Norma Cole
Encyclopedia
Norma Cole is a contemporary American poet, visual artist, and frequent translator from the French. A member of the circle of poets around Robert Duncan
in the '80s, and a fellow traveler of San Francisco's language poets
, Cole is also allied with contemporary French poets.
.
She moved to France in time to absorb the revolutionary atmosphere of the May '68 general strike, but returned to Toronto in the early '70s before she migrated to San Francisco in 1977, where she has lived ever since. Upon her arrival to the Bay Area, Cole got a job in the public school system, but it was through her association with New College of California
that she met her core community of poets, including Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer
, David Levi Strauss, Susan Thackrey, Aaron Shurin
, and Laura Moriarty
. However she continued to spend time in France, and her association with French poets has been crucial to her work. Important French connections have included Claude Royet-Journoud
, Emmanuel Hocquard
, and Joseph Simas, who published her first book, Mace Hill Remap.
Norma Cole is the recipient of the Gerbode Poetry Prize and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. "The Poetics of Vertigo" --- delivered as the 1998 "George Oppen
Memorial Lecture"--- won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. With Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins she won the Purchase Award for the photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize".
And:
Text & Image
Translations
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
in the '80s, and a fellow traveler of San Francisco's language poets
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, Cole is also allied with contemporary French poets.
Life and work
A Canadian by birth, Norma Cole received both undergraduate (Modern Languages: French and Italian) and graduate (MA in French, 1967) degrees from the University of TorontoUniversity of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
.
She moved to France in time to absorb the revolutionary atmosphere of the May '68 general strike, but returned to Toronto in the early '70s before she migrated to San Francisco in 1977, where she has lived ever since. Upon her arrival to the Bay Area, Cole got a job in the public school system, but it was through her association with New College of California
New College of California
New College of California was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1971 by former Gonzaga University President, Father John Leary. After 37 years, it ceased operations in early 2008....
that she met her core community of poets, including Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...
, David Levi Strauss, Susan Thackrey, Aaron Shurin
Aaron Shurin
Aaron Shurin is an American poet, essayist, and educator. Since 1999, he has co-directed the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.-Life and work:...
, and Laura Moriarty
Laura Moriarty
-Life and work:Moriarty was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and has lived in Northern California since 1966. She attended Sacramento State University and the University of California at Berkeley in the 70s...
. However she continued to spend time in France, and her association with French poets has been crucial to her work. Important French connections have included Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud
Claude Royet-Journoud is a contemporary French poet and artist living in Paris .-Overview:Royet-Journoud's publications in French include his tetralogy, published between 1972 and 1997: Le Renversement, La Notion d'Obstacle, Les Objets contiennent l'infini, and Les Natures indivisibles...
, Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
, and Joseph Simas, who published her first book, Mace Hill Remap.
Norma Cole is the recipient of the Gerbode Poetry Prize and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. "The Poetics of Vertigo" --- delivered as the 1998 "George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
Memorial Lecture"--- won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. With Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins she won the Purchase Award for the photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize".
Recent projects
Norma Cole's work has received great acclaim for her: "openness to traditions and practices, artists and writings, radically divergent from her own". Recently, she collaborated with The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at SFSU in honor of their fiftieth anniversary. There she helped to create a site-specific gallery installation titled Collective Memory which opened on December 11, 2004 and ran through April 16, 2005. The project was described as:- " a departure from her earlier work, extending what has been primarily a written, literary practice to the expanded dimensions of a public space...Aimed at exploring and embodying the creative process involved in making poetry, Cole...worked both on site and off, inviting, responding to, and incorporating into her text the comments, perceptions, and contributions of visitors...opening the possibilities for more active exchange with others.
And:
- Aspects of the installation will change over time, providing an evolving and adaptable creative space, altered by the objects and people moving through it...the project will openly demonstrate that poetry making is not an insular and isolated activity, acceptable as long as it's on the perimeter of society, but an integrated art form based in communal exchange, from which we need to learn."
Selected publications & translations
Poetry/Prose ~ books & chapbooks- Mace Hill Remap (Paris: Moving Letters,1988). [ e-textE-textAn e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...
version available: see External links section (below) ] - Metamorphopsia (Poets & Poets, 1988).
- My Bird Book (Littoral, 1991).
