SWENSEN, Cole
Stele

In Stele, Cole Swensen pens a series of lyric poems in couplets, organized in two side-by-side columns, which can be read together (across the caesura) as fragmented but interwoven lines, or discretely, as simultaneous vertical compositions. Either way, these oblique shape poems suggest the visual form of stele: stone slab monuments typically inscribed with memorializing texts—monuments that are also some of the most ancient sites of writing. What the poems of Stele commemorate, however, are not the public events and persons celebrated by the State officialdom, but the quiet movements of the mind of a peripatetic poet at play, observing and reflecting on the grand and grave minutia of everyday life. [publisher's note]

Published by The Post-Apollo Press, 2012
Poetry