain.

*

                                                                                                                                Huge
Piles of leaves in the live sky burning the piles of flames into light dying in the sun.

*

                          The man across from me slightly shakes. He thinks
It's his hands. He shakes, and then he shakes them.

*

                                                                         Raw, strong roads that
Sweep the wind.



I found the easiest way to purchase Landscapes on a Train in the UK was to purchase it from Abe Books.

Cole Swensen's The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007), second selection

Here are some favourite passages from the book's second and third sections (of three). I find it a difficult work to excerpt from, as some of its felicity comes from longer threads and their concatenous developments.

from "The Glass Act":

        He said open

and everything he painted then opened

a woman sewing

enters in infinite gradations, the white

that never gets there

remains

               who, alone in a house with light,

built his house entirely of doors.

*

...--something

has slipped, is now offset, and now the street and the windows comprise a single living thing, which makes it come out in color.

*

Bonnard had a double fixation: saturated color and utter transparency. Not so much opposites as an immanent collision of the present until it's tangible. Cracked open to reveal at its center, a verb.

---

from the final section, "Glazier, Glazier":

When I was a child, I had a glass kite. Said the child staring out the window of the speeding train.

*

While in France, they built whole mansions of glass;

called orangerie or serres or vies, a conservatory can be

made, paned, claimed

I grew a lemon from a forest of thieves; I grieve

still for the infinitesimal

difference between

what you can see and what you cannot see

*

Geometry with imprecision at its heart

as the circle always veers in its infinity. Necessity.

*

Every window implies a blind spot--it's the air, the percentage of air in every scene; the portion that can't be seen lying over everything. The unveiled veil.

*

One of Bonnard's last paintings is titled The Small Window and shows, through an open window that frames three sides of the painting, another window, red, and at a distance, a suggestion of a building or maybe by now a window alone, a thriving shore.

In the UK, Cole Swensen's books are most easily found through Abe Books. 

Cole Swensen's The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007), first selection

Those in the Bath area will want to see Cole Swensen when she reads on the Bath Spa University poetry series at Burdall's Yard on Thursday, 29 October at 8 p.m.; tickets are free for students and only £3 for the public at http://www.bathspalive.com, and the venue urges pre-booking so as to avoid disappointment and to help them with staffing.

Here are some favourite passages from the first section, The Open Window (passages from the latter two sections will follow in a separate post):

Sand and ash                    (the ocean like glass

                                            we say of a day when nothing moves)

further a natural feeling for light.

*

...to reach

is not necessarily to touch....

*

So often in Bonnard's work, the window is where we actually live, a vivid liminality poised on the sill, propped against the frame, he turns and speaks for the first time that day.

*

Photography replaced the river, which, due to unexpected complications, resulted in the Great Age of the Train.

*

The earliest movie was a window.

*

...diffusing the focus into a plane that hums, a homogenous intensity extending anarchically....

*

It's an equivalent world, one in which each element serves as a clinamen to trip the homogeneity into precipitating specifics so numerous that they can construct a rolling chaos quite able to hurtle through darkness without a hitch.

*

...a floodplain on which skates, fleet apothecary, the glance.

*

Whatever enters through a window is a ghost; everything else is just visiting--transfixed witness to the instant of the threshold, the site of the slip, the shift; we look up.

In the UK, Cole Swensen's books are most easily found through Abe Books. 

Book blurbs

Lately I've been thinking a lot about blurbs as I've collected a couple for my next book of poems and advised a friend on obtaining some for his. In seeking blurbs, I've encountered unexpected (while hoped for) generosity and earnestness. For my pamphlet/chapbook Subterfuge for the Unrequitable (Potes & Poets, 1998), I approached via email two poets I'd never met or had previous contact with, Cole Swensen and Ron Silliman. I'd admired Swensen's work for years and was delighted when she provided a lovely blurb. With Silliman, I only had the virtue, by way of introduction, of bringing out the pamphlet with a publisher who had also produced some of his own works (and he's had quite a few publishers over the years), and yet he too kindly gave me a blurb for my pamphlet. 

The blurbs did more than provide the pamphlet with something to put on the back cover and perhaps persuade a few people to buy it. They heartened me greatly. Indeed, to this day rereading their remarks encourages me. 

I had a similar experience with my first full collection, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), approaching Robert Crawford, whom I'd only met briefly at a conference, and Rosanna Warren, whom I'd never met but whose work had influenced my aesthetic since I was introduced as an undergrad to her work.

