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Cole Swensen
A conceptual introduction:

1. Focus your life on the precise point at which perception turns to thought.

2. The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth...As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it.

3. One of the things that I'd like to manage to do when I write is to have the texts generate a sort of phenomenon of persistence, (like certain short pieces of music seem to continue to be heard after silence has returned).

4. Unification is another misleading term. It's a euphemism for conformity even among ourselves. We must continue to differ, even to disagree.

5. The poem becomes a search for the new structures that time makes when memory becomes the living present.

6. I'm always a little puzzed by the fetish for origniality, yet participate in it fully.

7. Never paint a moving part.

Bio:

Cole Swensen is the author of eleven volumes of poetry; the most recent is The Glass Age (Alice James 2007). Her earlier book Goest was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, and other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon’s New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. Another book, Ours, will be published by the University of California Press in 2008. Also due out in 2008 is American Hybrid, a Norton anthology she has co-edited with David St. John. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. She’s also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon’s The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets. Writer-in-Residence at the Beinecke Library at Yale for the 2007-08 year, she is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Washington D.C., Iowa City, and Paris.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Symposium is made possible by grants from the Arizona Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Poets & Writers. We are also grateful for Symposium support from the Arizona Inn; College of Humanities; Book Stop Used Books, and Friends of the Poetry Center, especially Helen S. Schaefer.