Cole Swensen’s Goest, Or How To Paint A City
Review by Randall Williams


If you turn one of Cole Swensen’s poems on its side, the right margin appears to be a skyline. Phrases and articles rise from the left margin like helicopters. And alleys are created by the long building lines.
This notion, that the poem is both an image and auditory score, is important to Swensen’s work. In an interview with Raleigh-based poet Jon Thompson for Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, she states, “I’m thinking of the page as a visual object as well as a support for something audial. You can get the eye and the ear going at the same time, creating interference patterns and interesting tensions and co-operations.”
Swensen’s page drawings guide reader pronunciations as well through the text. “The graphic use of the page affects not only the visual,” she adds, “it affects timing, rhythm and stress. Emphasis can be orchestrated by placement, and ambiguity can be fine-tuned through line breaks.”
In her most recent collection Goest, published by Alice James Books in 2004, Swensen uses not only line breaks but page breaks to control the reader’s pace through the text. In “The Future of Sight,” for example, she starts with the thought, “We draped the stage in sheets / and nailed it into place. And put a lightbulb inside it / and said that it bloomed” only to delay the sentence’s completion until the top of the next page, “too soon.”
The effect is this is that speech is being stretched and reassembled. She gains the active, objective image of the light bulb exploding into white on the obscured stage. Then she adds commentary, within the same sentence, as if punctuating it with a subjective tone. A joint, or pivot, is created. And, at this awkward pace, every statement becomes odd.
Subjective and objective tones, occurring within the same sentence, also beg questions about a consistent speaker. Did the same person end the sentence who started it? For Swensen, the I is not a stable entity. “The I is the option for specific perspective, therefore, the option for the particular itself,” she tells Thompson. “And so, for me, it’s the option to enter. We enter the world through an I. I like to think of Is as sites that remain constant while we slip in and out of them.”
In Goest, many of the Is are figures living contemporaneously with various inventions, such as street lights, artificial ice and hydrometers. In each case, the characters live amid historic change and the poem asks how those inventions reverberate with the communities around them.
For the most part, though, Swensen seems committed to Gilles DeLuze’s notion that, “Life is not a personal thing,” which serves as the book’s epigraph. We travel, therefore, into deep observations of objects, never seeing too far beyond them, or their surrounding scenario, again like one’s experience walking in a city. “The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth,” Swensen writes in Identity Theory, a Web-based magazine of literature and culture. “In the city, it’s the physical plan. As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it.”
Other people appear in her cities, of course, and they take various forms. In her poem Others, Swensen catalogs some roles they play. “In the crowded subway, a stranger stands behind you with one hand firmly, warmly, on the small of your back,” she writes. And in another section she adds, “You walk into a house / in which several people are sitting in the dark / around a dinner table, eating, drinking, laughing.”
Throughout Goest, Swensen meditates on sight, always seeming to prefer meditations and glimpses, as opposed to statements of the apparent. Glimpses seem to be a method for her to leech time out of a narrative, and pack it into something more concentrated like a memory or painting. “Niepce’s first photograph, / which was the first photograph, / was of a scene of roofs so blurred they were often mistaken for sales. / Or people passing / on the other side of frosted glass,” she writes.
Swensen draws us toward the generative moment of seeing, which is momentarily represented when we see incorrectly. “There’s a set of identical twins who communicate through prime numbers, / and certain figures in medieval paintings whose extra fingers / can only be seen at a glance,” she writes.
The conjunction here works literally and is weak compared to the juxtaposition. Twins speaking in irreducibles are dream-like. Saints with extra fingers seem otherworldly. Both are similar because of what they are not: obvious.
Many of the poems in Goest, at first, seem impenetrably difficult. Speakers are irregular and it is poetry without self-assertion. The poems invite readers to see them first as objects then, upon closer attention, small worlds. “I love the idea that maybe a poem can have a surface tension, a strong surface tension, so that you almost bounce off of it in a way that I would hope is pleasurable,” she explains. “But then you can, with a gentle pressure, penetrate it in a way that reveals or gives the language a depth. It’s the experience of two dimensions collapsing into three that I’m after.”