review
When Poetry “Rivers”: Reflections on Cole Swensen’s Gave and Alice Oswald’s Dart
Poetic treatments of rivers are as varied as the transfigurations of Proteus. The book-length poems addressed in this essay, Cole Swensen’s Gave and Alice Oswald’s Dart, suggest some of that range while honoring two European waterways, the Gave de Pau in the south of France and the Dart in Devon, southwest England. Through very different approaches, both authors capture the dynamic quality of streaming water as it intersects with nearby lives. Oswald signals such aliveness with a tumult of varied voices and tales in concrete images whose velocity provokes sensory overload. Swensen’s spacious net provides deep-breath moments where unvarnished impressions can penetrate beneath habits of interpretation to reverberate recursively. Both authors witness the river communities they write about, while employing the linguistic calisthenics of poetics to engage readers in dynamic modes of apprehending the texts and through these, to reflect anew on the surrounding more-than-human world. In the process, they provide ample occasion to revel in linguistic delights.
Historically, rivers have been influential in defining geography and assisting trade, industry, agriculture, and transportation. Beyond these practical considerations, rivers generally have metaphoric and aesthetic appeal, as Swensen discusses:
They radiate deeply binding associations with time, the flow of life, and the passage from life to death,
among others. To live beside a river is to live in constant connection to and conversation with these
powerful and eternal elements.
Their compelling aesthetic appeal, she writes, derives from their continuing movement.
It's the motion that is compelling; it's as if the various circulatory systems in our bodies—blood, lymph,
mucus—all respond at a visceral level to this motion. (Swensen, LWR)
Rivers that flood, host drownings, and become polluted, yet sustain multiple life forms, attest to the dynamism and incommensurability of the ecosystem as a whole in contrast to human desires to control or understand through static categories.
Oswald is a long-term resident of the Devon area traversed by the Dart and often swims in the river. Her project developed from regional inhabitation combined with two years of interviews. Dart was designed as a community project, as explained in the preface:
This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two
years I've been recording conversations with people who know the river. I've used these records as
life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters - linking their voices into a sound-map of
the river, a songline from the source to the sea.
Oswald derived a deep connection to terrain from years working as a gardener:
It was the foundation of a different way of perceiving things. Instead of looking at landscape in a
baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I
became critical of any account that was not a working account. (Kellaway qtd. in Parham 121)
Of the voices Oswald selected for Dart
All are 'working' voices. This reflects my preoccupation with Work as a power-line for language. When
a sewage worker talks of liquid being 'clarified', when a fisheries officer talks of the water 'riffling' or a
stone-waller says 'scrudging', those words have never had such flare.
While Oswald forefronts such occupational jargon, as well as local dialect and varieties of phraseology, the composition of Dart involved a dual process of translation, as indicated in her in-process report:
I began to think it was people's living, unselfconscious voices, not their poems, that were most awake
to the river… my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go
home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record - one precise, one
distorted by the mind - to generate the poem's language.
Marginal glosses introduce workers for whom the river is a resource, interspersed with local tales, as of Jan Coo, a swimmer who drowned and “haunts the Dart,” local sayings (“Dart Dart / Every year thou / Claimest a heart”), and ancient legends from times when the local oaks participated in sacred rituals. While each voice is distinct, Oswald writes that the marginal glosses “do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.”
