Cole Swensen
The Ventriloquist
Let’s let Cole Swensen begin this essay with a poem.
What the Ventriloquists Invented
The word juggler, for many centuries meant any
form that curved the sun. Any sleight of hand. Any number of which
were so imprudent as to claim
that the voice within the machines that moved was not
(as if nothing human
could also be magic) that precious some
believe
the answers be given by a man concealed.
These are speaking machines.
They risked their lives. A woman
or a child, waking up inside the oracle, the miracle of burning oil, swallowed, who
forgot to breathe, and who forces the puppets to speak?
Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria,
he found them hollow, it does not necessarily follow that
The penalty for trickery is death
(such is the wealth of belief)
seems to imply
behind a finely painted sheet of shell,
ancestor to the walls of Proust;
they spoke too.
Today we equate juggling with keeping things up in the air
but that’s a recent notion; it came into vogue
when the speaking stopped.
It’s amazing to see how the first four lines set up the poem, how they clarify Swensen’s technical virtuosity: her quick development of syntactical and thematic motifs and her subtle displacements of conventional contextualization:
The word juggler, for many centuries meant any
form that curved the sun. Any sleight of hand. Any number of which
were so imprudent as to claim
that the voice within the machines that moved was not
Just so, the implements of the writer, hand and voice, are brought into play, juggled as it were, into the first stanza. The ventriloquist’s “thrown” voice, like a sleight of hand, directs an audience toward a specular presence. And the poet’s voice, converted into script by the hand, stages the appearance of a writer who is not there. Swensen’s poem envisages a historical moment at the same time that it historicizes this moment of making the poem.
Meanwhile the syntax juggles our expectations. At first, we think we see three parallel clauses: “any/form”, “Any sleight of hand” and “Any number”. The anaphora and the comparable phrasal weights and tones all suggest a parallelism. Each clause might serve as an appositive, a refashioning of the meaning of juggler. But when our eye follows the third sentence across the line break, we are forced to revise our reading. Clearly “any/ form that curved the sun” and “Any sleight of hand” characterize the word juggler. But “Any number of which/were so imprudent as to claim” must characterize a juggler’s skeptical audience. We’ve been surprised by Swenson’s deft switch, the repetition and then the subtle variation of syntax, her sleight of hand, the poetic equivalent of three card monte.
And next, at the word “moved,” a body of words lurches to the right.
Thereafter sentences break down and an italicized voice interrupts. Only when sentences again begin to form parallel clauses, subject verb object-- These are speaking machines. They risked their lives—do we think we have recovered a normative syntax. Wrong again. Almost immediately afterward, the syntax involutes as it tumbles toward “who forgot to breathe,” an adjectival clause describing, it seems, the “woman or child” at the sentence’s beginning: A woman or child… who forgot to breathe…. But the sentence continues into a parallel clause: “and who forces the puppets to speak?” What can we make of: “A woman or a child… who forgot to breathe, and who forces the puppets to speak?” The grammar seems to divide mitotically, and once again clauses that at first appear parallel modify different subjects. Swensen’s grammar is decisively non-Euclidian.
It is possible that the linked descriptive clauses modify some other, invisible presence, an unnamed, ghost subject. Certainly, the poem invokes invisible presences thematically. They are invoked generically as well, in as much as lyric poetry necessarily draws a listener, you, toward the voice of language itself. But the poem works against our resolution of its mysteries.
Reading “What the Ventriloquist Invented”, we process a series of images that connect living oracles enclosed within hollow statues to Marcel Proust enclosed between the cork-lined walls of his study. But in Cole Swensen’s work, the poem’s entire architecture emphatically elaborates the more discrete linguistic meanings. Not only are voices “enclosed” in the sentences of the poem, but at moments words themselves are enclosed typographically: “such is the wealth of belief” is locked inside parentheses!
As that demonstrative phrase—“(such is the wealth of belief)”—and others float away from any anchoring text, as allusion, caesura, and disjunction dissolve the unified, explanatory voice of the first few lines, the poem acts out its ostensible subject material, the loss of faith in the oracular.
The Origin of Ombres Chinoises
In the physics of the whisper, this gallery of asias, I’ve seen them
rising, fan-shaped through lacquer
and later at the feast of lanterns, says Prosper Alpinus, 1735:
It takes a whole circus:
You stand the figures in a circle
and behind each one a person the light shines through to the opposite wall
And the specters thereon,
though the earliest treatises say spectators, and that the wall is gauze, and started
when a hand moving the guard a flame
caught and headed off on its own
There are screens behind which
all of ancient China
was born of these shades, contagious; they make us
more numerous in silence.
Throughout “What the Ventriloquists Invented,” words were juggled, like all the meanings, between sentences, contexts, and margins. In “The Origin of Ombres Chinoises,” poetic lines, like shoji screens, slide out to reveal long white intertextual spaces. Between the lines, sounds and words are sliding too. The high throaty puff of a short i passes from In to physicsto physics to whisper to this to asias. Lacquer, later, and lantern develop a pararhyme. Circus leads to circle, gauze to guard, and specters to spectators. Here, linguistic structures model thematic concerns. In the same way that silhouettes of figurines are cast onto screens, each word casts the shadow of its sound into the poem to create a floating echo effect. And the last sequence of echoes clusters the trinity of long a’s in shades, contagious, and make [us]inside the more extended reverberation of long i’s in words which comprise a kind of kernal poem within the poem: behind, China, silence.
The Discovery of the Bologna Stone
And all because it shines in the dark. It was an accident. Once there was
a shoemaker (1602) in search of gold
and most of what we know about light
is the color of water
woven without us, our lapis solaris
foliaceous in structure
and no one in the town would say a thing.
There are magnets for light. They enter the darkened room.
You pound the stone to a paste and shape it like a sun.
There’s no magic to this. You leave it in the sun
and it lumens, then it fugits, and then (it is written)
if not the magnet, then the siren: pyrophorus
as presented to King Henri II of France
on his way to reclaim his throne, a stranger offered him a stone on fire but he
saw the danger and turned away in time. Will the light come back, will the
darkened room, will the colors in their sequence become confused. Though
that which I obtained in 1782 and kept between cotton sheets in a luminous
state turned its brass box black. Once it was impossible to build a room
without a window.
In “The Discovery of Bologna Stone”, it is not sounds so much as images that are bandied about, reflecting each other and flashing across layers of narrative like quartz veins through plutonic schist. A predicate phrase—“is the color of water”—threads backwards to bind itself to two subjects, “what we know” and “light”. Similarly, references to light gleam across discontinuous layers of story, across embedded voices, and across odd (metamorphosed) juxtapositions. When we recognize how light connects the disparate sequences of the poem, we can see that the last, mysterious line, “Once it was impossible to build a room without a window,” is less a non sequitur than a corollary to the penultimate one. The inhabitant of a windowless room, like the lustrous Bologna stone inside its brass box, will tarnish and decay.
Swensen’s generative structural mechanics, her allusive references, her white spaces, her disjunctive syntax and the asymmetrical splay of phrases across the page help to fashion an accomplished poetics notable for the way it coordinates multiple views and voices, the said and the unsaid. Historical reference, quotation, description, assertion, and a panoply of pronouns multiply perspective. In this series, as elsewhere, Swensen’s poetic project underscores the place of language as foundation for the intersubjectivity that comprises human experience.