Cole Swensen's Goest

Looking to develop a vocabulary of absence? Then proceed to Cole Swensen’s Goest. It is hard to imagine what Cole Swensen is up to in this book when a reader first approaches Goest. However, after reading the entire collection, a certain program and theme begins to emerge. The book is arranged into three sections, the centerpiece being the middle section where many poems about “invention,” “development,” “firsts,” and “origins” lie. These pieces seem to speak to the creative act by abandoning little outposts of words that are fortified with (often factual) detail. The reader then is allowed in on the process of creating these texts by filling in the gaps, becoming an unwitting imaginative partner in the formation of these texts. This activity frequently parallels the fragments from the “story” of invention, development, etc. that is featured in each piece. In this way the process and the subject are entwined. The first and third sections [“Of White,” On White”] are suggestive of why we should value this aesthetic of the broken, the fragmentary and torn open. These sections use metaphor for the open, the vacant, the ghostly(?) (which some have suggested is punning with the title of the book—Goest). To my mind, the middle section is the most important aspect of the book, the part that raises the most questions. I find that I must acknowledge Swensen’s project of valorizing the degradation of the language (or being reminded of its insufficiencies). This kind of aesthetic is hard for many to swallow at face value (I’m reminded here of my own battles with my wife who always wants to throw out the cut flowers as soon as the blossoms begin to falter while I implore her to let them die a little more, to let them burn out and show the full range of their beauty. Of course, my approach is not very practical because the seeds and leaves scatter everywhere . . . just as Swensen’s approach mat not settle with a reader who insists that the packets of meaning should not scatter and create messes that good, middle class folk will have to clean up later because of her negligence). Despite the formal elegance of the book and the ingenuity put forth in many of her writing projects, other larger questions linger. When we elevate the broken and disfigured to the status of art objects (especially in the realm of language), how does this assail the underpinnings of what it means to produce work that essentially undercuts the medium used to express it? In other words, why use language to express what language is incapable of? Perhaps one needs to develop a new medium of silence or gesture. Could it be that Cole Swensen is really a dancer at heart?

I can accept her infatuation with the aesthetic of the broken and lost in language as impulse; however, it seems to me that she has deliberately chosen this kind of aesthetic and tried to “develop” it and “invent” it. I ask myself why all this rigor and dedication to dismantling the language?

I think of poets as choosing language to be the one kind of technology they are fluent in, and now here comes Swensen (who in her spare time disassembles and reassembles language like it is some sort of outmoded solid state device). She points out the flaws in the design, the underperformance of the signal-to-noise ratio, etc. At times I feel like I want to say to her that if she really must believe in and insist on the ineptitude of words, then she should get a job in politics and work for the government. Leave the language smithies to their delights in what can be accomplished with language.

The wonderful thing about this book is that she does deliver on this language-as-instrument to a certain extent. Her accomplishment with the language is the act of omission. However, this is akin to what the composer can do with the rest or, perhaps more aptly, what a visual artist does with negative space (or that which is not contained within the frame/installation).

Unfortunately, it is difficult for most readers to override their prevailing notion of what is beautiful. They become wary of where to draw the line between what is beautiful and what is not. They ask: are you to develop an aesthetic based on bowel movements and toe fungus? Indeed, I always have a hard time convincing my neighbors that my dog is leaving little sculptures on their lawn. They are the same folks who strut around galleries, tut-tutting, this isn’t art .

In saying this, the difficulty in getting this kind of person to grant legitimacy to a project like Swensen’s rests not only in informing him/her what the project is, but in making them care about it. They will need to defend such an aesthetic, not just merely accept it.
Then again, maybe she is basing her aesthetic on the gaps and outages that occur in cell phone conversations. The piecing together of those is almost always more interesting than what the caller originally intended.

“The Girl Who Never Rained” is a short narrative of a girl who moves around with clear space surrounding her (we will see the reference to clear space in the second section) and the resultant attraction that follows. This is a neat metaphor, I presume, for the way that she would like readers to be “attracted” to the clear and open space of the poems in the second section.

