The Painter’s Measure

Norma Cole

For Nicole Phungrasamee Fein

Hope is encountered, variouslyremembered, granted the patternsof heaven—countless tinystars, oxalis hearts,forget-me-nots, test sheetsDistant mountain ridgelinesflatten to paper in daylightwith every purposeful motionnight vision of timeless timeapproaching the pulse of suspensionMetabolic edge of experiment,the radiant points, scales andvariations of beads and dotsbreathe benevolent notes, theirparticular legibility of tracklessResistance, deep-rooted, timebecomes sight incarnate, embodiedcontrol framing chaos, space beyondclarity, branches of lavender, thistlegrinding binding wetting the colorsA meteor shower—constellationas memory of perfection

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Photo:
Angel O'Brien

Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is Fate News. Other books include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, Spinoza in Her Youth, TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks and Actualities, her collaboration with Marina Adams. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole), and Jean Daive’s White Decimal. Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and most recently her film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California.

Oakland, California

"Early in these pages Norma Cole quotes Hafez as a warning to the gentle reader—that in fact or in practice, 'under every deep / a lower deep opens'—and this book, this incredibly diagrammed advisory concerning both 'fate' and 'news,' plumbs startling depths and arrives at its nal moments with Ornette Coleman’s question—'What do you expect?'— and with Tassadit Yacine’s approximation of Amrouche’s uncomfortable acceptance of Algerian identity—'I am the bridge.' In between, Norma Cole diagrams an astonishingly intricate map of power, the “angel standing in the sun” that John mentioned in Revelations, and how its loci are, again, in fact and practice wide-ranging. And, rife with a homegrown ambiguity, the poems expand—grim Halloween turns up twice like a bad penny, and the police turn up as well. But there’s also a luminous bar of elegies for Tom Raworth, Bill Berkson, Leslie Scalapino, and David Bowie. ('Still Today' ends with a request or admonishment for Bill Berkson: 'So keep on / Proposing paradise.') And Norma Cole instructs, 'the world is / its own music in awe and // space and not at.' Fellow gentle readers, Fate News is good news for all of us."
—C.S. Giscombe, author of Prairie Style

"In Norma Cole’s Fate News, a book whose title turns on its head the derisive 'fake news,' she offers an array of experimental musings on time and art in four sections. In the opening poem she begins in space, with creation and destruction as her focus, and she continues through the first section with a series of occasional poems, elegies, and others written in dedication. Cole’s poems simultaneously shrink the substantial in their gaze ('Distant mountain ridgelines / flatten to paper in daylight') and take in the enormousness of the universe. Her use of form is variable; the book includes prose poems, colorful lyrics, songs, and poems that engage in a wily sense of language play."
—Maya Phillips, Poets.org

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