- Mars (Listening Chamber, Berkeley, California 1994).
- Moira (O Books, 1995).
- Contrafact (Poets & Poets, 1996).
- Quotable Gestures, (CREAPHIS/un bureau sur l’Atlantique, France, 1998)
- Desire & its Double (Instress, 1998).
- The Vulgar Tongue (a+bend, 2000).
- Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, 2002) ISBN 1-890650-09-9.
- A little a & a (Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles, 2002).
- Burns (Belladonna Books, 2002).
- Do the Monkey (Zasterle, 2006) ISBN 84-87467-44-X.
- Natural Light (Libellum, 2009) ISBN 978-0975299364
- Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2009) ISBN 978-0872864740.
- 14000 FACTS (A+Bend Press, 2009)
- To Be At Music: Essays & Talks (Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, 2010) ISBN 978-1890650445
Text & Image
- SCOUT, text/image work in CD ROM format, (Krupskaya, 2004).
- At All: Tom RaworthTom RaworthTom Raworth is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.-Early life and work:Raworth...
& His Collages (Hooke Press, 2006). - Collective Memory, installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," (California Historical Society, San Francisco, CA, 2004–06)
Translations
- It Then by Danielle CollobertDanielle CollobertDanielle Collobert was a French author, poet and journalist, born in Rostrenen, Côtes-d'Armor on 23 July 1940. She died, by her own hand, in Paris on 23 July 1978....
(O Books, 1989). - The Surrealists Look at Art, essays by AragonLouis AragonLouis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
, BretonAndré BretonAndré Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, EluardPaul ÉluardPaul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, SoupaultPhilippe SoupaultPhilippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton...
, TzaraTristan TzaraTristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
, edited and translated with Michael PalmerMichael PalmerMichael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...
, (Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1990). - This Story is Mine: Little Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy by Emmanuel HocquardEmmanuel HocquardEmmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
, (Instress, 1999). - A Discursive Space: Interviews with Jean DaiveJean DaiveJean Daive is a poet and translator. He is the author of novels, collections of poetry and has translated work by Paul Celan and Robert Creeley among others....
, (Duration Press, Sausalito, California, 1999. - (editor and translator) Crosscut Universe, an anthology of poetry / poetics by contemporary French writers, (Burning DeckBurning Deck PressBurning Deck is a small press specializing in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. Burning Deck was founded by the writers Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop in 1961.-Overview:...
, 2000). - Nude by Anne PortugalAnne PortugalAnne Portugal is a French poet who lives and works in Paris. She was born in Angers and attended Vincennes University in the suburbs of Paris....
[Le Plus simple appareil], (Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, California, 2001) - Distant Noise by Jean Frémon, (with Lydia DavisLydia DavisLydia Davis is a contemporary American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a French translator, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust's Swann’s Way and Flaubert's Madame Bovary....
, Serge GavronskySerge Gavronsky-Life:He fled Hitler in 1941. He graduated from Columbia University, and is now professor and chair of the French department at Barnard College. He lives in New York City.-Poetry:* Lectures et compte-rendu, poèmes. Coll...
, Cole SwensenCole SwensenCole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State...
), (Avec Books, Penngrove, California, 2003). - Notebooks 1956-1978 by Danielle Collobert, (Litmus Press, 2003) ISBN 0-9723331-1-8
- The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen by Fouad Gabriel Naffah (Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, California, 2004).
External links
- Norma Cole @durationpress.com includes e-book text of Cole's Mace Hill Remap archived here
- Collective Memory Cole's site-specific installation for the "The Poetry Center"
- Correspondence between Wendy Tronrud and Norma Cole
- "SPEECH PRODUCTION: Themes and Variations" poem by Cole at Shampoo website
- "Yellow and...: A Response to the Poetry of Marjorie Welish.": talk on the U.S. poet and painter Marjorie WelishMarjorie WelishMarjorie Welish is an American poet, artist, and art critic.Welish is a graduate of Columbia University and received her M.F.A. degree from Vermont College and Norwich University...
, recorded 5 April 2002; Slought Foundation Online Content; access/download recorded audio - Contemplating Table(t)s Marjorie Welish reviews Spinoza in Her Youth by Norma Cole on-line at Jacket Magazine
- Norma Cole, Writing as Luminousness (Part 1) essay by poet and publisher Laura Hinton