I understand some poets are bombarded by so many requests for blurbs that they have had to set down rules: they don't do blurbs for students or they only do blurbs for students; they only do them for people they know personally; etc. I feel grateful to all those poets who make time to comment conscientiously on a younger or less established poet's work and thus help it find a readership. My thanks go out to them all.

Pamphlets

Homecoming

Dancing Girl Press, September 2013
$7 US plus P&P / £5 direct

Homecoming picks up on a sense of isolation in the American Midwest as well as its emphasis on the more positive attributes of family life. Thus when the father falls to injury and illness, his decline upsets the meanings of family, selfhood and home. Poems in Homecoming first appeared in Court Green, New Welsh Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Times Literary Supplement and The Warwick Review.

Positive reviews have appeared in Sabotage Reviews, Elsewhere and Luna Luna.

* * * 

Divinations

Punch Press, June 2010

$10 US / $15 elsewhere (SOLD OUT)

Twenty poems from the series Divining for Starters, originally published in Alterran Poetry Assemblage, Cannot Exist, Damn the Caesars, Gists & Piths, Great Works, The Liberal, Painted, spoken, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, and Tenth Muse.

* * *

The Son

Oystercatcher Press, September 2009

ISBN 9781905885244

£4 including UK p&p

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice

Peter Riley describes The Son as "quite startling--a serious work about loss through a terrific play of imaginative resource," while the selectors of the pamphlet choice remark, "There is something too, about how time moves, or how it doesn't, in a world akin to that nightmare in which you are running and running and your legs are jelly and you are getting nowhere. The fact that the poems in this collection are either prose poems, which can shuffle on the spot, rather than move along with a sense of narrative, or catechisms which go back and forth with different responses to the same question, adds to an overall feeling of being trapped. Indeed, these poems work by accretion, so the more you read, the more powerful that feeling becomes."

Other reviews include Alan Baker on his blog, Litterbug; three at Sphinx, by Rob A. MacKenzie, Marcia Menter, and Helena Nelson; and Rupert Loydell in Shadowtrain.

The Son evokes a birthmother's consciousness through two kinds of poems: Imagined Sons, prose poems which envision the now-grown son and birthmother in a moment of contact; and Birthmother's Catechisms, in which the same question--e.g., What day is today?, How did you let him go?--recurs with changing answers. Moreover, after Al Qaeda's attacks on the US in 2001, the anniversary of the son's birth becomes complicated by the fact that both occur on September 11th.

Many of the pamphlet's poems have already been published in Barrow Street, PN Review, The Republic of Letters, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The Son comes from a book-length manuscript, Imagined Sons, presumably forthcoming. It was launched at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath on 26 October 2009, along with Janet Sutherland's second collection, Hangman's Acre (Shearsman).

* * *

Yet
Leafe Press, February 2008
ISBN 9780953540198
£3.50 (UK) / $8.00 (US) (SOLD OUT)

"Technically Etter often makes use of the arresting juxtapositions of new sentence writing (in both prose and lineated forms) but counterpoints these with threaded-through continuities that generate more settled overall arguments. This is used to great effect in 'Paternal', which hints at family illness, even death, but in a way which keeps pathos firmly at bay [...]. Elsewhere this technique simply allows more space into the poem, and for the mind to savour the relationships between images as much as the images themselves [...]. Yet is an excellent introduction to Etter's work for British readers and promises much for her new books due this year and next."

--Scott Thurston, Stride

"The eighteen or so poems here vary in structure, intent and layout—sometimes it seems perversely so, but Etter is a poet who knows exactly what she is doing. This isn’t in any sense an easy collection and I mean that as an endorsement. I was intrigued, impressed and ultimately bowled over by its hard-won lyricism."

--Eleanor Livingstone, Sphinx

* * *

Subterfuge for the Unrequitable
Potes & Poets, 1998
ISBN 9780937013793
$6.00 (SOLD OUT)

To “register the tongue’s torque,” Carrie Etter’s poems show great skill and a willingness to take risks, both rare things in a “first book.” This writing is simultaneously “out there” and always also immediately present (in the most literal sense of “with it”), an experience that is by turns centering and dizzying. It’s quite a ride.

Ron Silliman

Attention and compassion direct this finely chiseled work. Etter’s quick eye focuses on precise moments of change and of emergence—those crucial moments where life gets really interesting—and sculpts them into wholes with an unusually attuned ear, an ear that catches always a subtle music and often a marvelous oddity—what an agile vocabulary! These are poems that wake you up when you thought you were already awake.

Cole Swensen