Let’s let Cole Swensen begin this essay with a poem that she ends up cutting from her collection Goest (Alice James Books, 2004).

What the Ventriloquists Invented

The word juggler, for many centuries meant any

form that curved the sun.  Any sleight of hand.  Any number of which

were so imprudent as to claim

that the voice within the machines that moved                        was not

                                                                                    (as if nothing human

could also be magic) that precious some

                                                            believe

the answers be given by a man concealed.

                                                                        These are speaking machines.

                                                                        They risked their lives.  A woman

or a child, waking up inside the oracle, the miracle of burning oil, swallowed,  who

forgot to breathe, and who forces the puppets to speak?

Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria,

he found them hollow, it does not necessarily follow that

The penalty for trickery is death

                                                            (such is the wealth of belief)

                                                                        seems to imply

behind a finely painted sheet of shell,

ancestor to the walls of Proust;

                                                            they spoke too.

Today we equate juggling with keeping things up in the air

but that’s a recent notion; it came into vogue

when the speaking stopped.

Apart from her characteristic mixing of language types-- informational, historical, subrogate, metaphorical, elliptical-- what strikes me as remarkable is the way the first four lines set up the poem, how they clarify Swensen’s technical virtuosity: her quick development of syntactical and thematic motifs and her subtle displacements of conventional contextualization:

            The word juggler, for many centuries meant any

            form that curved the sun.  Any sleight of hand.  Any number of which

            were so imprudent as to claim

            that the voice within the machines that moved                        was not

Just so, the implements of the writer, hand and voice, are brought into play, juggled as it were, into the first stanza. The ventriloquist’s “thrown” voice, like a sleight of hand, directs an audience toward a specular presence.  And the poet’s voice, converted into script by the hand, stages the appearance of a writer who is not there.  Swensen’s poem envisages a historical moment at the same time that it historicizes this moment of making the poem. 

Meanwhile the syntax juggles our expectations.  At first, we think we see three parallel clauses: “any/form”, “Any sleight of hand” and  “Any number”.   Anaphora and the comparable phrasal weights and tones all suggest a parallelism with each clause serving as an appositive, a refashioning of the meaning of juggler.  But when our eye follows the third sentence across the line break, we are forced to revise our reading.  It’s fairly clear that “any/ form that curved the sun” and “Any sleight of hand” characterize the juggler.  But “Any number of which/were so imprudent as to claim” more probably characterizes a juggler’s skeptical audience. We’ve been surprised by Swensen’s deft switch, the repetition and then the subtle variation of syntax, her sleight of hand, the poetic equivalent of three card monte. 

And next, at the word “moved,” a body of words lurches to the right. 

Thereafter sentences break down and an italicized voice interrupts.  Only when sentences again begin to form parallel clauses, subject verb object-- These are speaking machines.  They risked their lives—do we think we have recovered a normative syntax.  And we are wrong.  Almost immediately afterward, the syntax involutes as it tumbles toward “who forgot to breathe,” an adjectival clause describing, it seems, the “woman or child” at the sentence’s beginning: A woman or child… who forgot to breathe….  But the sentence continues into a parallel clause: “and who forces the puppets to speak?” What can we make of: “A woman or a child… who forgot to breathe, and who forces the puppets to speak?”  Once again, clauses that at first appear parallel come to modify different subjects. Swensen’s grammar is decisively non-Euclidian.

It is possible that the linked descriptive clauses modify some other, invisible presence, an unnamed, ghost subject. Certainly, the poem invokes invisible presences thematically. They are invoked generically as well, in as much as lyric poetry necessarily draws a listener, you, toward the voice of language itself.  But the poem works against our resolution of its mysteries.

Reading “What the Ventriloquist Invented”, we process a series of images that connect living oracles enclosed within hollow statues to Marcel Proust enclosed between the cork-lined walls of his study. But in Cole Swensen’s work, the poem’s entire architecture emphatically elaborates the more discrete linguistic meanings.  Not only are voices “enclosed” in the sentences of the poem, but at moments words themselves are enclosed typographically: “such is the wealth of belief” is locked inside parentheses! 

