Poetry, broadly speaking, is divided into two opposing schools: the “traditionalist” style and “experimental” persuasion. This problematic distinction has exposed more exceptions and has caused more confusion than it has helped. It is only recently that this rift has started to mend, thanks to poets like Cole Swensen, who declare two seemingly antagonistic poetic practices to produce a lyrical hybrid that is at once both emotive and intellectual.
Swensen’s poetry comes at the interstices of art and history by using the colorful palette of language as art to inform about historical contingences.
“Poetry becomes a mode of investigation through which I can ask different sorts of questions, or put different emphases on the questions,” Swensen said. “It allows for more emotional imagination that would be appropriate in more straightforward history writing, and it allows history to weave in and out of sound and abstraction, so that its details stand out more sharply.”
This has allowed her to tackle such wide ranging subjects, like glass sculptures and the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, in just one of her books.
Besides writing poetry, Swensen has also taught at the University of Denver, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. Her own pedagogy is informed by critical theory, philosophy and, of course, history.
“You can’t give a classroom full of bright students a poem and say “what do you think?’ So I work a lot with historical background, considerations of form, etc. And I find that when I’ve given them all the information I can, they start adding to it,” Swensen said.
One of Swensen’s teaching concerns is the general reception of poetry. Within the general pool of entertainment, those who read poetry are part of a small pond, and even smaller, those who read contemporary poetry are a droplet of water in that pond.
“It’s odd that in this culture there are so many people who have no relationship to poetry at all or even actively hate it, because poetry engages the core of our lives8212;language8212;the raw material of most communication, and something our day-to-day lives depend upon,” Swensen said.
Swensen has also translated contemporary works from French poets such as Olivier Cadiot and Nicolas Pesquès into English. Like her own work, these French writers breathe fresh air into poetry as they combine landscape painting and philosophy, as in the case of Pesquès, and the shifting registers and tones of language, as in Cadiot. Translation, for Swensen, is the deepest reading she can ever give a piece of work.
“One of the principles that I find directing my translations is the notion that although you must translate the text out of the original language, you must write it into the target language,” Swensen said. “I think many translations fail because a fear of deviating too far from the original inhibits the translator from ever getting out of translation-mode, and so he or she never gets into writing-mode, and the piece never attains that vibrancy of the freshly written.”
Swensen is working on an untitled book involving the paranormal.
“I’m interested in the ghost as an outgrowth of collective grief and collective guilt,” Swensen said. “They seem to be magnets for all sorts of hard-to-define, hard-to-own and hard-to-get-rid-of emotions. Yet at the same time, they embody hope, in that they indicate that there is something beyond this world.”
Swensen will be performing her hybrid brand of reading and writing at the Art Barn tonight at 7 p.m.