Cole Swensen. The Glass Age. Alice James Books, 2007.

Review by Hadara Bar-Nadav

The idea of poetry as elastic (or plastic) and the interplay among the arts has been both historically charted and categorically denied. Think of Plato’s banishment of poets from the Republic. Or the exclusion of poetry from fine arts departments, events, listings, etc. Even the popular magazine Poets & Writers divides poets from writers as a whole. Like Mary Jo Bang, Barbara Guest, and Claudia Rankine, Cole Swensen defies such exclusionary categories among the arts through an interdisciplinary vision made manifest in her poems.

Author of ten previous poetry collections, Swensen gleans intellectual and aesthetic insights from painter Pierre Bonnard in her newest collection The Glass Age. A post-impressionist painter, Bonnard’s obsession with how seeing visually was represented becomes metaphor for Swensen’s formal investigation of linguistic representation. According to Swensen, Bonnard’s paintings that “seem to focus on windows are actually more concerned with the frame . . . thus framing not our view, but our awareness of viewing.” Fueled by an acute preoccupation with perception, Bonnard studied the process by which light rays and electrical signals are interpreted as visual images by the brain. His complex compositions, richly lit and colored, reflect his definition of painting as the “transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve.” Swensen shares in and extends Bonnard’s interdisciplinary approach. Art, science, philosophy, literature, history, architecture, and technology converge in poems that delight in the expansive flexibility of language.

Along with painters, poets, and philosophers, Swensen examines the history of glass and its use in early photography and film. “A window always marks the meeting of edges,” attests Swensen, and there are many edges that meet in these poems focused on the art and act of seeing. Drawing a parallel between perception in poetry and in painting, Swensen proposes: “Bonnard’s work implicitly asks what it is to see, and what it is to look through. We think of the arguments for the materiality of language . . . . ” With paint and glass as her metaphors, the poet doesn’t ask if language can help us see, but how. Swensen’s interdisciplinary ease gives way to exciting pluralisms among various ideological, aesthetic, and cultural concepts. Her poems generate a stickiness, a sticky list of concepts that want to smudge (to kiss):

poetry	↔	art
linguistic representation	↔	visual representation
poetic language	↔	apoetic language
viewer	↔	reader
viewer/reader	↔	art/artist
viewer/reader	↔	art/artist/poetry/poet

Clusters, relations, conversations, interrelations, transformations, and the list continues.

Swensen’s poetry illustrates a poly-reflexiveness in which art, artist, model, viewer, and reader participate. “So where are you,” she asks, “the visitor, who came here to visit a painter?” Swensen urges us to (re)consider our role as active participant in a poetry that considers three-dimensional experience and invites us to be more present in our lives and our worlds. “You have a choice,” she writes, “you can stand outside looking in, or inside looking out.” Using second-person to foreground the invitation (both her own and Bonnard’s), she writes: “The next afternoon, Marthe is out in the yard and comes up to lean on the windowsill and calls to you // who are in a museum looking at the painting . . . .” (And who, I might add, are reading a review about a book about a painting about a woman calling to you.) Swensen reveals her inherent belief in the visceral exchange between art and viewer. This stance reflects early modernist painting in which narrative was suggested (rather than given) with the intention of being completed by the viewer, who became an essential part of the art-making process. Swensen manifests this linguistically by conjoining conventional and experimental treatments of language. Lured by the familiar, readers are ravished by ideological and linguistic innovations.

Swensen presents an abounding and fluid model of language. Flat apoetic descriptions are juxtaposed against highly lucid and fragmentary poetic moments:

Glass is not a liquid, but a non-crystalline rigid, and the window made its first appearance in Rome around the year 100, when reviewers said, “of poor optical quality,” yet those who wanted fissured sight were living twice and lifted. When I was a child, I had a glass kite. Said the child staring out the window of the speeding train.

This passage shows the grace with which Swensen navigates multiple language systems. Such moments in her poetry indicate not only fluidity across language, but fluidity across disciplines as well as time, space, and experience.

Such fluidity however is by no means a statement of mastery over language or a claim of language as a superior artistic medium. Swensen writes, “I grieve // still for the infinitesimal // difference between / what you can see and what you cannot see.” Even in this loss, however, she is accompanied by artists such as Bonnard and his persistent paintings of the dailiness of things—living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms, their brightly colored flowers and soaps. And always, there are windows, a place beyond, which beseeches us to try and try again, to write, to paint. Even though every “window implies a blind spot,” it is this blind spot that is our invitation as readers and as artists. Trying to capture the world around us is not as easy as it seems. Even so, Swensen affirms, we “are multiplying the things we can and do see through.”

Swensen concludes her book with an ironic quote from Bonnard: “The most beautiful things in museums are the windows.” In the context of her book, this quote infers several possibilities:

1) Paintings and museums (and poems) are boring; process is all.

2) Light from actual windows and the activity beyond the museum space (or book or page) revitalizes art.

3) Paintings (and poems) metaphorically are windows.

4) Eyes metaphorically are windows, and the viewer/reader brings the paintings/poems to life upon viewing/reading them again and again (“every body involves a window ….”)

5) Art has failed, is always failing, must continue to try and fail because there are infinite ways of seeing (of saying, of writing).

Though this sense of failure or loss is palpable for Swensen—as it has been for many artists who navigate the outer reaches of their media—it also becomes steam, fuel for the fire, for art. Painting, Swensen assures, “opens a world that was not there just seconds before.” Painting, like poetry and the other arts, has made more ways of seeing possible. In this way, The Glass Age is a necessary book, one that reminds us that there are ideas, sensory phenomena, and experiences still waiting to be perceived and articulated, or articulated and perceived. The reader must be present. And the artist must do her part, too, stretching the boundaries of canvas, latex, syntax.

The poem as plastic art.