“light which is not sum” - Norma Cole, Mars
I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point many years ago, someone gifted me Norma Cole’s To Be At Music. I had never read her—what is this amazing book? Of talks and essays, with a Stanley Whitney painting on the cover, and line fragments, notes, prose blocks, and quotes unfolding into exacting, yet improvisatory forms. I remember loving the title of the essay “Start Singing”—it refers to Chris Marker’s film about war in Yugoslavia—and opening to it now, I also remember the way the prose seems to speak to itself like a series of asides, while at the same time accumulating, moving into and against its own logics, finding ways to pose new questions and begin again: “Would you be so kind as to look at my eyes, as to look at the points of view behind false opposites. (At this point, I could have made an other different shape, but did not realize it.)”
Norma’s work explores what she calls a poetics of vertigo (via George Oppen, Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Motherwell, from a talk she gave at the Unitarian Center in SF in 1998), and translation (via Samuel Beckett, Emilio Gomez Garcia), and languages like Latin, Hebrew, Bugilai, and Zuni. It also remembers the The Poets’ Theater Jubilee, a festival put on by Kevin Killian and Camille Roy in the early 2000s, always contending with presence—how can a work look both forward and back—with community and the assembly of people in public, the assemblage of text on paper, the mobilization of, the looking toward the conditions in which to gather, and work, and “play…in a territory of risk.” Her work also resists easy classification, is seen and felt materially, as composition, it exists within variable proportions, moves across languages, stretches (and sometimes gives) across long and difficult textures and surfaces. That Norma is also a visual artist was not at all surprising to learn, given the space her work creates, and the collaborations with other artists (Marina Adams, Stanley Whitney, Jean Daive) that have sustained her practice for many years.
But I want to pause here, in the space between a talk and an essay, where To Be At Music lives. Cedar Sigo writes, in a piece about Norma: “I think of studies as forms that ask to be re-entered so they never seem bound by a sense of scale.” Because Norma’s works traverse so many modes—poetry, translation, drawing, performance, it’s hard not to think of modulation and change—that the work changes us, changes when it looks back at us, that a talk is not just “given” (in its final form) and an essay is not just read, but that they both exist as studies, or imprints of the other, apprehending and reanimating their forms. Like Dante’s “In that part of the book of my memory” from La vita nuova, which she refers to, they change each other in the space of the book, are notes taken and to be arrived at by a future reader, returning to notes. That language can know and question simultaneously, that it constantly composes, rather than closes to hold down meaning is something I learn each time I encounter Norma’s work, and I was grateful to get to speak with her about it.
Dear Norma,
I’ve spent the last few nights with your excellent film Scout, which I think first existed as a CD-Rom. I love the voiceover and the images flickering across the screen in twos—mostly from Toronto and San Francisco—and portraits of people holding what seem to be photographs or books, folding into other worlds. Can you talk a bit about how you came to make this film? There’s a distinct tension between the idea of origins and the idea of gaps, detours, and disavowals, especially with the formal structure of the film—the two frames side by side, creating associative and disruptive logics. And lines being read over them, like “wanting becomes a memory of the father,” or “the alive and the present can never measure up to the other story” contain so much of your poetics. I really love the title Scout.
Hi dear Alexis,
I never thought of it as “a film” until you gave it back to me as “your film.” Because it was made in so many stages (multimedia stages; the constraints including the associative and disruptive side-by-side photographic images; the images of “people we know” or knew with or without faces), “serial use of the several impulses. Working with elements, letting them talk,” I was thinking of it as it is now on Jerrold Shiroma’s website, durationpress.com, as a document of these stages of emotion and media. Thank you for handing it back to me as a fait accompli, a film, for which I thank you.
Like your Caetano, SCOUT is an “experiment in autobiography,” a sort of anti-autobiography.
Hi Norma,
Yes I definitely see the different media coming together to make this film, essay, poem, document of a film. And that makes sense, your voiceover, which gives the sense of one long, continuous poem being read, can and sometimes does create a dissonance with the images that appear on the screen. It’s interesting, though, because it’s the tone of the whole piece that holds it together for me—I can move between associations and disruptions and feel like I’m still within the (tonal) space of the work. I can also see, and identify with, this serial use of several impulses. I wrote Caetano as a kind of attempt to explore the multiple lives I’ve lived and am living simultaneously, several origin stories, all which spill out beyond the logic of a (family) line, a sentence, an archive.