“Others” addresses the permanence (and sanctity) of blankness, how it can be magnified by passing it along (the way one passes on language, a good joke, etc.) as in the first vignette (page 4-5) Swensen goes further to look at territory that surrounds some vague but hazy recognition “a scene of roofs so blurred they were often mistaken for sails.” This suggests to me that looking at something intently can invariably result in the blurring of that object. This is something she seems to be getting at in the second section as well.

“Five Landscapes” describes very sparse landscapes always with a bit of white as the focus—egret, spot of a white house, white sheet, white bird, child in a white t-shirt. While by itself this piece does not overtly provide any insight into her project, it signals that we should pay attention to white, the white spaces of the coming poems in section 2.

“The Future of Sculpture” is seemingly a meditation on Cy Twombly’s sculptures given the epigraph. Twombly’s sculpture exhibition at the National Gallery was of work from 1946-1998 and consisted of primarily found objects and rough fragments of wood coated in plaster and white paint. Twombly’s work is also said to exhibit poetic allusions to motifs and relics of classical antiquity. The white paint would explain all the references to white in the poem. Swensen seems to be cobbling together scraps much in the same way that Twombly is so that it could be said that he is her guide and model in this approach. The poem tends to veer away from this subject towards other areas (at least I could not make it cohere in my time with it). However, it is interesting to note how the block-like sections are arranged so that they appear to be little sculptures themselves. Already we see the glomming of plain fact (scrap piece of wood by scrap piece of wood) present in this piece that is largely the project of the second section.

“White Cities” returns to a meditation on white. Here the whole imagined city is white, made of white objects—chalk, talc, sugar. The sun (already mentioned as a key ingredient in “The Future of Sculpture”) returns and could possibly be a metaphor for brightness, illumination. Finally, in the last stanza, a man is glancing at windows (presumably only getting a brief snatch of the vignette presented there as he walks by—just as we are privy only to glance at the fragments assembled by Swensen as we meander past them). The man is always and only counting up to one as he counts the cobblestones. In this respect Swensen reminds us that the cobblestones (cobbled together) are to be treated as singularites in themselves as well as larger parts of the whole.

Section 2. “A History of the Incandescent,” based on John Beckmann’s “A History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins” (1846), is the full poetic project of Swensen’s pastiche and her concern (obsession) with white space. The first selection “Lachrymae Vitreae” reads to me like an ars poetica for the rest of the pieces in this section. The subject is a glass tear made by a man named Schulenberg in 1695. The rapid cooling of this tear causes it to shatter (a shattering that “must excite the curiosity of philosophers”). This tear then turns to particulates which Swensen so aptly relates to the fragmentation of we (the readers? the populace at large? “those who were home at the time”(those who are centered and belong to one particular space and frame of reference)?” It is the last juxtaposition which suggests as the world fragments, we fragment along with it. This would be a point that many traditionalists (who write from a singular perspective) would contest.

The technique of these poems is disorienting at first, but with repeated exposure (about 8-10 poems into this section for me), there is a tendency for the reader to arc across the gaps and spaces which Swensen presents. The imagination fills in the gaps in order to habitually connect them in semi-narrative. The presence of historical dates in many of the pieces suggests that there is a historical narrative to be had if only we, as readers, continue to pry.

“The Invention of Streetlights” is one of the more sustained pieces in this section. At first I was confused about all the classical references, the quotation by Libanius, etc. This may be because she is using Twombly as model, who also referred to classical shapes with his found pieces. But this piece seems to be quite close to having intact content extracted from it. The overall effect is to illustrate how the lighting of city streets became a democratizing experience. They became accessible to all, not just thieves and those who could afford protection from thieves. From the article that Josh sent out about how Swensen regards her poetics to be similar in how one goes through a city and discovers its incongruities, this piece is indicative of her overall oeuvre. Is this a kind of “white city” mentioned earlier in section 1, full of blanknesses that are to be written on?

