“That Tongue Be Time”
“That Tongue Be Time”
Norma Cole and a Continuous Making
Originally from Canada, Norma Cole is a revered writer and visual artist who has authored and translated over thirty books and chapbooks. Though highly esteemed internationally in both visual art and poetry circles, Cole’s association with the New College of California and her influence on artists and poets has been overlooked by scholars. In “That Tongue Be Time,” Dale M. Smith seeks to remedy this oversight by bringing together sixteen noted scholars, editors, and poets to examine Cole’s poetry, translations, and visual art in order to place her within the larger scholarly conversation about contemporary poetry and poetics. The book also includes a number of black-and-white reproductions of Cole’s art and a contextual introduction by Smith. “That Tongue Be Time” provides a groundbreaking look at Norma Cole’s lasting influence on multiple generations of poets, visual artists, and scholars and should be on the shelf of anyone interested in contemporary poetry.
The impact of Norma Cole’s work as a writer, artist, and translator crosses continents as well as disciplinary boundaries. I am thrilled that she is finally getting the critical attention that she has long deserved.’—Susan Briante, author of Defacing the Monument
Taken together, these essays amplify a powerful alternative to the careerist and technocratic approaches to the field of ‘creative writing,’ an alternative where poetry, as Norma Cole practices it, is as much an art as a modality where life and curiosity entwine.’—Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse: Poems
Dale M. Smith is a professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is author and coeditor of several other books, including An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (UNM Press).
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Norma Cole and a Continuous Making
Dale M. Smith
PART I. NEWS AND MYTH
Chapter 1. Norma Cole’s Mythology: “And it was always drainage for angels”
Kaplan Harris
Chapter 2. Apprehending Terror: Norma Cole as Poet and Translator from the French
Teresa Villa-Ignacio
Chapter 3. Norma Cole’s Fate News: The Small Essential Truths of Poetry
Martin Corless-Smith
Chapter 4. Aggregates of Order: The Deedless Deed of Meaning and the Ontology of Play
Steven Seidenberg
PART II. METHODS OF ABSTRACTION AND MEDIATION
Chapter 5. From “Paper House” to SCOUT: Norma Cole’s Abstraction on a Sliding Scale
Roberto Tejada
Chapter 6. “Documents / that document”: Norma Cole’s Archival Writings
Claire Tranchino
Chapter 7. Resonance and the Art of Teaching
Dale M. Smith
Chapter 8. “It’s the doing that matters. The making.”: An Introduction to the Poetry Collection’s Norma Cole Collection
James Maynard
PART III. “WORD/ACTION/IMAGE/WORD”
Chapter 9. Art Movements Behind Nine Drawings: The Early Years, 1945–1984
Joseph Shafer
Chapter 10. All Writing Is Projective
Jean Daive
Chapter 11. Befriending French
Cole Swensen
Chapter 12. “Louise Labé”: A Test of Translation
Ted Byrne
PART IV. IN COMPANY WITH OTHERS
Chapter 13. This Questioning, Witnessing, to Play too Much, Prophetically: Norma Cole and the Community of Poetry
David Levi Strauss
Chapter 14. Portrait of Norma Cole
Laura Moriarty
Chapter 15. Editing Norma Cole’s Where Shadows Will
Garrett Caples
Chapter 16. Norma Cole’s Natural Light: A Memoir, Reflection, and Critical Encounter
Vincent Katz
Bibliography
Contributors
