“As if you could open a jar of sugar forever”:
On Cole Swensen’s Ours
A garden is a curiously, and famously, double space. It is, first and
foremost, both nature and culture. Then, it is both a real place and an
imaginative space. It is to be both used for practical purposes (growing
vegetables, for example) and enjoyed for sheer beauty (flowers); it is a
place to escape oneself (to lose oneself in nature) and a place to find
oneself (to rediscover one’s relationship to the world through the
medium of nature). It requires a lot of effort, but for best effect
should look effortless. If it is private, it will inevitably cede to a
public it positions itself against, through time; if it is public, it
will be used for all kinds of private activities. It is the origin of
the world and, in its guise as cemetery, the end of it.
It is remarkable that such an inherently ambiguous space has received
relatively little formal attention from poets. Whether it is because the
subject seems too occupied by biblical content or too unoccupied by
psychological or sociocultural content, or simply because it has served
primarily as a place from which to speak rather than as a subject to be
investigated in its own right, gardens themselves, while unquestionably
at home in the realm of poetry, have seldom occupied center stage
thematically.
The gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte sweep along a grand perspective, of
almost a mile and a half (3km). The vast area, Le Nôtre’s first
masterpiece, is divided up into a sequence of terraces, forming an
orderly composition of borders of box based on motifs from Turkish
carpets, bordered flower beds, shrubberies, grottos, lawns, lakes and
fountains. Image from
http://www.vaux-le-vicomte.com/en/histoire-chateau-jardin-francaise.php
Cole Swensen began to fill this gap with 1991’s
Park, and has radically developed and historicized the subject with her new book
Ours,
a meditation on the French formal gardens that began life as the
playgrounds of kings and queens in the seventeenth century and that are
today public parks where any plebeian wandering through or sitting on a
green metal chair reading a newspaper can feel, briefly, like royalty.
While the garden served more as a setting for
Park’s more pressing themes, which included blindness, repetition, and memory, and whereas
Park’s gardens were generic and their architect purely fanciful, all of the parks Swensen writes about in
Ours
are real (though their perceptual reality still interests Swensen less
than their phenomenological reality), as was their designer, André Le
Nôtre.
Le Nôtre (1613–1700) was a landscape architect who had the apt fate to
have been born in a garden (the Tuileries in Paris), a fact Swensen
delights in. She also delights in the fact that Le Nôtre’s name in
English means “Ours.” In a short introduction to the book, Swensen notes
that Le Nôtre was, though a gardener to the most exclusive clientele
imaginable, remembered as “a great guy — modest, fun-loving, easygoing,
and friendly.” The gesture of the colloquial language — “great guy” — in
an otherwise noncolloquial introduction is a signal of the “ours” that
is to come in the book, as Swensen constantly works, through means
linguistic, thematic, and spatial, to bring this privilege-tinged,
noncontemporary subject matter down, literally, to our earth of 2008,
even while she takes pleasure in the beauties and particularities of the
seventeenth-century mind and its productions.
Never explicitly addressed in the book but always a subtext is its
paradoxical situation — that Cole Swensen, American poet of the
twenty-first century, non-royal, is poetically engaged in English with
French (formerly) royal gardens she has access to thanks to the twists
of history. Of course, one could read the triumphal note of “Ours” as a
political statement — the triumph of the communal over the private that
has been the result of one particular strand of European history. And
class is certainly addressed in the poems, often in the book’s most
playful moments.
But Swensen’s concern is not with placing herself physically as an
American, non-royal self in the gardens — or as a self at all (though
one assumes she has spent a great deal of time in them) — but with
engaging imaginatively and intellectually with the ideas of the gardens
and with their varietal possibilities for meaning. And while the gardens
are thus not quite “imaginary” in the Mooresque sense, the poems are
far less interested in the flowers under the nose than in how meaning
flowers in the head.
Parterres and orange trees outside the Orangerie on the grounds of
Versailles. From French fr:Image:Orangerie.jpg, personal photo under
GFDL license by fr:Utilisateur:Urban
The doubleness of the garden opens up a symbolic space that allows for
many meanings to be overlaid on and drawn from it, and perhaps the most
striking aspect of the book on first read is Swensen’s ample use of the
copula. According to the poet, the garden is, among other things: a
start, a mirror, a description of its era’s metaphysics, a sequence that
has no basis in fact, a way of making nature account for the mind, a
machine for multiplying, an allegory, an asymptote, a portrait, a tide,
and a tithe. When it is not part of an a = a equation, the garden’s
capacity to stand in for other ideas is pointed to through the use of
“as”: one poem is titled “A Garden as a Letter,” another “The Garden as
Architecture Itself,” etc. It is perhaps this quality of blankness,
which lets the observer draw her own conclusions, that most cunningly
reflects the garden’s “nature” half’s relationship to its “culture”
half: landscape has always been a form of matter that people have wished
to mark, to name, to change, to frame, to impose upon.
In Swensen’s rhetorical insistence on the garden’s metaphoric
possibilities, the garden becomes the great available signifier, which
has a seemingly endless capacity for signifieds. You see in a garden
what you want to see, and that’s what makes gardens so rich in symbolic
ascription. A garden does not only make “nature account for the mind,”
as Swensen so perceptively writes; it also makes the mind account for
what the mind has created within nature, for the mind’s
status
within nature. According to Swensen, a garden is a reflecting pool for
the mind’s wish to impose order, for the human ambition to design.
The book is divided into nine sections, beginning with “History” and
winding towards “‘You Are a Happy Man, Le Nôtre’” (a quote from Louis
XIV), passing through such sections as “Statuary,” “Orangeries,” and
various named gardens (among them Versailles) along the way. Swensen’s
now-trademark procedure: choosing a subject that fascinates her — such
as opera, books of hours, hands, and, most recently, glass (in the books
Oh, 2000;
Such Rich Hour, 2001;
The Book of a Hundred Hands, 2005; and
The Glass Age,
2007) — immersing herself in research on it, and writing poems that
take off from and include some of the findings of the research, always
interrupted, played with, and torqued by various means — has found a
particularly fitting subject in the gardens of Le Nôtre, who took the
given of the garden (a plot rather like a page) and liked to fill it
with optical surprises and mathematically determined perspectives. As
Swensen notes Le Nôtre’s ambition “to create gardens unprecedented in
their appeal to both the eye and the mind,” one can’t help but think of
her pages and their interplay of white space and text.
Of course, the delicious irony is that Le Nôtre’s formal gardens, with
their principles and rules and anamorphic exigencies, are being
investigated by a non-formalist poet whose primary formal impetus is
intuition. Reading Swensen’s lines is like walking through a garden
where views are opened up based on one’s position in relation to the
garden’s features. Her lines, in fact, are constantly in the process of
transformation — as is, of course, a garden — although Swensen’s lines
do not transform in a linear fashion, like a stalk, but rather through
fragmentation, like petals scattered by a breeze: the ends of lines
usually end up far from where they began. It is as if the lines had
wings that worked intermittently: one was standing in one place and was
suddenly weightlessly whisked to someplace else. A good example of this
effect is a section of the poem “And the Birds, Too”:
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