Oswald tries to retain “the structure of oral poetry, which tends to be accretive rather than syntactic” and which employs “self-sufficient sentences that keep the poem open to the many centred energies of the natural world” (The Thunder Mutters x). Although most of its voices are human, Dart depicts these “many centered energies” as numerous species’ commingled niches, for example:
The spider of the rapids running over the repeated note
of disorder and rhythm in collision, the simulacrum fly
spinning a shelter of silk among the stones (7)
This tercet sets a keynote for the volume. The assonance and alliteration provide continuity for the forward momentum, while the urgent tempo implies a simultaneous rush of water and thought and then modulates in the third line, where the breathy soft vowels accompany an action of shelter in a less volatile zone of the river. All are sentient forces, including the river itself. As pointed out by John Parham, the interplay between humans and the more-than-human world in Dart resembles the chaotic ecology suggested by Daniel Botkin, in which the “harmony of nature”
is by its very essence discordant, created from the simultaneous movements of many
tones, the combination of many processes flowing at the same time along various
scales, leading not to a simple melody but to a symphony at some times harsh and
at some times pleasing. (Botkin qtd in Parham 112)
Dart is an animated mural, saturated with a dense interleaving of prose descriptions, poetic passages, dialogues, quotations, shifts in perspective and notations of historical and legendry incidents tumbled into one network. The ongoing succession of voices of the living and dead and of the river itself, each telling a tale, and the often-urgent impetus of the text, its rhythms not impeded by end-stops (periods) simulate the tempo of a powerful river. Dart’s personas generally seem immersed in their milieu; the concrete sensory images, often inflected with emotional intensity, are among the features that pull readers toward immersion in the poem’s sonorous language.
In contrast to the tumult of voices and images in Dart, Gave is an evocation in one calm, reflective voice, elegantly reserved and elliptical. Its texture is filigree-like in balancing text and white space, voice and the silences between. Swensen was invited to do a residency at Pau by the association “Poésie dans les Chais” and its director, Didier Bourda. She started writing about the Gave de Pau, a river she enjoyed walking beside. Her book was developed during two on-site residencies. Among her sources, the archives of the département, the Pyrénées-Atlantique, housed in Pau, offered significant material. Textual research was enriched by interviews with local historians. While aware that history is always inflected through cultural and personal filters, Swensen found that the reports of living historians revivified the history they recounted. The archival research provided data for the lists of “Views of the Gave” by various artists, in which the varied viewing angles support Swensen’s contention that no one viewpoint is “the” correct one. These précis detail the choice of materials and subject matter; they invite readers into the scene through first person plural address, as if you were present, e.g. “we are standing far off, up on a hillside… (43). The Mediathèque de Pau’s digital archive contains hundreds of postcards, “and they all make it quite clear… that Pau does not exist without its river…(49). These passages play counterpoint to the sparse, sometimes ethereal texture of the poetic sections.
In researching and writing about Gave as an “outsider,” Swensen could be considered a bystander witness. In an interview, she calls the witness role “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, evenly” (Anderson, Rumpus interview). Swensen further defines the witness role “as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view.” She notes that “Walking enacts a particularly enabling witness in that …it fixes the event in a way that avoids stasis, a way that anchors something without stopping it… To witness is to walk out of the self, it is to present the self as an opened space, a space that, in turn, invites occupation, occupation by the witnessed. The witness harbors…” (Walk v). To hold a view open would allow an impression to register without superimposing personal judgments. Yet the process of articulating such an impression cannot avoid some degree of interpretation. Swensen notes that “It’s impossible for one person to present another’s voice unaltered” (55). Poetry, though, can approach the fullness of human truth through “bringing language as art into the heart of the language of information” (NSN 55).
Some of Swensen’s discussion of documentary poetry in Noise that Stays Noise (NSN) seems to apply to her own research-based poetry, as Lynn Keller suggests. First is the issue of “how to reconcile the language of information with the language of art,” the latter linked to “poeticity: the unquantifiable qualities of sound relationship, word associations, and innate rhythms.” Swensen maintains that Americans associate truth with “transparency or ready accessibility.” Because poetry creates its own internally-consistent truth-value and need not be a microcosm of the “the world at large,” “documentary poetry has a paradox at its core.” If a writer can “bring language as art” “into the heart of language as information,” this will create a vibrant tension “by positing an incommensurability at the center of the work, an irritant that demands attention and refuses complacency.” “Poetry can also attain a unique relationship to truth, because it implicitly acknowledges and interrogates the limitations of language. The truth of the human situation can’t fit into language…because human truth surpasses fact.” To arrive at such a full vision, the “fully complex version must incite the imagination of the reader, must get the reader… into a responsive engagement with” facts (NSN 53-58 passim).
