From "The Invention of Streetlights"
Certain cells, it's said, can generate light on their own.
There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.
and light entire rooms. .
Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.
on any corner with a torch to light you home.
were lamps made of horn.
and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.
Notre Dame seem small. .
Now the streets stand still. .
By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.
to photograph a midnight ball.
"Goest, sonorous with a hovering 'ghost' which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation-even initiation-on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the 'whites' of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen's poetry documents a penetrating 'intellectus'-light of the mind-by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent."-Anne Waldman
]]>
The post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard painted, among other things, dozens of paintings of windows. Starting there, this extended poem-part art criticism, part history-considers the phenomenon of glass, revealing the strength and fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
From "The Open Window":
Photography replaced the river, which, due to
unexpected complications, resulted in the Great Age
of the Train. Bonnard started photographing just as
the snapshot became possible. Glass negatives gave
way to strips of film, and the river froze, intact. In
shadow and light, the Seine, said Marthe, standing in
the garden, frame after frame. We are multiplying the
things we can and do see through.
Looking at the paintings themselves involves examining the way that they make meaning and, in contrast, the way that words make meaning of them and themselves--what happens when you have a representation of a representation? All the poems in this collection weave in and out of proximity to visual work, sometimes from the distance of a gallery viewer, sometimes as a character in the painting itself. Issues of narrative sequences and time float through the collection but are always subordinate to the play and rule of language on the page.
]]>