Cole Swensen
Author of Goest
About the Author
Cole Swensen is Professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa. She has published many translations and is also the author of many books of original poetry including Ours, The Book of a Hundred Hands, and Try.
Works by Cole Swensen
Associated Works
The Collected Poems: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (2013) — Translator, some editions — 58 copies
Chicago Review: 59:1/2 (Fall 2014/Winter 2015) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1955
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Kentfield, California, USA
- Places of residence
- Iowa City, Iowa, USA
Washington, D.C., USA
Paris, France
Providence, Rhode Island, USA - Education
- University of California, Santa Cruz (PhD - Comparative Literature)
San Francisco State University (BA, MA) - Occupations
- professor (Literary Arts)
poet
essayist
editor - Organizations
- University of Iowa (Writers' Workshop)
Brown University
University of Denver - Awards and honors
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2006)
- Short biography
- Cole Swensen received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include The Ours (Univ of CA, 2008), Goest (Alice James Books, 2004); Such Rich Hour (2001); Oh (2000); Try (1999), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Noon (1997), which won the New American Poetry Series Award; Numen (1995); Park (1991); New Math (1988), which won the National Poetry Series competition; and It's Alive, She Says. Her translations of contemporary French poetry include Art Poetic (1999, by Olivier Cadiot), Natural Gaits (1995, by Pierre Alferi), Past Travels (1994, by Olivier Cadiot), and Interrmittances II (1994, by Jean Tortel). Her work as a poet and a translator has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a Contributing Editor for American Letters and Commentary and for Shiny, and is the translation editor for How2. Cole Swensen currently teaches at the University of Iowa.
Members
Reviews
Aspects of Swensen’s book remain problematic for me. Ours left me feeling a bit chilly perhaps because the 17th century formal gardens in and around Paris, particularly the gardens of Versailles, which are the poetry’s pretext, it’s raison-d’être, largely leave me cold as well. Beyond my disaffection for such cultural artifacts of autarchy, it may be the attentiveness to language for its own sake that Swensen’s poetry so artfully enacts that discomfits. I look for fissures and find very few, but such cracks are what most interest me in her work. I’m not talking about fragmentation when I say “fissure.” There are certainly gaps, ellipses, white space, and broken syntax in the poetry. What I’m looking for are rough spots, where artfulness and artifice give way, and energy percolates through. Perhaps a moment where the poet doesn’t have complete control over the work. That may be what bothers me: Swensen’s poetry creates an impression of complete control, and complete control always disturbs me. She doesn't appear to be taking any risks. A blurb by Ron Silliman on the book jacket almost reads as a critique although I don't think he intended it as such; Silliman calls Swensen, “A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson.” He goes on to “place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have.” Did he really say and mean “facile”? 17th century French royal and aristocratic gardens are models of the geometric, the overly-interpreted and overly-thought. They were (and to a large extent still are) manicured and managed to the nth degree, artifice carved from Nature. Interestingly, and certainly intentionally on Swensen’s part, the process of constructing such formal gardens mirrors the formal process of constructing poetry “about” such gardens. Her honed craftiness, her seasoned artfulness seem just as intent upon perfection as were those of Le Nôtre, the "happy" and "kind man" who designed the gardens under Louis XIV. The undecided is the antithesis of the formal French garden and it is this lack of undecidedness that leaves me somewhat dissatisfied with the poetry. The terrain that Swensen maps, and her poetry is nothing but topographical in its attention to surface detail, is fully instructed, 100% made. Every clod of dirt, precise.
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Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 25
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 265
- Popularity
- #86,991
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 4
- ISBNs
- 37
- Languages
- 1
- Favorited
- 1
(7) “the mind/ with its boundless arboretum of neural withins”
(23) “As it carves its world/ from the aerodrome of nerve and dream”
(39) “the term “pillows of the wrist” was engraved upon the lintel/ through which one enters/ the deeply placed”
(55) “Photographs have a way of implying that it was a little cold that day, or that we live like pets in the laps of everyone who wanted something else.”
(94) “They say there’s a past/ that’s simple as opposed to perfect.”
(103) “The hand writes in the air; the bird stays there.”
(120) “There is no door/ to the room; it has been replaced by a room.”
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