But this leads me to think about translation, the space between the original and its supposed reproduction. Bianca Messinger and I are about to teach a class at the Poetry Project that thinks a bit about translation as a means, rather than its ends, its generative qualities. Can you talk a bit about how you came to translate Jean Daive? I see this strong affinity between your poems and his, and I also can’t help but think of his book about his friendship with Paul Celan, the importance of friendship in his work and yours.
Dear A,
I think I did not send you this translation of White Decimal yet (2017) published in France in 1967 as Décimale blanche. Translated by Cid Corman, published in Origin 1969, it was very late but very decisive in Lorine Niedecker’s push for new work (she died in 1970). Daive asked me to do this new translation. This book, and A Woman With Several Lives—so different from each other—I loved their freshness and loved working on each.
I knew Daive by sight and by his poetry when I first got to know Claude Royet-Journoud, in Paris, in 1986 (through Michael Palmer, who I got to know at New College—more of New College to come). When I read Daive’s Une femme de quelque vies (2009), a book of poems he wrote while thinking about Lorine Niedecker’s work, my first thought was, I really get this work and I should translate it. Next thought, someone must be translating it already. It was so great, so special, the Niedecker connection. I had written an essay about Neidecker and her poetry for Conjunctions, the “Tributes” issue, Fall 1997 (again, this goes back to my New College days, reading Niedecker, Zukofsky, Oppen, etc.). The essay was republished in my To Be At Music: Essays & Talks, Omnidawn 2010. Months later, I got a note thrust into my mail slot, no stamp, no address, on the envelope just my name. It was from Daive. What? He had been outside my house. In this note, he asked me if I would translate Une femme de quelques vies. I was floored and of course said I would. That began our work together. In 2017, Jean Daive’s translation of my work appeared in Paris from Editions Corti as Avis de faits et de méfaits.
University of Buffalo, 2016
Hope you & Ash are warm & fine. More soon.
xxx
N
Dear Norma,
Sorry for my delay. Ash turned five. I am still emotionally hungover from the holidays, and perma-aggrieved at this world. I didn't buy anything today on strike, I didn't work, but couldn't make it to the protest because Ash was sick. I read the new S*an D. Henry-Smith book, out from The Song Cave, and a Tom Raworth poem, “Beautiful Habit.” I read many of your books, including Fate News, where you write after Tom and for Stanley Whitney. I am moved by the relationships built through your work (and the story above!)—its relational quality. I’m wondering about the idea of assemblage, assemblies (I also read an interview you did with Sara Wintz many years ago, she’s an old friend!), where you both discuss this a bit. Your work not only gathers different influences, friendships, modes of working, but is also concerned with the tactility of language, its physicality. It makes me think about what a poem does, what and who it assembles, and how it might exist inside places like universities, which are becoming more and more like profit machines, trying to monetize every mode of education/creativity—it seems new models for learning have never been more important.
Dear Alexis,
Reading your Caetano and thinking about Ash turning five. You are a single parent, “single mom?” Your poem (“Custody”). I too, although my baby is now 54… I also didn’t buy anything today and didn’t go to a demonstration or protest—being 80, having had the stroke (23 years ago now), can’t (literally) walk around in the streets anymore. But my son and my granddaughter Olivia were at the student protest with her big and beautiful sign.
So, you and Sara W are old friends! I first heard of you, your name, your work, translations, from Kit Schluter. Before he went to Mexico City. Yes, the gathering. Gathering up. “Relationships built through… work.” When you are lucky enough to get this old, you’ve gathered, accumulated so much. You look “out”—at your past. It’s spread out before you. It’s only after you’ve done something that you know what you’ve done, maybe sooner, maybe later, but maybe not ever.
You’ve said that you love reading about New College—I love reading about it too, and have been involved with people who have tried to go on with that model, or similar models, because each one will only work in its location.
Here’s a beginning about my involvement with it: 1977, the drive cross-country from Toronto arriving in SF with Jesse, my young son, getting him into school, getting myself a job (same school), then looking around for the poets, where were they? At a reading in Berkeley, I chanced to hear two “famous poets” talking about a place called New College, in the Mission in San Francisco. One of them shrugged to the other, “I don’t know what Robert Duncan is doing over there at New College…Olson, Pound…” etc. I went over to New College the next day.
