Lex-Icon Blog Project Post 68 : Cole Swensen

Trains pass behind a screen of small trees, spend their lives, tree blind and tree gloved. Small things that grow. Grow undone. And outside it will, And it alone. Holds. White explodes. This late in flower the single is its pieces. Nothing is so white as that seen almost dark almost in darkness.

  

Addresses.Us in plural and on. A great sweep replacing space with tact; it, in wavering, paces a landscape to almost a landscape anchored. Stayed.Said held, small hand by the tree.By the things that move more slowly than trees.

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And orchard on. There is a great plain. If trees can count and they can. One more house built before. Fallen down. The falling on. One more canal the size of a thumb. And the great plain a single way trees take over a meadow. All that walking. Scar the throng. One more station without a name. Name the call. I heard something call. One if animal.And horses once more. A plain is cut. By a rivulet. A house stands alone

In a field.A white cow stands alone in a field. A white horse stands alone among trees. A line of trees stands alone. Will not this town. Will offAgain into what’s blind. Will say of eye and that so far. Strikes a far thing, a small thing, a thing at this distance becomes. Distance alive all alone.

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White flock over the field just set.Scattering flood.Over the field just.Straightened braid. Horses on all sides straighten the clay. And two white horses walk the silence. By broken steeple: steeple open: open the sky blue soft. Down a lane that then comes across. Cross, and change all this.

 

Light slices across the tops of trees, the very tops. We look up. White light cuts in the presence of. The lack of the tops of trees. Has light replaced, the light that is gold, the constant return, that we cannot see light enter the cells of the trees, nor what leads on there the path down to the cells below the trees.

BIO:

Cole Swensen is the author of over 14 books--Gravesend has just come out from New California--and a translator of French poetry into English. Her book of essays Noise that Stays Noise (U. of Michigan) came out in 2011. She's also the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founder and editor of La Presse, a nano-press dedicated to contemporary French work in translation.Swensen joined the community of fiction writers and poets at Brown as professor of literary arts in 2012. 

      Her other books :  Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010); Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008); The Glass Age, (Alice James Books, 2007); The Book of a Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2005); Goest (Alice James Books, 2004); Such Rich Hour (2001); Oh (2000); Try (1999), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize; Noon (1997), which won the New American Poetry Series Award; Numen (1995); Park (1991); New Math (1988), which won the National Poetry Series competition; and It's Alive, She Says (1984).

      Her translations of contemporary French poetry include Physis (2007, by Nicolas Pesquès); Future, Former, Fugitive (2004, by Olivier Cadiot); Oxo(2004, by Pierre Alferi ); Island of the Dead (2002, Jean Frémon) which was awarded the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation; Bayart (2001, by Pascalle Monnier); Art Poetic (1999, by Olivier Cadiot), Natural Gaits (1995, by Pierre Alferi), Past Travels (1994, by Olivier Cadiot), and Interrmittances II (1994, by Jean Tortel).