The Goal
The goal of life is happiness (Agnes Martin); the word happinessshares the root hap with happenstance, haphazard and, simply,happen. I once had a friend named Happy—we worked foryears at a restaurant together, and once during a slow moment,he took my Maybelline eyeliner pencil—warm brown—andwith that alone, made up my eyes, creating amazing nuances,subtleties, new depths and contours. Neither they nor I hadever before (nor ever have since) been so beautiful. Chatting,as one does with someone who's immobilized you by workingon your body, I happened to ask him about his name, what itmeant; he said it means that I'm occurring right now.
This was a chance to consider the complexity of simplicity—Agnes Martin’s statement is so simple, and yet her writings accumulate into great complexities. And happy—that word seems so simple, and yet what could have a more complex and radiant web of etymological associations? This conflation led me to a memory of something very simple that simply happened, in every sense of the word. It is, needless to say, dedicated to Happy.
Feature Date
- February 24, 2024
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Eric Pankey
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“The Goal” from AND AND AND: by Cole Swensen.
Published by Shearsman on September 1 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Cole Swensen.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cole Swensen is the author of 19 books of poetry, most recently And And And, (Shearsman Books, 2023), a collection of hybrid ekphrastic essay-poems, Art in Time, (Nightboat Books, 2021), and a volume of critical essays, Noise that Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the PEN USA Award in Translation. She has been a finalist twice for the LA Times Book Award and once for the National Book Award. She was on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for ten years and has spent the past twelve years on the faculty of Brown University’s Department of Literary Arts.
“Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in The Orphic Voice, describes as ‘…a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward.’ That could serve as worthy blurb for And And And. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a prima poieia, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn’t define, doesn’t categorize, doesn’t lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other…”
—Dan Beachy-Quick
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