Cole Swensen is an American poet, editor, and translator. She is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, including Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021); On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017); Gravesend(University of California Press, 2012), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry;Stele (Post-Apollo Press, 2012); Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010); Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; and New Math (William Morrow & Co, 1988), winner of the National Poetry Series.
Swensen has translated over 20 books of French poetry, creative nonfiction, and art criticism. Her translation of Lazy Suzie by Suzanne Doppelt (Litmus Press, 2014) was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award awarded by Three Percent; her translation of Island of the Dead by Jean Frémon (Green Integer, 2002) won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation; and her translation of Frémon’sNow, Now, Louison (New Directions, 2019) was a French-American Foundation Translation Prize finalist.
She was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Pratt Institute, and Temple University. Swensen was the founder and editor of La Presse, an imprint of Fence Books that was dedicated to the translation of contemporary French poetry.A book of her essays on poetry, Noise That Stays Noise, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011.
Swensen was born and raised near San Francisco. She earned a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University and earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a former director of the creative writing program at the University of Denver and taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is a professor in the literary arts program at Brown University.
Kristina Marie Darling: In addition to your extraordinary achievements as a poet and critic, you are a celebrated educator. What is your favorite literary text to teach and why?
Cole Swensen: Now, that’s a hard one! There are so many texts that I have so loved teaching. And then there are so many texts that I have come to love through teaching them. I find teaching to be one of the deepest ways of reading. My other favorite modes of deep reading are reviewing and translating, and each offers a completely different kind of reading. The deep reading of teaching extends the text, makes a text’s often unrecognized network of connections, its innate intertextuality, come to the fore. But to get back to the question, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is what first leaps to mind, then second is Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. They have in common a labyrinthine structure; they make you want to construct architectural models of them. And there are innumerable poetic texts that I love to teach. I often find that teaching two radically different texts together, no matter what their differences—tone, form, era, etc.—will create sparks that illuminate aspects of a text that reading it alone might not.
KMD: What is the greatest misunderstanding people have about how poetry should be taught?
CS: Perhaps it’s not a misunderstanding, but a glitch of vocabulary; our common way of speaking at times starts us off in the wrong direction, for, though we all do talk about teaching poetry, in fact, most of us don’t teach it as much as share it, experience it with our students and colleagues. The term teaching evokes a hierarchy; there are those who know and those who don’t, whereas poetry is equally unknowable by all, and so it can only be experienced. And it can be experienced communally. It’s precisely the fact that “poetry has no right answer” that allows it to dissolve hierarchies. My favorite school of literary criticism is the “point and say Wow” school—you don’t try to analyze or interpret but simply put amazing passages on the table so that all can gaze at them together in wonder. Reading is often thought of as a solitary act; you sit in a comfortable chair, curled up with a book, but as an activity shared with others, it can become even richer.
That said, I think when presenting poetry in whatever pedagogical setting, no matter how casual, we too often focus on meaning, on what the poem is “saying,” instead of on how it’s moving, working, the mechanics of the thing. Paul Valery was, I believe, the first to liken a poem to a machine (“A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.”). That very material approach keeps us focused on movement, on the fact that what’s at stake are elements moving in relation to each other, and that it’s the relationships, and, above all, the betweens that all relationships create that are the crucial sites of production.
KMD: In your experience, what aspects of the writing life tend to be neglected or overlooked in writing curricula?
CS: What comes to mind is not what is overlooked in writing curricula, but crucial aspects of the writing life that can’t be addressed by, that couldn’t possibly fit into, a curriculum. Camaraderie and networking are perhaps the most crucial—they’re absolutely essential, and though they extend into classes and workshops, they’re not generated there; they’re necessarily generated outside the academic structure and by the students themselves. Not writing programs, but the atmosphere that emanates all around them is excellent ground for the creation of community through creativity. The faculty take no part in its creation, though at times they do get to participate in it. And that’s where so much learning takes place—through students sharing with each other.
KMD: How has teaching and mentoring others enriched your creative practice?
CS: I’ve had the good luck to work in programs with amazing students—and I know it sounds a bit cliché to say that I’ve learned more from them than they have from me, but in my case it’s true. Everything from seeing the poetic choices they make to following up on their reading suggestions continually gives my own work new options. Also, because much in the classroom requires taking texts (both the students’ in workshops and other writers’ in seminars) apart to see what makes them tick (back to Valery and the machine), I’ve learned immeasurably from so many years of that incredibly pleasurable activity.
KMD: What are you working on? What can we look forward to?
CS: I’m just finishing a manuscript titled The Museum of Unnatural History, which takes birds, animals, plants, etc.—the usual territory of “natural history” (and how could a history not be natural?)—and takes them at odd angles or in torqued directions, sometimes bordering on the absurd. And I’ve just begun a new project on the history of windows. It’s just beginning, so I’m not sure where it will go, but reading up on the subject has been a delight.