In this section there are numerous references, call them motifs, if you will, to glass, the sun, the city, counting, phosphorescence/luminescence, etc.

“Sing: if in pieces we are accurate, here the we accrues” from “The Invention of the Mirror” suggests that it is the mirror that realigns all the various fragments of self (with a single representation of it.)

Throughout all of her cut-ups/collages in this section the gaps are sometimes hardly discernible, and there is very little trouble to read across the gap from one fragment to the next. Sometimes it is only after one arrives at the end of the second fragment is it apparent that there was a splice made. Many of these cuts are made as though by a master film editor. For example, “The Game of Balls and Cups” can read like a narrative nearly all the way through. Only occasionally does a fragment veer into territory that makes it apparent we are reading collage; it veers into extraneous subject matter. The transparent gaps are what one might refer to as “minor gaps”. The gaps that call attention to themselves could be said to be “major gaps,” and these pieces are systems of major and minor gaps.

Section 3, “On White,” returns to the themes in section 1: cities, the sculpture of Cy Twombly and more “landscapes.” In “Razed Cities” the most meaningful line is the last one, “Then who are they?” It suggests that blankness, whiteness is what we are all reduced to. With so much light and luminescence it is worthy of noting that white light is the composite of all in the visible range—red through violet. This perhaps also suggests that subjectivity, similarly, is the accumulation of all those colors that combine to form whiteness, blankness. The “they” might also be foreshadowing of the classic age which seems to rear its head in the next two pieces.

The “Future of White” returns to Twombly. The piece seems to be alluding to a specific work(s) by Twombly, but without seeing the exhibition, I can’t be sure. The “box” from the section 1 Twombly poem comes up again. This time it is of “the dead/we left spread out” that seemingly refers to the dead of classical Rome “by the Ionian Sea.” Here a non-descript “wheel” marks the beginning of the poem and the end. It seems to be the main subject, but I am at a loss as to what kind of wheel (or circle) is being referred to here. A wheel of life? A wheel of days, of time (a clock)? The little wheel turns vicious at the end. There seems to be regret attached to its existence. It is implied that time erases that which once existed to the state of blankness.

The “Five Landscapes” that end the book are much like the first “Five Landscapes” with one major exception. All the white items that served as the main focus in the first section are missing. The blankness has been done away with (presumably because it has been inscribed upon by other things as time ensued). Only the air is white, and it is emptier. The “field” dominates the white air. Symbolically, the field (the modern) dominates the white air (the classical) because it resembles the classical which has been inscribed upon and displaced.

[Note] John Poch's Review for Smartish Pace finds the potential for Swensen’s poems in Goest to be there, but is put off by the lack (they rely on the white space too much) of what they deliver despite the promise. He seems to be suggesting that Swensen’s emperor has no clothes. At the same time he seems to be suggesting that her presentation is reminiscent of John Cage, and just as empty. His only example cites the sparsest of poems “”The First Lightbulb.” It is only four lines, for sure, but to suggest that all the poems in the second section (and the entire book) are equally brief is to overstate the case. Also, he tries to disparage the book by saying it is more reminiscent of Joseph Cornell than Cy Twombly. This, though, seems like faint criticism to me. Cornell’s boxes were terrific. In any case, I don’t see him as anyone in the position of casting judgment. Additionally damning is his reference to Swensen’s language as something that Hart Crane would swoon over. Apparently, his great desire to contextualize Swensen’s work is something he could not overcome. It is not even remotely helpful unless one reads Hart Crane as a synonym for “incoherent,” but clearly Crane’s multisyllabic, pyrotechnical flourishes are a far cry from the plainer, factual and informational bits that Swensen has cobbled together. But what do you expect from a guy from Texas who writes sonnets about fishing? Why are guys like this allowed to review books they clearly aren’t qualified to comment on?