Her chosen method for such a merger of “informational art” in Gave is an alternation of informative prose with lineated “poetic” pages. Swensen establishes the verisimilitude that research-based poetry demands in the date-ordered historical sections delineating floods, bridges and other crossings and in the précis of artists’ renderings of the river. These passages contrast to poetic passages where, as Lynn Keller notes about Swensen’s work, “syntax fades into mystery or is interrupted” (“Truths” 284). The poetic passages allow an extension beyond the factual to explore the domains where “human truth surpasses fact” – the range of “poeticity.” Writers can “use poeticity to slow down our assimilation of language, to encourage us to take detours, to ponder alternatives” (Swensen, NSN, passim). As a result of this structure, the historical précis preserve their facticity, while a compelling indeterminacy hovers around the edges, providing opportunities for readers to expand the poem’s significance through their extensional reflections.
Where most Dart personas interact directly with river-water, the persona in Gave is usually located alongside the river. Here, the embodied grounding derives from the persona’s movement of walking near and with the river. Swensen relates her own walking praxis to her writing: “My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene” (Anderson). This triangulation between body-ground and visual relationships may provide an elusive network of cohesion beneath syntax that often fragments from apparent coherence. Research in developmental psychology suggests that all language reception and production is deeply connected with walking rhythms (Walle). Writing closely correlated with walking might allow one to elicit a body-brain state that predates much cultural learning to arrive at fresher impressions of one’s surroundings. The uncluttered language of Gave’s poetic passages suggests such a directness of perception: the poem pierces to the elements of water, sun, and wind and their visible and considered interactions, often without an overlay of figurative language. In any case, the triangulation highlights Swensen’s ongoing engagement with the visual and aesthetic components of perception.
The visual system is not a passive receiver of impressions like a camera lens but rather an active interpretive system. A simple act of identifying something requires extensive neural convergence and synthesis. More than half the neural connections involved in an act of seeing are downstream, from other brain areas, rather than upstream, from impressions of the external world. As these currents synthesize, their activity relates the new impression to the organism’s prior experience and interprets it in light of the immediate situation. The emergent interpretation is context-sensitive. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio indicates the reciprocity involved in an act of perception: “Perceiving the environment, then, is not just a matter of having the brain receive direct signals from a given stimulus, let alone receive direct pictures. The organism actively modifies itself such that the interfacing can take place optimally” (225). This view of visual activity is reflected in a passage from Gave, which queries the relative speed in several transecting movements, on different scales.
You walk alongside the river. No; you walk always faster? And does
that mean each molecule of water? Or does a body of water form internal
bodies, pockets that move in counterpoint, in back-beat, in eddies? Or …
…. What stays? I watch a large branch being carried down by the
river, and then a kayaker, moving faster, then turn to walk back upstream
like I’m walking into the arms of some thing. (19)
The multiple rhythms suggest a dynamic perceptual field, moving water’s complexity paired with the persona’s changing tempo, while the questions incite cognitive leaps beyond the visible. “You” are invited to entertain those questions while locating yourself liminally in a parallel context. The expression in the final line exemplifies the reciprocity of vision as the persona joins with the field of perception. This moment exemplifies what physicist Karen Barad calls “Meeting the Universe Halfway” in the book of that title. An attentive reader can partake of this attentive openness.