I had to “look it up in the phone book” to find the address: 777 Valencia St. It was summer. Pinned on a sheet of paper on the outside of the door was a roster of Fall Courses. One course was being taught by Robert Duncan, with Michael Palmer filling in that year because Duncan would be teaching somewhere else. I knew Duncan’s work a little, had the City Lights Pocket Poets; had seen Michael Palmer and heard him reading his poems at a Margaret Jenkins dance performance in her Mission Street studio. The door was open. I walked in, and sitting at a desk was Duncan McNaughton. I had no idea who he was, and asked if there was a way I could sit in on the class. McNaughton looked at me and said something like, well classes don’t start until September… but (gesturing) there’s the library.
The door was open. Suddenly, I was at New College (courses like Duncan’s “Basic Elements” and his and Michael Palmer’s shared course, “Field Theory”); David Levi Strauss’s journal, ACTS (“the first issue printed in Robert Duncan’s basement on a near-virgin Gestetner 466”); Small Press Distribution (located in a bookstore at 24th and Guerrero Streets, the many poetry readings; Intersection for the Arts; Langton Street; many other arts organizations, galleries, bookshops, performance spaces) so it was normal to become involved with people old and young who were making art, communicating with each other, sharing their work, their meals, what they were seeing and what they were reading. The charged, intense reading. “There’s the library.”
“Simply to study and read,” David Meltzer writes. By the way, have you seen this book: Roots and Routes: Poetics at the New College of California, edited by Patrick James Dunagan, Marina Lazzara, Nicholas James Whittington [Vernon Press 2020]? Essays, talks, interviews, notes etc. in three chronological sections. My time period, the first, circa 1980-1987 and there’s a piece of mine that the editors found in my papers at UC San Diego, written longhand for my slide presentation, in the “Field Theory” class: “Boundary — Horizon — Landscape — Field (or The End of the World).” At the end, I wrote:
Here is
the horizon as the infinite
everything seen in relation to it
(the biggest boundary)
Love,
Norma
PS — for you & Ash
Jan 30, 2026,
7:52 PM
to be able at the same time
To grow yourself into a large new shape
laughing gentle superb humble often
Show yourselves at once wave and foam
And out of fear spare me
And of too much sweetness. Bitterness. Pride
In burnt heart wave together
To each who wish it
Now then that you my life and death
Happy eyes blessed eyes and dear
Be always happy calm and clear
For Jesse
[Norma sent me a photograph ofthis poem during our interview]
Dear Norma,
Another delay, but I’ll try not to apologize! I am a single mother, a single parent, and share custody of my child. When you talk about coming to the bay and finding work, the New College, and everything, it reminds me I did that also when I moved to New York, almost ten years ago now! But maybe I did this again when I had Ash… I found a city within this one, where I could raise him in a way I had not expected, I guess. Anyway, now my sense of freedom—my days without him—are also filled with some grief, kind of like, as my former student said recently, and brilliantly, that joy is filled now with responsibility, though maybe it always was? We also like to visit California, him and I, to see the redwoods, and friends, and go to fairyland in Oakland. Maybe we can see you this time? For some reason right now I am thinking of a poem title of yours that I love—“A Poet Enters the Body of Expectation.” It makes me think of birth, emergence, and the inevitable breaks between the imagined and real versions of life. Can you talk a little about how motherhood, or how the space between the before/after enters your poems? Relatedly, what was it like to collect your poems into the “Where Shadows Will” book, to create a book, a “selected,” around which other versions of the same book exist?
Dear Alexis,
I think this phrase could mean something like “as before as after,” or “be here now.” But also, on motherhood: because Jesse and I were together except for a month in summer and some holidays here and there, I didn’t go to readings much (at that time people didn’t bring children to readings; people didn’t “see you” if you were a woman, had a child etc.) and, more than that, I understood that if I went to the internal place where poetry occurred, for me, I could get lost in it and forget to look at the time (clock-time) and that would not be okay. Thinking of the dyad was simply more important, until my child got to an age where we could be on our own time, some of the time. We had to grow up more. So I didn’t “publish” until I was 40.
