I first began reading the work of Cole Swensen sometime around 1980, so that I had already formed an impression before I first met her when she turned up as a student in the graduate seminar I taught at San Francisco State in the fall of 1981. My take at the time was this was a person who was extremely adept at employing a wide range of literary styles but who might not have a deep commitment to any. Happily, I was wrong about that. What she was doing, I now think, was sort of stalking out the range of what might be possible, the first steps in a far more ambitious project than I’d originally imagined. As her books since then have demonstrated, she has a restless, extremely sharp intellect & deep formal imagination. It’s hard to imagine her teaching full-time, as she now does, in Iowa City, but her hire there is one very clear way to prove to the world that the new Iowa City is a far cry from the barren waste land that characterized the workshop from, say, 1975 until just recently.

 

Swensen’s latest book, Goest, has just been nominated for the National Book Award, and it deserves to win. Actually, this may be the least toxic shortlist of nominees that I can recall ever seeing for the NBA: in addition to Swensen, the group includes William Heyen, Shoah Train; Donald Justice, Collected Poems; Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love; Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003. The others may all be School o’ Quietude types, but none is really obnoxious and one could easily make the case that Justice & Valentine are two of the finest poets to emerge from the conservative tradition in American poetry.