VOICING A RIVER
Gave’s first “poetics” page begins with the words:
no river rivers / no river knows
of rivers after / on others wander
Already “river” has become a verb and an agent that can “know.” Although it appears here in a construct of negation, on the following page it becomes “no river/ unseen” (10), though later, we hear there are parts of rivers that “we never see” (58). The shifting ambiguity correlates with the flux of water. This first poem quietly introduces the text’s main foci: the parallel movements of walking and rivering: “on walking/ on river;” the interactions of river and sun, which slips into the tale as “a bit/ of a sun thing/ a thing of the sun”; and a sketch of activity on the banks, which shape the river in a shifting way, since rivers are often “over-reaching” (9). “Thing,” the most generalized word for a concrete item – almost a linguistic blank - cannot help but raise the question, what kind of thing? Any readerly expectation for ensuing clarification will be continually deferred, as indeterminacy is a defining feature of the book.
What happens to language when it rivers? There is a hint on the first page, with the open “o” of “overflowing” echoed for two lines in “flower,” “towered,” and “tower,” like circular dents from a stone skipping in water. These echoes cleverly take the reader out of the water, demonstrating that “A river is always more than its water” (26). Later we hear that over eons the river has shifted its course; it now appears as “a river ungainly yet/ silvered…” The fluidity of water emerges through shifting elemental images, revisited in variants, along with reminders that the same spot in the river is never the same, as “a river slips…(58), and that layers of river move relative to each other, each layer affecting the others, as do the lines of the poem. The river is shown in interaction with the surrounding elements of sun; wind; and activity of perceiver. Repetition of words and phrases, with variation, connects to the riverine theme:
all repetition is in some part spell
as all water repeats itself (18).
The unembellished language, large proportion of white space, and omissions of punctuation produce an incantatory tone, while the ongoing questioning alerts readers to their responsibility in seeking a syncretic meaning reverberating among the text’s sparse words.
Most of the lineated “poetic pages” have left and right sections with the lines staggered between sides. The majority of right hand line sections are left-aligned, but at varied distances from the left section. On a few pages, the text meanders irregularly. As a result of these variations, the middle white space fluctuates in size and shape, as a river’s width fluctuates, both geographically and temporally. Although no simple analogy seems applicable, this bit of unpredictability suggests the dynamic parameters of a fluid medium. Writing about Mallarme’s Un coup de des, Swensen claims: “White space becomes the silent medium that connects and supports the more volatile, vulnerable tissue of language, even as it also becomes the absence within the sign system that connects the work to the reading body…” (NSN 14). These openings in the text provide spaces of indeterminacy that allow readers to interpolate from their own experiential base and actively construct connections. Complete certainty can cause a “suppression of imagination,” writes Swensen. The unquantifiable qualities of “poeticity” resist such closure: they slow the reading speed and reduce decipherability but provide more opportunity for the reader’s imaginative interjections (Swensen NSN 7).
One method Swensen adopts from documentary poetics is threading: “elements or details that reach back to other places- not long enough or close enough to be considered repetitions but small details that echo and haunt and set up a system of overtones” (NSN 61). The snapshot images are not accretive but reflect recursively on prior statements as well as those to come, so they split reader’s attention toward echoes of prior images that they seem to reactivate. This technique seems well aligned to a watery theme: a river keeps moving, but the water is still there, in front of you. One thread that appears intermittently in Gave is a contrast between the river’s dynamism and a human’s attempt to measure it or find its center: “a person with a compass” can be “tracing perfect circles”; yet the river has changed its flow pattern and remains “itinerant, capricious,” its “more localized changeability” demonstrating a “reckless disregard for geography, cartography, and all other attempts at order” (17). Time, too, disrupts attempts at facile comprehension: side by side with the literal history, Gave introduces a kind of ghosting where the former course of the river tugs the present course toward it in an unseen dimension. This abstract measuring desire contrasts to literal measuring in Dart by the water treatment inspector; he feels limited in his attempt to control the water’s quality through quantified measures.
A final example of threading in Gave is the set of sun-water interactions; they neither repeat nor accrete into a more complete image, but permeate the text like echoes from an unidentified source; “overtones” is a good analogy. Hints such as “the way it moved in the sun/ and the way the sun moved it” (17) weave through the text in evocative language that doesn’t yield a fully developed image but suggests a complex relationship that remains inconclusive at the books’ conclusion. There is relative visual cohesion on the next to last page because the lines are not split. Yet the partial anaphora of “or” challenges any fixity of view. The sun-river interaction, implies the text, exceeds what we can perceive:
There is only one river and it is in the sun.
