Noon, by Cole Swensen
(Sun & Moon Press, 1997)
When I taught creative writing to grade school kids, one of my favorite prompts used “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens. The idea of capturing any one animal or place or piece of fruit (sometimes we’d cut open an apple and use the inside view and the smell as an additional “way of looking”) touched a profound note in the kids. It does in many of us. We like it when the act of seeing is repurposed to the act of looking. Usually, we see the world. And when we’re reminded that we should take time to look at it, we’re grateful. Looking is intent, and it’s thoughtful.
To compare Cole Swensen’s Noon to the Wallace Stevens poem is apt, if only to prepare for what it means to look at the poems. As with much of so-called language-driven work, reading is an activity. I’d like to say Swensen wants you to “look” at the poems, except I don’t want to say “look” as in “be conscious of the language on the page.” I experience these poems. Swensen places me inside a lyric sensibility. I am instructed to reorient my perspective on the inside of language rather than the literal. Consider the second poem in the book, “Nine Trees.” Like Stevens’ “Blackbird,” complications arise when a single speaker is noticing the subtle differences among nine trees, sometimes taking them individually, sometimes as a group. Swensen is asking me to look into these complications, and to feel them, to have “listening skin” or to see “the little smile that seals itself to sleep.” Maybe phrases like this, quoted out of context, sound too sentimental. Too cloying. But it is Swensen’s ability to create a context that is so irrevocably lyrical that these phrases merely fit into the overall experience of the book’s poems.
The poem “Signature” might help me describe this lyric context better. Here, Swensen sorts through what constitutes the physical and non-physical body of someone the speaker knows. For example, how do I know my wife, who is sitting right now in the other room? Why, when I take her hand, would I say I am touching her? What does the “her” signify in that last sentence? Perhaps questions like this are unnecessary. In the everyday life, they are. I pick up Carrie’s hand, I am holding it. I am touching her. But Swensen’s occasion is the desire for a more thorough and personal understanding of her beloved. Is there a part of that body that would better signify who that person is? If she could cut the skin and the “internal skin,” would that bring her to a more beloved—a more significant sense of the beloved?
This anatomy expressed in “Signature” is the lyric context for these poems. As a reader, I am constantly probing at and into the language of a poem, and that probing reveals its body. But how do I describe what constitutes that body? The words of the poem? The definitions of each of those words? The elusive grammatical structures? Perhaps my description here would be a basic primer for a number of deeply lyric poems—books like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life or Michael Palmer’s The Promises of Glass. What I distinguishes Noon, for me, is the access it gives to this lyric sensibility. “I was the one with ten thousand hands,” Swensen says in “Body Parts for the New Millennium.” Noon makes me feel I can handle this lyric context with all those hands.
Recommended links:
Noon
Five poems at almostisland.com (one of the poems has my name!)
An interview on video (especially for the way to get a sense of certainty in reading her poems)
Comments