Okay, so where Goest Cole Swensen, exactly? Her book of that title itself presents a text in three sections, the first & last of which form short brackets (Of White and On White, respectively) around a longer sequence entitled A History of the Incandescent. At one level is this a long or serial poem, at another an exceptionally well thought out sequence of independent works. There is a sequence in Of White – “Five Landscapes” – that has an exact parallel in On White. Likewise balanced is a work entitled “The Future of Sculpture” in Of White, largely taken from the words of Cy Twombly, and a work entitled “The Future of White” in On White, likewise derived from Twombly.

 

The middle & longest section of this book is a sequence of 20 poems, virtually all of which have to do with first things. “The Invention of . . .” appears in eight of the titles. Other titles include “The First Lightbulb, “ “The History of Artificial Ice,” “The Origin of Ombres Chinoises,” “Things to Do with Naptha,” “The Lives of Saltpeter,” etc. A second way to look at this sequence is to focus on what precisely is being invented, discovered, evolved, or whatever: in addition to those already mentioned, we find streetlights, the hydrometer, the mirror, the weathervane, automata, Bologna Stone, etched, engraved & incised glass, the pencil and natural gas. How does one suggest ethereal? Evanescent? There is, in fact, a version of this book to be written within the framework of a history of the sublime – the sort of thing someone like Rob Wilson might write. And that is, I suspect, not too far from what Swensen herself is pursuing here – this is the kind of writing one might characterize as abstract not in the lazy sense of that word, but in the literal, almost philosophical sense that conveys out-of-traction, suggesting in the same moment a hue beyond color & a gravity that understands weightlessness not as a condition so much as a gateway & what fascinates me most about what Swensen is writing here is not this focus nearly so much as the rigor & intensity of her pursuit, which can only be described as marvelous.

 

Let me give an example. Here is the first poem from the series entitled “Others,” which appears in the opening section Of White:

 

You walk into a house

in which several people are sitting in the dark

around a dinner table, eating, drinking, laughing.

 

This simple text has, a careful reader will recognize instantly, a history & a context as well as several decision points, not one of which occurs casually or out of habit. The use of the second person invokes an entire tradition of “dream writing” that would include everyone from Kafka, the Russian absurdists, Max Jacob, Lydia Davis among more recent Americans & the work of Russell Edson. Swensen’s work stands up well – better than “well,” actually – alongside these other works. This is due largely, I think, to two decisions that occur in the final line – the first to omit the “and” from the list of actions, the second to include the period to a work in which it might not otherwise appear necessary.

 

Omitting the “and” destabilizes the list’s sense of completeness. It also gives the third line a sense of claustrophobia (through condensation, the ur-device of poetry) it could not otherwise have. The claustrophobia is reinforced through the presence of the period, which closes the image posed by this single sentence. Together, the two give this text a menacing air that is not visible at all through Swensen’s selection of words – unless we consider the second person itself to be “menacing” (a real possibility) – something I don’t think I’ve ever seen demonstrated so clearly before in a poem.

 

This degree of engaging the reader’s expectation only to undercut it is characteristic for this book. Similarly, for example, the sentence that wends river-like through the lines of the first stanza of “The Lives of Saltpeter” – “Glass made its first appearance / on the shores outside of Belus / when sailors placed blocks of saltpeter under cooking pots / causing the sand to fuse along the entire edge of the sea / ran another sea that refused to move”– sounds as if it was set up to articulate that fissure of syntax that occurs just prior to the last line until (and only until) the eye crosses over the stanza break to the first words of the second strophe –

 

has been proved false.

 

– again inserting an exceptionally forceful piece of punctuation. The reader whose attention flags during these shifts will lose his or her way quickly in these poems.

 

Another review that needs to be written of this book is one that contrasts the seeming openness of so many of its “transparent” subjects & the closing – indeed, constricting – forms that Swensen gives to these pieces. Even the idea of a central sequence bounded on either side by parallel brackets, prelude & coda, sets this book up very much against the apparent open-endedness of the American long poem.

 

Swensen is completely conscious of these stresses in her work. In addition to its title, with all of its layers, the book takes for its cover image a photograph of Running Fence, the site work constructed by Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude throughout Marin & Sonoma counties in Northern California in 1976, 18 feet high by 24½ miles long. To a poet’s eye, this endless “sheet on a clothesline” is nothing other than the line – including of course the line of the poem – made palpable & manifest. But to enter into it meant nothing less than taking a ride in the country, something a bit alien to lots of art lovers in that disco-defined decade. In some sense, the book behind this cover does something very similar, but reversing these exact dimensions – where Christo’s fence made closed form infinitely indeterminate (it ended only when it went, literally, into the ocean), Swensen wants to show us how the form of the poem seems able to close off the infinite power of light itself. The result is a book that is an immensely powerful experience.