Or sunlight stands upon the river
or moves across it like a lathe. ….
or we could say
there is only one sun and the river within …
Is the sun in the river, as reflection, or the river in the sun – its domain of influence? Such open-ended questions reverberate through and beyond the poem’s spare language. The final page ends with a little-considered fact, followed by an extraordinary image that encapsulates the resonant indeterminacy of the book as a whole:
most rivers/ are not actually flowing, but falling
the length of themselves/ times the sun” (58).
…………
Early in Dart, an otter offers a view of the balance of the wild and “civilized” on the river’s perimeter:
everyone converges on bridges, bank holidays it fills up with
cars, people set up tables in the reeds, but a mile either side
you’re back into wilderness” (6).
This view establishes an orientation to the terrain. Unlike Gave, the outer frame of Dart follows the river’s geographical parameters from source to sea. This narrative order provides a provisional sense of cohesion, which is reinforced by the partially repeated questions at beginning and end. “Who’s this moving alive over the moor?” begins the poem and initiates an intermittent dialog between an animate river and its visitors. The walker, “an old man seeking and finding a difficulty,” expects to find his way by map. Meanwhile the river, “trying to summon itself by speaking,” is “working/ into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart” (1). Personified from the outset as a far-from-innocuous character, the river critiques human self-preoccupation:
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,
clomping the silence in pieces….
Here is a human viewed from “outside” as an interloper, thrusting his artificial noises over the flow sounds. The irony of the discordant purposes is brief: the man finds a rapport with the water’s liveliness as he discovers the river
in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river/
one step-width water/ of linked stones /trills in the stones/
glides in the trills/ eels in the glides
This set of nested containers, including three sequential choriambs enfolded within the emerging river, offers a sense of living processes interleaved. The map-holder is a stand-in for our attempts at controlling or sorting things out literality; his engagement in the vital activity of the river acts as an invitation to approach the text with a more open mindset. In an ongoing series of shifts, the walker’s confidence in the map “folded in my mack pocket” fades before his growing awareness of vulnerability as night approaches. Such brief snapshots of a person’s internal shifts concomitant with the river’s activity enrich the narrative blend.
Narrative cohesion is challenged throughout the poem, for example by the incompleteness of many of the tales and the ongoing disruptions of linear temporal sequence. Historical events are looped through and not necessarily dated. Past legends continue to circulate, and ghosts lurk in the river’s depths: for example, a struggling swimmer is accompanied by ghosts of long-past warriors who drowned here (23). Many of the personas are in the river, or drawing water or fish from it. Aware of its passengers, the river seems poised to fold them into its own being, to out-voice them and let them slide under its flow. A confident canoeist who falls into the rapids has voice as well as body submerged under the riverflow’s unique voice:
come warmeth, I can outcanoevre you
into the smallest small where it moils up
and masses under the sloosh gates, put your head
The river’s voice, its “jabber of pidgin-river,” is ambiguous and multi-valent: the Dart absorbs, even seems to desire, dead bodies, yet also provides water and sustenance to other beings.
In addition to numerous personas telling of their individual activities in local dialect or occupational jargon, there is an occasional anonymous vocalizing presence. The water treatment manager justifies his decisions in making potable water to an anonymous other voice: “I do my best. …, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders.” Finally, he admits “if there’s too much, I waste it off down the storm flow, it’s not my problem” (26). Both authors chose not to be didactic in their ecological concern, but enfold testaments to how individual actions impinge on communities. Other voices in Dart reveal the far-reaching connections of the local, in terms of migration, travel, and commerce. Occasionally, there are deep-breath pauses to appreciate aesthetics, as when a fisherman says of salmon: “it takes your breath away, generations of them inscribed into this river.” Too, Dart has some full-stop moments: a blank half-page after an extended description of a drowning, ending with “and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty/ seconds” (21). Death is a full-stop even when, like Oswald, one considers it generative of new life.
