Cole Swensen Quote: "My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between ..."

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My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene.
Cole Swensen / Poet
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My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene.
⇛ Cole Swensen (Poet)

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At the end of any of my project I miss the material. I pick subjects I love and then get very engaged with them, so stopping that engagement often feels odd and arbitrary, but there's a moment when I don't want to change anything else and when the shape and length feels right. At that point, continuing would be destructive.

Cole Swensen Poet

Being in unfamiliar places has no effect on my writing, except that it often means I'm caught up in the logistics of travel, the places and people on the spot, etc., etc., which can mean that I don't have the time to write. But I try, wherever I am, to take a couple of hours in the early evening to go off and write. Because I never write from personal experience, per se, where I am makes no difference except for this element of available time.

Cole Swensen Poet

Rather than thinking of sound and sense in my essays as two opposing principles, two perpendicular trajectories, as they are often considered in conversations around translation, or even as two disassociated phenomena that can be brought together to collaborate with more or less success, I think of sound as sense. Sound has its own meaning, and it's one of the many non-semantic dimensions of meaning in language. I want to emphasize is the formal dynamic between language-as-information and language-as-art-material.

Cole Swensen Poet

If you're deeply engaged in an event, you're part of it. But if you're outside of it, disinterested, you are the regard that registers history. And that disinterestedness is different from objectivity. The objective view sees only the event, while the disinterested one participates as well as views by creating that link to history. It's a type of viewing that's both inside and out of the event, that brings to the viewing the capacity for human emotion, for compassion, but holds it openly. And objectivity excludes the human element, and is therefore not a point of view open to humans.

Cole Swensen Poet

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

Jeanette Winterson Writer

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.