And And And, Cole Swensen
Free Poetry Press, 2022
Other
options for poetic
form:
The map
The graph
recipe, shopping
list, already done. Ditto re letters to the
editor, book
blurbs, and weather reports.
Though I’m
actually not sure about the weather reports;
maybe add that to
the list.
The crossword
puzzle
A crossword puzzle
in which all the horizontal words rhyme
in a given pattern
(abba, abab, aabb, etc.) and the vertical ones
are all iambic, no
matter how many feet.
But I’m sure Adrienne Raphel has already covered this.
Through over a dozen full-length poetry collections, Swensen has long been engaged with the book-length poetic study, most of which work their way through very specific subject matter—whether landscape, gardens, paintings, opera or graveyards—and this collection turns the poetic, in certain ways, back in on itself. As part of her approach to the book-length poetic study, her poetry collections work through the structures and histories of each of her specific subjects, and And And And is, in that way at least, no different, but allowing for a deeper sense of self-aware play, writing out an exploration of form through form. As well, her exploration of the form of the prose poem through the form of the prose poem is reminiscent of when poets Stephen Brockwell and Peter Norman worked their sonnet collaboration/conversation on the form through the form through their chapbook-length Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), a magnificent banter I keep hoping might once again see print. “Regarding the political work that grammar does,” Swensen writes, to open one of the poems titled “And,” “our inequities / are not only instigated in grammar, but they also hide their / veiling mechanisms and their maintenance crews therein.” Referencing works by Robert Smithson, Plato, Joe Brainard, Helen Armstrong, Adrienne Raphel, Gilles Clément, Deleuze and Guattari, Swensen explores the physicality of the prose poem, writing out the possibilities that this particular form might provide, as well as what others have brought into the conversation, including herself. Mid-point through the collection, the first stanza of the two-block “Language Heaps” writes:
I’ve always loved Robert Smithson’s Heap of Language—both concept and object—and one day while visiting my family in the house in which I grew up, I looked out the window of my old room and realized that the hill I’d been looking at throughout my entire early life just happened to have exactly the same silhouette as his heap.
On the following page, the poem ends: “Arguments advanced by / 20th century poetics regarding the materiality of language / were clearly one of his principal tools, for there they are, / doing their part, heap by heap.” There is such a depth and a play through this collection, as thick as a book-length critical examination on poetic structure and history. While Swensen’s perspective is very much attuned to threads along both American and French poetic traditions (I have yet to go through Canadian poet Nicole Markotić’s thesis on the prose poem, which I can only presume focuses more heavily on Canadian traditions), one only hopes that anyone interested on working or simply reading the contemporary prose poem will consider this small and curious volume as an invaluable resource.
Carved Out
Thinking that every letter, rather than being built up in defiance of an edifice of silence, is actually carved out of a block of solid sound, is created by careful removal, a meticulous chiseling, a paring down with finer and finer tools—and the discarded fragments, vestiges such as the centers of os and es are repurposed to later serve as punctuation.