The plethora of individual voices recede at the end before a novel “who”:
who's this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy,
all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave . . .
This dynamic, composite presence, the shape-shifter Proteus, encompasses all the voices of the poem not as a blend, but as many strands intersecting: not “we,” but “many selves,” richly inflected with multiple sonorities, epochs, and worldviews. Like Proteus, the river remains unfathomable; it retains the “inexplicable knot of the river’s body.” The repetition of “Who…?” at the end offers syntactic balance. However, the whole poem-panorama is left inconclusive by ending with ellipses. We infer that the river flows on, Oswald implicitly sharing Swensen’s perception that “a river doesn’t end/ in the sea” (20). The river encompasses all its multi-species histories within its four-dimensional body. It flows, or falls, and stays.
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES
While the mixture of narrative and lyric elements found in both texts no longer seems radical, it is worth exploring how this enables the authors’ purposes. I discussed above how Swensen challenges facile linear ordering. She offers a more complex view of connectivity in one example where the narrative skips across time periods and modalities and links visual art to current practical necessities.
The centrality of walking to Swensen’s writing praxis implies that a primary viewing position for the poetic pages is the bank of the river. Yet one passage varies from that pattern:
Or you can view it from the middle, on one of those lazy days when the river
runs broad and low across the plain between the mountains and Orthez.
The water is so clear that you can see to the bottom, down to the stones
that built all these houses and roads, and in the middle of the river, a fisherman—
it’s the opening day of the season—the water coming just up to his
knees—casting long and slow downstream. (51)
This novel view, described in the present tense, turns out to be a postcard image from 1929, “Where to Find Salmon in the Gave de Pau, by Olivier Dunouau.” Then the text skips to its present, linking the historical fish to the contemporary ones who need to maneuver around a dam. On the following page, the persona watching the fisherman sees a dead fish and wonders “what it died of.” This indirect suggestion that the river might be polluted is made explicit on the following page, which attributes the increased pollution to population pressure. “Fish” acts as a pivot, a node in a multi-dimensional network allowing perspectival shifts between multiple contexts and time periods. This passage too employs threading in the reiterated mention of the “stones that built all those houses and roads,” a statement that indicates the local inhabitants’ many debts to the river.
John Parham considers a narrative/ lyric mix an asset for bringing a living, sentient ecosystem into focus. He suggests that “an intermixture of narrative and lyric forms offers a potentially fertile model for an alternative ecopoetics: one where phenomenological modes of writing, able to generate a deep ecological regard for other species, and to which lyric poetry seems well suited, might combine with a narrative mode that seeks to unravel the complex interrelationship of human with nonhuman.” He takes his definition of phenomenological modes of writing from Jonathan Bate’s claim that “the immediacy of the poetic image, as rendered in sound… has the capacity to recreate what might be called the “phenomenological moment” …the moment at which direct encounter with nature impacts upon human consciousness.” By this means, Parham claims, “poetic expression can circumvent layers of culturally mediated meaning” (116).
Oswald shares this aim in wanting to create “a kind of porousness or sorcery that brings living things unmediated into the text” (The Thunder Mutters x). As I hope this essay demonstrates, to provide readers with the full impact of a direct impression requires sophisticated linguistic labor. Both authors push language beyond customary formulations toward what could be called linguistic overflow.
LINGUISTIC OVERFLOW
Swensen reiterates the Gave’s capacity for overflowing its boundaries:
a river by nature overflows/ its terms (29)
And so the river overflowed. In fact, the history of the region is a history
of its floods (31)
This matter-of-fact statement is followed by four pages of historical précis regarding specific floods and their damages. The river can’t be delimited. It overflows its banks, occasionally changes its course, and “doesn’t end/ in the sea” (20); by implication, the idea of ending is a human-imposed boundary on an ongoing process. Instead, A river “is its destination” (54).
