Cole Swensen

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I tend to work on a book from the very beginning. In the last few things I’ve written, the book is the basic unit, so while my books are composed of discrete poems, they are conceived as larger units. 

Lately books have started for me through a nagging interest that I want to explore, and often that exploration amounts to lots of reading and light research, and often it has something to do with the visual arts—the visual arts linked with history. It’s a way, perhaps, of insisting upon poetry as language-as-art rather than language-as-information. I feel like I learned a lot the Language poets when I was in my early 20s, and particularly about the material potential of language on the one hand and the dangers (political and social) of the illusion of transparent and/or objective language on the other. That attention to surface has mixed in me with a love of the visual arts and has generated some of my works, though at times I regret poetry’s inability to achieve the same immediacy. 

 That regret is in part behind my interest in ekphrastic poetry, in reworking that genre so that it’s not so much a matter of standing across from a painting and attempting to replicate or translate its emotional impact, but of finding new ways to live with and in art, to make it increasingly present by having it infuse such a daily staple as language. 

I often begin with a specific work of art and a related idea. My most recent book, The Glass Age, comes out of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of windows and their paradoxical opacity (he used such vivid, dense, opaque colors), mixed with the idea that our age, beginning with the technological and scientific revolutions of the 19th century, is an increasingly fragile one, from the psychological brittleness caused by the loss of God to our potential to literally destroy the world.
The book I’d written before that, The Book of a Hundred Hands, began with a drawing manual by that name, and tries to see how much of a sheer concept the hand can become. And the last manuscript I finished, Ours, which is coming out in 2008, began in the 17th century formal French gardens of André Le Nôtre and addresses the idea of public versus private property.