Spinoza In Her Youth
Norma Cole
publisher: Omnidawn Publishing, 2002
isbn: 1-890650-09-9
price: $12.95
The experiencing "self" and the pragmatic value of "identity" -- often appearing to be a priori because one can't know whence it came -- is wonderfully described in a brief poem from this new book:
the idealization of the face
in the year -1
nothing but a shadow
she so became her name
so first, this faith, it was
a social tool.
[91]
Cole, who hales from Toronto and moved to San Francisco after a time in France, is distinctive in her use of poetic methods often associated with a "French" style -- a reticent, spare rhetoric suggesting a classical education, a loving deconstruction of narrative tropes to offset a free use of abstraction.
She resembles Michael Palmer most among American poets, though some phrases suggest a kinship with Lyn Hejinian ("to say explore the experience the very thought of thought or a unified theory of the sensesÖ" [71]), or -- at hear most impenetrable -- a writer working through a Maximus hangover.
Spinoza is often forbidding in its restless need to escape summation, and often the drama of the poem -- exaggerated by italicized phrases and a halting, breathless expression -- doesn't convince the reader that there is a volcanic agonism antagonizing conventional lyric expression:
how people use each other like seratonin
linked by formaldehyde to protein
the antibodies will find you
if you hear hoof-beats
they must be zerbras. Ils sont tres sensibles a
la motion -- it's motion they notice --"
[24]
In the verse poems, there is an air of importance to the poet's quest to decode the riddle of experience, to estrange the "everyday" in the hope of super-real objectivity, but the fragments -- perhaps because they are so willing to be hermetic -- often fail to add up to a drama that demands interpretive attention.
The short poem "For shade" nicely suggests what Cole is after:
Now the woman lives alone. And
what does she do while she's alone? She
lives
its uncommon austerity
dreamlike not in its sense of
being vague but
rather in its clarity and vividness
[96]
But the "clarity" is often threatened by phrases like "recursive paradigm" and a penchant for being ludic -- linguistically, philosophically -- without any really joyful play.
The prose poems -- such as "My Operatives," the "Artifical Memory" sequence, and parts of the title poem -- are more successful, following through, in a subtly twisted fashion, on their intitial premises rather than leaping away at the first sign of a resonant white space:
The newspaper reproduces a photograph of Helen Keller beside the famous Indian poet. Her youthful and animated face lifts and turns affectionately toward his, her left arm extends toward him, the left hand, fingers spread, masking the lower portion of the elderly poet's face. What the photograph says: the poet's eyes stare straight out of the picture, at you.
[79]
Cole's great skill might be as a photographer, trapped before her subject -- "Here is the camera's inanimate lens, and here is the operator whose gaze is of an unprecedented interiority" [38] -- rather than as a dancer who leaps in circles around it.
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