As that demonstrative phrase—“(such is the wealth of belief)”—and others float away from any anchoring text, as allusion, caesura, and disjunction dissolve the unified, explanatory voice of the first few lines, the poem acts out its ostensible subject material, the loss of faith in the oracular.

The Origin of Ombres Chinoises

In the physics of the whisper, this gallery of asias, I’ve seen them

                                                                                    rising, fan-shaped through lacquer

and later at the feast of lanterns, says Prosper Alpinus, 1735:

                                                                                    It takes a whole circus:

                                                                                    You stand the figures in a circle

and behind each one a person the light shines through to the opposite wall

                                                                                    And the specters thereon,

though the earliest treatises say spectators, and that the wall is gauze, and started

when a hand moving the guard a flame

caught and headed off on its own

                                                            There are screens behind which

all of ancient China

                                                was born of these shades, contagious; they make us

more numerous in silence.

Throughout “What the Ventriloquists Invented,” words are juggled, like all the meanings, between sentences, contexts, and margins.  In “The Origin of Ombres Chinoises,” poetic lines, like shoji screens, slide out to reveal long white intertextual spaces.  Between the lines, sounds and words are sliding too.  The high throaty puff of a short i passes from In to physics to physics to whisper to this to asias.  Lacquer, later, and lantern develop a pararhyme.  Circus leads to circle, gauze to guard, and specters to spectators. 

These sonic and linguistic structures model thematic concerns as well. In the same way that silhouettes of figurines are cast onto screens, each word casts the shadow of its sound into the poem to create a floating echo effect.  And the last sequence of echoes clusters the trinity of long a’s in shades, contagious, and make inside the more extended reverberation of long i’s in words which comprise a kind of kernel poem-within-the-poem: behind, China, silence.

The Discovery of the Bologna Stone

And all because it shines in the dark.  It was an accident.  Once there was

a shoemaker (1602) in search of gold

and most of what we know about light

is the color of water

                        woven without us, our lapis solaris

foliaceous in structure

                        and no one in the town would say a thing.

There are magnets for light.  They enter the darkened room.

You pound the stone to a paste and shape it like a sun.

There’s no magic to this.  You leave it in the sun

and it lumens, then it fugits, and then (it is written)

if not the magnet, then the siren: pyrophorus

as presented to King Henri II of France

on his way to reclaim his throne, a stranger offered him a stone on fire but he

saw the danger and turned away in time.  Will the light come back, will the

darkened room, will the colors in their sequence become confused.  Though

that which I obtained in 1782 and kept between cotton sheets in a luminous

state turned its brass box black.  Once it was impossible to build a room

without a window.

In “The Discovery of Bologna Stone”, it is not sounds so much as images that are bandied about, reflecting each other and flashing across layers of narrative like quartz veins through plutonic schist.  A predicate phrase—“is the color of water”—threads backwards to bind itself to two subjects, “what we know” and “light”.  Similarly, references to light gleam across discontinuous layers of story, across embedded voices, and across odd (metamorphosed) juxtapositions.  When we recognize how light connects the disparate sequences of the poem, we can see that the last, mysterious line, “Once it was impossible to build a room without a window,” is less a non sequitur than a corollary to the penultimate one.  The inhabitant of a windowless room, like the lustrous Bologna stone inside its brass box, will tarnish and decay.

Swensen’s generative structural mechanics, her allusive references, her white spaces, her disjunctive syntax and the asymmetrical splay of phrases across the page help to fashion an accomplished poetics notable for the way it coordinates multiple views and voices, the said and the unsaid.  Historical reference, quotation, description, assertion, and a panoply of pronouns multiply perspective.  In this series, as elsewhere, Swensen’s poetic project underscores the place of language as foundation for the intersubjectivity that comprises human experience.