Book ReviewNorma Cole is an accomplished translator, painter and poet; perhaps above all, she is a writer’s writer. Stepping into her collection of essays and talks To Be At Music (Omnidawn, 2010), the average reader – meaning most of us – is likely to feel that she has fallen down the rabbit hole. Familiarity, a guide of sorts is needed. While a map of Wonderland might be nice for the pedestrian reader, such a map would imply teleology and a destination, an implication that Cole disclaims, but perhaps some postcards of what to expect might be helpful, not as guideposts, but to provide a sense of recognition. A phrase from Cole's catalog essay on the painting of Stanley Whitney (whose work appears on the cover), may create one means of entrance: Seeing him you’ve seen what he’s seen…Like a musician quoting a few bars of another song in his own song, the painter, at moments, makes tonal quotes: yes, thinking of Matisse here, remembering Bob Thompson’s flat emblematic use of color here, articulating the Yoruban investigation of shape’s numinosity, here. Cole's pieces are constructed using materials she has salvaged from the writings of others. These tonal quotes let you know where she has been and what she has seen. It is as much about materials as content, or perhaps more accurately the materials are the content in the same way that in Whitney’s work is about color and texture, not story or message. Foucault’s much-lauded essay “What is an Author?” begins, “The coming into being of the notion of 'author' constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences.” To Be At Music, through its use of quoted materials demonstrates what writing that undoes the concept of the individualization of the author looks like and in so doing Cole presents her argument for why in the contemporary world the idea of a single author is untenable. The illusion of the ego (atman) is hardly a new concept inasmuch as it is an idea present in the Upanishads, but a Cole’s schematic gives something of the western version:
means
before SELF SELF (Descartes, etc.)
makes
means
after OTHER SELF (Delueze etc.)
makes
Thus, for a reader lost in the Wonderland of Cole’s writing, two recognizable landmarks that might diminish the vertigo are: repetition of names and works of writers and writings, and the physical appearance of materials gathered from other writers on the page. In the first instance, names such as George Oppen, Robin Blaser, Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Edmond Jabès and HD are prominent. This is neither because she is specifically writing about their work (though she may be) or for any kind of scholarly showmanship. It is to show a reader where she has been and to demonstrate her claim that her writing is not her own, that she is not the author but that authorship of anything she writes is a communal effort not pinpointable to a specific time or place. It is not just that these writers inform Cole's writing but that they are not separable from them. As for the look of the physical construction, this sample from "Goldie and Ruby: A Piece of Short Sets": The line is eternally under attack. Tension activates the ground. You cannot paint it today as you painted it yesterday. If one is to move to experience further with all attention to the truth of the moment The work in To Be At Music spans approximately 20 years (achronologically ) from the above mentioned piece on Whitney’s paintings in 1991 to "Forever Amber" in 2011, with the bulk of the work centered in the 1990’s, and covers a variety of venues including talks, panel discussions, magazines, anthologies, chapbooks and catalogues. While there is no reason one could not start right in with "The Poetics of Vertigo", the first and one Cole’s best known pieces, it would be a little like trying to work one’s way straight through the food court at Harrods. Sampling a few of the things that appeal most might be the best strategy. One possible first sampling might be at Cole’s discussion of painting. Cole is both painter and poet, and in her work poetry and painting are never far apart. In the essay "Yellow and…" a discussion of the work of Marjorie Welish, Cole begins with the statement " ‘Cadmium Yellow Light and Cadmium Yellow Lemon’ what does it mean that they are both yellow." Then follows with, "In her artist’s statement (undated) Welish speaks about her use of diptych 'to announce that this physical different will be realized also as formal difference'." She wants to address "both the painting impulse and the poetry impulse." In the beginning I thought I could talk about the painting and the poetry together, how they both find their origins in "a smudge, a dot, a line" the "not very noble" "unpromising" initial and initiating expressions, "physically slight though they may be." The are two competing yellows, but Can’t have difference without the other thing. The repetition. Rhythm of repetition. Redundancy, even. Difference in repetition. but/and Although where there is body, there is not always yet voice. Unlike painting, however, with poetry: The agent is language itself, its indomitablility an uncertainty principle enacting itself, an undoing of form or an undone form, thus another definition of what form might be. What it