Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Art. TO BE AT MUSIC is the first collection of essays by Norma Cole, who is one of our most respected poets writing in the innovative tradition, as well as an esteemed translator and visual artist. These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA
Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her recent poetry publications include 14000 FACTS, NATURAL LIGHT, WHERE SHADOWS WILL: SELECTED POEMS 1988-2008, SPINOZA IN HER YOUTH, and SCOUT, a text/image work in CD-ROM format. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert's NOTEBOOKS, 1956-1978, Anne Portugal's NUDE and CROSSCUT UNIVERSE: WRITING ON WRITING FROM FRANCE. She created 2004-6 Collective Memory, an installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," California Historical Society, San Francisco, CA. Cole has received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Nonfiction Award, as well as awards from the Fund for Poetry. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for over twenty years.
“Norma Cole says that ‘a poem is a made place, a deedless deed that stakes out or constellates ambiguity without laying claim to it, without attempting to master or contain it.’ She has here assembled into a book her long dialogue with many voices, some her own, some the voices of those she loves. These essays are never attempts to master, but they are subtle questioning of various works in various languages, and are impassioned engagements at specific moments in time; many were written as celebrations of writers such as Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen. But the liveliness of mind, constant and thrilling throughout, is the liveliness of Norma Cole herself. Like the person herself, this book is a fabulous companion.”
—Bin Ramke
“To read Norma Cole’s wondrous essays is indeed to be at music; her investigations subtle and expansive give us brave and lovely glints of what a writing subjectivity might ideally be. Here is silence’s substance, time’s abrasion, our linguistic possessivity and opening, an engagement with language and—stunningly—with the structure of the essay itself. Cole is as at home with Xenophanes as she is with Dante; her citational presences are flares of thought by which she builds the imaginary community some would banish from the Republic: where poets live, eat, remember, name. Hers is a search past borders rather in defense of them; she knows lucid and ludic are the same word and to be ludic—in or at play—is real resistance. Painting, visuality, translation, prosody, pictures, words, vertigo, time: the reader immerses in these essais, and marvels and is renewed.”
—Erin Mouré