The selected poems: I was so surprised—and thrilled—by the invitation from Garrett Caples at City Lights that I just “went with it”—meaning Garrett and I worked out all the separate poems we wanted to see in one book, and then put them together. We both had chosen a lot of the same poems. It was such an interesting process to see it through. A little like seeing the “Stay Songs: for Stanley Whitney” as a group in the small Bill Maynes catalog and then separately in the recent How High the Moon catalog.
xoxo
N
Dear Norma,
Thank you for this, and for this poem for Ash and I, what a dream to have been part of The New College at that moment. I love the part of your story when Duncan McNaughton gestures toward the library—I work in a library, at the BPL, for a tuition-free program run by Bard College—and part of what I like about teaching there is this (partial) disarming of the higher ed. institution, its fusion with a public library, one of the things that gives me hope these days, like a reading group, organizing with friends, a small press I love. I haven’t read that book you mention, but I feel like I’ve read those lines of yours, and I love hearing about the compiling of the City Lights book. I've been spending time with Fate News since we’ve been writing. Your “Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney” are beautiful, and feel like horizons into the visual realm—“Saturation—the world is / its own music in awe and / space not flat these / dynamics of rising / horizon …” They make me think of something Whitney said about Joan Mitchell—she takes “what she wants” from the landscape, so inspiring, this way of thinking about putting something into a new form, representationally or not, or simply moving forward through history with what you are able to carry.
I wanted to ask you about fragments. When I first approached you about doing this interview I said that To Be At Music is one of my favorite books, on my bedstand. It really is! The way you approach the “essay” in this book (with another Stanley Whitney painting on the cover) was groundbreaking for me, essays that build through accretion rather than linear progression. Some of them read like collage. They evoke, for me, both language’s limitations and its many possibilities. One thing that struck me, for example, in your “Nines and Tens: A Talk on Translation” is the phrase “There is no original of the encounter, only the encounter representing itself,” which not only speaks to translation, but the nature of publishing notes for a talk, an essay that might be given as one. I was curious how this form came to you, and what fragments mean to you—they seem so important to your poetics, including your drawings.
Dear Alexis,
Sounds like a dream to work at the BPL for this Bard program! I love what you say about “disarming” the institution. Tell me more about your work there.
You’ve mentioned Stanley Whitney a couple of times in our conversation. I was wondering how you came upon his work. The “Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney” that you’ve seen in Fate News were first in a catalog commissioned for his show at the Bill Maynes Gallery in 2001, but we met in the mid-eighties, when I was involved with New College. We were housemates while he (a New Yorker) taught for a semester at UC Berkeley. We became fast friends, went to many poetry readings in SF. The “Stay Songs” are also in the beautiful (& huge) catalog Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, 2024, but scattered, petals.
You’ve noted that Stanley said Joan Mitchell “takes what she wants” from the landscape, which brings me to your question about fragments. Good question—how do they get here? How do they come into play? By accretion, accumulation, not linear progression. Collage-like, fitting things in. Constellation is a good word here. For instance, take the essay about translation, “Nines and Tens.” The heart of this essay spilled out, or spiraled out from my thinking about Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud’s poem, “Le bateau ivre.” As you know, Beckett translated “dix nuits” into “nine nights.” This, to me, is one of the most magical transformations that ever was. The rhythm works, the music is perfect, nine nights “stand in” for dix nuits (ten nights). It became the core of “Nines and Tens” and everything else constellated around it. It could have just a sentence or two, but it was a thinking in mind, in the back of my mind until I was invited to give a talk on translation at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver in 1991. So it came up at that time and in just that way, a by-the-way in the middle of the “Nines and Tens.”
And the Beckett “fragment” now becomes the other question you asked, “Do the forms and encounters you see through/in/around translation inform your poetics, your visual practice?” Because it’s not a separate issue. It can be separated after the fact but comes up in constellation. It’s happening in this conversation we’re having, the everything that informs everything else. It would be “the same, only different” if we talked about, say, “How It Became It,” an essay about my translating Danielle Collobert’s Il donc into It Then. Location (the essay being written for an event at the poetics program at the University of Buffalo), time (chronology, linear progression) and timing (kairos, quality of “a moment”). I’m thinking of these two essays but it’s the same for poetry and visual art. Think of multimedia SCOUT, for instance.
I just turned the page over (I had scribbled thoughts, pencil on paper, last night to email to you today)—it says “bring it on / all this.”
Love,
Norma