Sunday, April 3, 2022

rob mclennan : And And And, by Cole Swensen

And And And, Cole Swensen
Free Poetry Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, Martin Corless-Smith sent along two volumes from a press I hadn’t been previously aware of, from Free Poetry’s “Poetry and Poetics Series”: Volume 2 being Peter Gizzi’s A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews, Edited and with an Introduction by Zoe Tuck (Boise ID: Free Poetry Press, 2022) and Volume 3 being Cole Swensen’s And And And (Boise ID: Free Poetry Press, 2022). What is “Free Poetry Press”? As a quick google search offers, from the Free Poetry Press website: “Since 2005, with the inaugural publication of Jeremy Hooker’s Reflections on Ground and Seventeen Poems, Free Poetry has been publishing poetry, essays and translations by new and established poets from around the world. All Free Poetry chapbooks are available free of charge and without copyright. Readers are encouraged to photocopy or download these chapbooks and to distribute them ad infinitum. In 2020 Free Poetry began publishing books focusing on Poetics. These books are also available free of charge and without copyright.” It also offers that the first volume in this same series is Luke Roberts’ Glacial Decoys (2021). And And And is a collection comprised of short, prose poem bursts, most of which are single-stanza blocks alongside the occasional sequence of similar-structured poems that explore poetic form. One of the structural outliers, as well as one of the more overt pieces on form, reads:

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), a collection of prose poems, is now available for pre-order, scheduled for release on May 15. He is currently working on crafting the final draft of his suite of pandemic-era essays, essays in the face of uncertainties, composed during the first three months of original lockdown, scheduled to appear this fall with Mansfield Press.