foregrounds is the instant of crystallization into language, liquid crystal, continuous and sudden in appearance in the supersaturated void. The untenable tension between rhythm and the infinite, the infinite present within each word, in every letter, threatens the proposition of centetor, or certainty, of comfort. What is between repetition and difference?Readers who have difficulty with avant-garde poetry are more than likely the same viewers who have difficulty with non-representational painting. Reading Cole’s exploratory commentary about repetition and contrast in painting allows even the most bewildered to at least visualize what is being done and why. In doing so, it begins to lead to some understanding of the poetry of Welish (and other writers like her), which frankly, is likely to have has less appeal for the more conventional reader than her art. Understanding does not always breed enthusiasm, but it can at least lead to tolerance and willingness to enter into discussion. Writing more explicitly about poetry in the opening paragraphs of "The Poetics of Vertigo" Cole says, I had been thinking about the limits he [Oppen] set for himself , for writing, the limits a w riter sets and struggles with and against and sometimes through. These limits, once articulated, might provide clues about where the writer’s ability to engage with other work…leaves off. That is, the limits of one’s writing are the limits of one’s reading. One need not be familiar with Oppen’s work to appreciate this passage and its implications for herself as a writer. Quine asserted that, Romantic notions notwithstanding, the creation of something truly new is impossible but even it were not, it would have no meaning since "the edge of the system must be squared with experience." Nevertheless, Cole points out, what makes an artist is the pushing against the edges of experience. There is a delicate balance in improvisation where the music is not yet familiar and too far out to be heard. This point is always moving, a moving pint in the dynamics of the work itself. It can be utterly disorienting. Disorienting indeed. Denise Leto in Waveform describes contemporary poetry as , "a realm of writing in which identity disappears or is ejected, is seen as aesthetically inferior passé." The quotidian writer is likely to feel like Alice:
Who are you? said the Caterpillar. As mentioned above, Cole develops her thesis that the idea of single authorship in the contemporary world is untenable in various places throughout the collection, but if the poem is to exorcise the author or, in the alternative, if the poet (i.e. the person who believed herself to be a poet) is not actually the author of the words that flow from her pen, then how is she to proceed. Cole’s statement that "a poem is a navigational chart of moving edges" is not exactly a Guide for the Perplexed. Perhaps a bit more help is provided in her definition of abstraction, which is equally applicable to poetry, music and visual art: "On a sliding scale, like improvisation. Meaning is unhooked from reference and inheres to varying degrees in other elements of a work, such as a relationship, scale, color or cadence." Finally closer to home for many readers she says, in a piece originally called "Writing into the Twenty-First Century," "I’m interested in what we can know, or what we can ask, and how poetry is a form of this asking and knowing, this trying to remember or trying to foresee, or to grasp what is ungraspable, and play with it in a territory of risk, and of permission." This is an interest that most people who consider themselves poets share as well. A commonality. Something that they can attempt to grasp too. A third possible point of entry in To Be At Music might be to check in where Cole applies her expertise as a translator. As with art, in Cole translation is never far from poetry. In several of her talks on translation Cole repeats the story told at the end of the Aeneid in which the Trojans are able to come to a truce with the indigenous people of Latium, whom they have conquered, by allowing them to retain their name and language. Cole observes that a people are inseparable from their language provides one of the recurring motifs in her work. It also sheds light on the opening sentence of "Nines and Tens: A Talk on Translation: "The translation never takes place since the texts have nothing in common.", a statement that in itself would raise a few eyebrows. To Be At Music is a deeply philosophical work and, in terms of praxis, Cole walks the walk. She presses the edges. Her footprints as a painter and translator of French work are all over the pages. We know where she’s been. Even those with difficulty tuning into Cole’s frequency can still ask important questions of her work such as how statements such as "I am here to tell you that one has ideas before one has the works to say them" which sound so Chomskian square the with materialism that she constantly invokes. It’s hard to think that someone with a true interest in poetry would not find something of value in this collection. Ironically, it is probably just those readers bent on investing what they read with meaning who are most likely to find To Be At Music rewarding. It truly is a wonderland. |