Flare is the culminating project of the 2007–2008 collaborative Artist and Poet in Residence Program sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery &amp; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The book includes new poems by Cole Swensen and new prints by Thomas Nozkowski. The poet and illustrator visited Yale together on several occasions to work on this project, influencing one another’s artistic process and completed work, and the book reflects the makers’ creative conversation and collaboration.

Flare

Arts & Photography

Swensen, Cole

Nozkowski, Thomas

Individual Artists

Beinecke Rare Book Library

Noise That Stays Noise: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

Praise for Cole Swensen: "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry." ---Library Journal "Engaging and delightful." ---Publishers Weekly A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. Ezra Pound famously said that literature is "news that stays news," but recent experiments in poetry and the sciences allow us to enlarge the statement to bring information theory and biology to bear on the issue---in particular, how the information theory–based model of self-organization from noise offers a way to look at language as an art material as well as a mode of communication. This concept directs these essays on poetry by contemporary poet Cole Swensen. Noise That Stays Noise covers a variety of subjects relevant to contemporary poetry and will give the general reader a broad notion of the issues that inform discourse around poetry today. Space---the conceptual geometry of poetry and its concrete mise-en-page---is an underlying theme of this collection, sometimes approached directly through the work of other twentieth-century poets, sometimes more obliquely through considerations of the role of the visual arts in contemporary poetry. This question of space and the shapes it includes and acquires offers a different way to look at some familiar writers, such as Mallarmé and Olson, and a way to introduce several more recent writers who may not yet be known to the general public.

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

University of Michigan Press

Praise for Cole Swensen:
"One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry." ---Library Journal 
"Engaging and delightful." ---Publishers Weekly A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
Ezra Pound famously said that literature is "news that stays news," but recent experiments in poetry and the sciences allow us to enlarge the statement to bring information theory and biology to bear on the issue---in particular, how the information theory–based model of self-organization from noise offers a way to look at language as an art material as well as a mode of communication. This concept directs these essays on poetry by contemporary poet Cole Swensen.
Noise That Stays Noise covers a variety of subjects relevant to contemporary poetry and will give the general reader a broad notion of the issues that inform discourse around poetry today. Space---the conceptual geometry of poetry and its concrete mise-en-page---is an underlying theme of this collection, sometimes approached directly through the work of other twentieth-century poets, sometimes more obliquely through considerations of the role of the visual arts in contemporary poetry. This question of space and the shapes it includes and acquires offers a different way to look at some familiar writers, such as Mallarmé and Olson, and a way to introduce several more recent writers who may not yet be known to the general public.

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

Ours (New California Poetry)

History & Criticism

University of California Press

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, André Le Nôtre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Nôtre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "le nôtre" means "ours." Whereas all of Le Nôtre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "le nôtre" to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

Ours (Volume 24) (New California Poetry)

“Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face” (p. 65) The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society’s actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.

Gravesend (New California Poetry) (Volume 36)

Poetry

Cole Swensen's beautifully exact and visionary meditations on specific paintings and sculptures give the venerable art of "ekphrasis" a new meaning. Whether focusing on a Siennese altar-piece, a 20th-century sculpture, or a river scene in the Loire Valley, Swensen "sees" with an uncanny X-ray vision that becomes the inward gaze. 'The difference, ' as Gertrude Stein once put it, 'is spreading.'

Try (Iowa Poetry Prize)

University Of Iowa Press

The hand is second only to language in defining the human being, and its constant presence makes it a ready reminder of our humanity, with all its privileges and obligations. In this dazzling collection, Cole Swensen explores the hand from any angle approachable by language and art. Her hope: to exhaust the hand as subject matter; her joy: the fact that she couldn't. These short poems reveal the hand from a hundred different perspectives. Incorporating sign language, drawing manuals, paintings from the 14th to the 20th century, shadow puppets, imagined histories, positions (the “hand as a boatless sail”), and professions (“the hand as window in which the panes infinitesimal”), Cole Swensen's fine hand is “that which augments” our understanding and appreciation of “this freak wing,” this “wheel that comforts none” yet remains “a fruit the size and shape of the heart.”

The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets)

Poetry. Cole Swensen's PARK is a book of poetry devoted to the discoveries and happenings in an unspecified park. Swensen, who was recently awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, takes an aesthetic interest in the phenomena of park-ness and an interest in seeing as a way of knowing what makes a place a generator of experience. The poem is organized numerically and gestures at its own fluidity as in the park "every time I've been back...I've had the distinct impression that everything is moving."

Park

Floating Island

Poetry. "Cole Swensen's STELE goes forth with an artful, graceful balancing as in a minuet, stopping, bowing and then moving towards new thought. This reading 'presumes a crossing' of empty space in each line. This crossing is a waking dream, linking action with image. The interval grows until it changes how one reads this work. Simple rhythmic constraints of diction and of space construct a fluid but uneven chiasm where one starts to read down and across at once, too eerily different musical scores. Sophisticated, in a refined, unhurried measure, the more STELE gains restraint, the more ardent it becomes."—Norma Cole

Stele

The Post-Apollo Press

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Books by Swensen, Cole

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Swensen, Cole. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Flare

Noise That Stays Noise: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

Noise That Stays Noise: Essays (Poets On Poetry)

Ours (New California Poetry)

Ours (Volume 24) (New California Poetry)

Gravesend (New California Poetry) (Volume 36)

Try (Iowa Poetry Prize)

The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets)

Park

Stele