Overflow is a theme within the poem’s syntax, as well. The poetic sections reverberate with a sense of order that periodically exceeds its limits, as the measured phrases are interrupted or break into fragments like water splatters. While Gave has a strong focus on the visual and aesthetic, Swensen is equally concerned with sonority. She claims that a full saturation of both visual and verbal in poetry will incite a non-habituated response, a new syncretic view:
poetry that works to maximize these two modes can deliver an experience that is 100
percent aural and 100 percent visual, which results in an overload, an overflow, which
spills into another zone of perception…” (NSN 32).
Here is one subtle example of how the poem can provide “overflow” through multi-sensory interjections:
a river is a slippage
is its business
river heading elsewhere
with a candle (54)
In a passage of indefinite images and actions, held together through the mesmerizing sound of assonance and alliteration, the sudden appearance of a candle pops out as a non-sequitur. Novelty alerts the senses to attend. There is at least a momentary break in reading tempo to reconsider the passage’s significance. The following page connects lit candles with pilgrims at Lourdes, 30 miles upstream, and describes their historical connection to Pau. Although in this case the cumulative references are proximal, there is still a demand for active participation by readers, in order to synthesize cognitive connections across page boundaries and sensory modalities.
Oswald expresses a parallel engagement with pushing language to limits where it can inculcate newness: “I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality,” she says.
At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you
get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning
into it. Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible.” (Armitstead interview)
This impulse to blend one’s embodied cognition with other life forms invites the kind of attentive, witness attitude described by Swensen: an openness to receiving impressions beyond pre-existing categories. Then comes the sorcery of poetics. Dart and Gave require very different negotiations for full appreciation. Yet both elicit fresh impressions in alert readers through their linguistic intensity. Dart approximates sensory overload from its density of unique images and tales, while Gave instigates overload through surprise, paradox, and other techniques that disrupt habitual mentation.
However deeply probed, rivers retain indeterminate elements on various scales and registers, both practical and metaphoric. Even without the poets’ reminders of ecological concerns, this fact points us toward the incommensurability of an ecosystem that always exceeds human views. In or out of the river, we pass through time along with other vulnerable life-forms. These books help us attend more fully to the vitality that immerses us. They invite us to look anew at the world we thought we knew, approaching its dynamism where “new water keeps flowing through each single strand of water” (Theodore Schwenke qtd. in Oswald, Dart 20).
……………
Works Cited
Anderson, Maria. “The Rumpus Interview with Cole Swensen. May 9th, 2016. <https://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-cole-swensen/>
Armitstead, Claire “Alice Oswald” <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/alice-oswald-interview-falling-awake>
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994.
Keller, Lynn. “Truths Surpassing Fact: Cole Swensen’s Research- Based Poetics.” in Sewell, Lisa and Kazim Ali. North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP. 267-291.
- “Singing Spaces: Fractal Geometries in Cole Swensen’s Oh.” Journal of Modern Literature 31.1 (2007): 136-160.
Oswald, Alice. Dart. London: Faber& Faber, 2002.
- The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
Parham, John. “’Two-Ply’: Discordant Nature and English Landscape in Alice Oswald’s Dart.”
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 64; April 2012. 111-129.
Swensen, Cole. Gave. Oakland, CA: Omnidawn, 2017.
- Noise That Stays Noise: Essays. Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press, 2011. (NSN)
- “Living with the River.” conference presentation. (LWR)
- “On Walking On.” Conjunctions, No. 63, (2014). 95-101. < https://www.jstor.org/stable/24517848>.
- Walk. Essay Press 2015. https://issuu.com/essaypress/docs/swensenep_pages.
Walle, Eric A. "Infant Social Development across the Transition from Crawling to Walking.” Front Psychology 2016; 7: 960.