It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen. Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us. In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill. It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world. This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.
Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.
New Green by Cole Swensen
What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.
Having studied at Brasenose College, she teaches at Brown Nose University.
Posted by: Gerritt Cole Porter | August 03, 2022 at 10:44 AM
Is the new green the unseen?
Posted by: Molly Arden | August 06, 2022 at 12:48 AM
If it's green,
goose the machine.
If it's red,
don't: you'll be dead.
Posted by: cOvid | August 08, 2022 at 05:42 PM
Thanks for your comment, but I think you're making assumptions that you probably wouldn't make if we met face to face. My entire education was through public school systems, and I paid for my college and graduate degrees by working as a waitress. That's not to say anything about your reception of the poetry, but just to correct the fact that I do not have an Oxford education--and also to take the opportunity to say that many people who do have degrees from Oxford have earned them through extreme hard work, and not through unearned privilege. To equate Oxford with privilege is an outdated presumption--as is equating Brown with the same. Brown's record of inclusive admissions is really quite impressive, and for the past 20 years or more, they've made it the core of their ethos.
Posted by: Cole Swensen | August 20, 2022 at 02:56 PM
I come back to this because I feel that what's really at issue here is the fact that it's the writer, and often, as here, imagined or even invented by the respondent, that's being critiqued rather than the writing itself. I can't imagine that anyone really cares what you think of me, while many might be very interested in what you have to say about a specific piece of writing.
Posted by: Cole Swensen | August 20, 2022 at 04:26 PM
Dear Cole Swenson: The Internet being what it is, people behave like drivers in a traffic jam hurling curses at other motorists from the safety of their car. Please pay them no mind. The chances are the first writer was charmed by the sounds of Brasenose and Brown Nose and proceeded without regard for the writing of green, let alone the actual feelings of an actual author.
There is magic in green -- the green of primavera, of leaves of grass, and even of money.
Posted by: David Lehman | August 20, 2022 at 08:05 PM