Noon

by Cole Swensen

First published in 1997 by Sun & Moon Press, Noon was chosen by Rae Armantrout as the 2000 winner of the Gertrude Stein Award (formerly known as the New American Poetry Series Awards), an annual competition. Swensen’s Noon is a stunning meditative mix of lyrical and prosaic poetry in constant motion.

Genres: Poetry

113 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Cole Swensen (b. 1955— ) in Kentfield near San Francisco, Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of over ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. A translator, editor, copywriter, and teacher, she received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz before going on to become the now-Previous Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. Her work is considered Postmodern and post-Language school, though she maintains close ties with many of the original authors from that group (such as Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles Bernstein,) as well as poets from all over the US and Europe. In fact, her work is hybrid in nature, sometimes called lyric-Language poetry emerging from a strong background in the poetic and visual art traditions of both the USA and France and adding to them her own vision.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

from The Landscape Around Viarmes
Landscape is light alone. Some white coming up from behind which like a pendulum will come to entrance. To evoke along. The border of a lake bordering the face. There was no one there. That turns and one after one. It is the repetition that makes it concrete. That makes it fall. The human body is blind except for the minute exception of the eyes. The variable sky extends inside. It is that gap across which in turning you catch a glimpse. Five million trees. We are barely alive. (11)

from Nine Trees
Within each tree swings a single gate
A valve of the heart
in the open sun opens out

And now divide by one. What
day draws deeply from the body now
the empty thing there on the shore
just where the shore joins the sky (28)

from Signature
When the words are carved directly into the body
we find the memory fundamentally altered
The digits in the musculature
That whisper and the other one,
they overlap they tongue to tongue
They are mine. Your body falls.
Which places it in space.
What makes a body real is its falling. (50)
[...]
When you wake up from a hypnogogic state
because a sound in a dark room and you can't place
the room and you think of every room you've ever
known and it is not this room. (53)

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is amazing, has quickly become one of my favorites and i must own it (i currently have a copy from loyola's library). she travels fluidly between line break and paragraph format and, while doing so, shows clearly with language the reason for the choice. her language is basic and brilliant, for instance "what would you do with a million throats..." is the one that seemed like it made my heart stop today, or my life. but there are a million of them in there and i want it perpetually to be "noon", i'm going to study this book like a bible.

[Cail Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like slipping into a waking dream, where rooms become fields, the bottom of rivers, bridges and crows in the sky.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of the 90s master poets recently, and these poems (Swensen in general) have a refreshing shape and voice. The form is loose and playful while seeming intentional, which I find rare. I didn't always feel as confident in the content--series that didn't seem to build much on each other, obsessions that get repetitive, and a reliance on some kind of outside reference, usually scientific ideas(as she depends on art in other collections).

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily, of the Swensen I have read, this is my favorite. Each of these 9-part poems have a way of touching images from previous poems to tie the book together, while intensely complicating the idea, say, of identity, when it's compared to a burst of crows flying into a sky. And yet those birds before was merely a hand shifted to resemble a bird.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the kind of poetry I should like, yet I often find it a little dull. I keep returning to it to find if it has improved. "Thought Experiment" is based on Einsteinian relativity; it's thought-provoking. I also like the concept behind "How Photography has Changed the Human Face."

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read four books by Cole Swenson today. This was the best of the ones I read.

This line seems to define what poetry is in general: "the impression that a small piece of paper is being folded over and over in your lung."

[Gary McDowell]

Prose poems?!