Table Of ContentNoise That Stays Noise
Cole Swensen
Noise That Stays Noise
essays
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Swensen, Cole
Noise that stays noise : essays / Cole Swensen.
p. cm. — (Poets on poetry)
ISBN 978-0-472-07155-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) —
ISBN 978-0-472-05155-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper) —
ISBN 978-0-472-02771-2 (e-book)
1. Poetry. 2. Poetics. I. T itle.
PS3569.W384N64 2011
814'.54—dc22 2011011896
To my mother, Patricia Swensen, and my husband,
Anthony Hayward
Preface
In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound defined literature as “new
that stays news,” evoking the immediacy that literature can at-
tain and retain, the way that it can capture life almost before
it’s conditioned by language—almost, but not quite, for while
the language of news may be uncommonly fresh, it’ s still en-
tirely shaped by convention. Much experimentation in twenti-
eth- and twenty-first-centu y poetry has tried to get beyond that
convention by finding ways to keep language molten, to keep i
in motion, a possibility itself based on the belief that there’ s
something that precedes news, that there exists a state of lan-
guage more raw, more volatile, with its own unique potentials
not only for presenting experience, but also for expanding it.
The following essays explore various writers and ideas en-
gaged with such a state of language, often using paradigms from
other disciplines for the additional perspectives that they of fer.
In particular, the paradigm of self-organization from noise, bor-
rowed from the biological and infor mation sciences, presides
over the collection as a whole, for it suggests a way that lan-
guage-arts practices that are initially impenetrable to a given
reader can become recognized by that reader as power ful in
their own right while also enlarging the field of the sayable, an
thus of the thinkable, the imaginable, for the culture as a whole.
The geometry inherent in literar y structures is also an in-
terest that directs much of this collection—as are the relation-
ships of the visual to the verbal and the source text to the trans-
lated text. All can be seen as part of a larger question regarding
the shape of experience, and I have tried through the ordering
of these pieces to make their inter -relationships apparent.
What emerges, perhaps above all, is the primar y place of rela-
tionship itself, and of the par ticular shape of relationship as
dimensionless articulation, as the principle of ar ticulation in
both its meanings, and in a way that fuses them.
A note about the figures and illustrations that accompan
some of these pieces: after much discussion about cost and
reproducibility, we (author, series editor, press editor, and pro-
duction team) decided that the best way to get these images to
readers in a quality high enough to be intriguing and/or to make
the point they’re supposed to make would be, in fact, to send
readers to the Inter net, supplying them (you) with the specifi
search words that will get you to high-quality versions of these im-
ages quickly. On the one hand, I’m sorry about this because I like
to think that reading can and does happen anywhere and ever y-
where, and in particular, that it is not becoming dependent upon
the computer. Much would be lost by that; I think we all value
reading as its own machine-free technology—versatile, flexible
and amaz ingly portable.
On the other hand, the Internet can deliver you much better
quality images, and more of them, than we could in print. For
instance, the Adolf W olfli images alluded to in the “A Han
Writing” essay: we could have reproduced one, maybe two, of
these stunning pieces, and most likely only in black and white;
whereas through the Inter net, you’ll be able not only to see
dozens of full-color images, but also to access all sor ts of other
information on Wolfis life and work. To return to Pound: it was
he who, in his Cantos, gave us the Modernist model of the ex-
ploding book—the book that doesn’ t want to keep its readers
neatly tucked within, but that wants instead to send them out
into the world to explore all the people, events, ideas, etc., that
he brings into the work. In making our choice to use the Inter-
net in this way, we had him and his tradition in mind.
This choice also gives this book the chance to enact the
overflow, the enabling excess, that it so frequently mentions
and that forms another organizing principle of these pieces. It
is the inability to be contained—within a given genre, a given
technology, a given language, or even a given definition of lan-
guage—that has allowed contemporary poetry to rethink lan-
guage into a method of enlar ging the sayable, and thus en-
larging the world.
viii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following editors and publishers who
first published some of these essays in jou nals and collections:
American Letters & Commentary13, Summer 2001, edited by Anna
Rabinowitz (“To Writewithize”); American Poetry in the Twenty-First
Century, edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, W esleyan
University Press, 2008 (“Peter Gizzi’s City”); Conjunctions,edited
by Brad Morrow (“For M. Moore,” “Besides, of Bedouins,” and
“And And”); Drunken Boat #9, 2008, edited by Ravi Shankar
and Jean-Jacques Poucel (“In Praise of Error”); Faire Part, winter
issue, 2009 (“The Infinite Mountain” in French translation);je te
continue ma lecture, P.O.L, 1999 (“Quand le corps est une phrase
à venir,” translated into French by Juliette V aléry); Moving Bor-
ders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women,edited by Mary
Margaret Sloan, Talisman Books, 1998 (“Against the Limits of
Language”); Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form,edited by
Annie Finch and Susan Schultz, Texto Books, Cincinnati, Ohio,
2009 (“Seeing Reading: Susan Howe’s Moving Margins”); Poetry
Foundation Website, edited by Emily W arn and Nick T wemlow
(“Cy Twombly: Hero & Leandro”); Theorie, Littérature, Epsitémologie
#25, Presse Universitaires de Vincenne, 2008 (“Translating Tim-
bre,” translated into French by Noëlle Batt and Yves Arbrioux).
I would also like to thank the following conferences, events,
and institutions for which some of these pieces were written:
AFEA conference at the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris,
2007
Associated Writers and Writing Programs annual confer-
ences, 2008 and 2009
Attention/Inattention Conference, University of Denver,
2005
