"Swensen reminds us that the old fashioned approach to extraneous (non-lyrical) data invading the text is called research." Ron Silliman on Cole Swensen's Ours/ Le Nôtre

On April 14, 2009, Ron Silliman wrote a review / essay on Cole Swensen's Ours and, more generally, on her work in relation to conceptual writing & American (& French) poetics. The essay addresses many of the issues Poets & Critics has been concerned with over the past three years.

Here's the beginning of the essay. The entire essay can be read on Ron Silliman's blog, by clicking on the icon below.

 “All conceptual writing is allegorical writing” argue Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place in Notes on Conceptualisms, a fascinating little book with painfully small type. At the core of Cole Swensen’s Ours, published last year by the University of California Press, is the allegory of the garden, French gardens to be exact, and especially the work of André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), the “father,” to use Swensen’s term for it, “of the French formal garden.” Le Nôtre’s work most famously includes Versailles, as well as Chantilly, Saint-Cloud, Sceaux, Vaux-le-Vicomte & the Tuileries, where he himself was born, the son & grandson of royal gardeners. Le Nôtre, of course, means ours in French, but this isn’t the most important dimension of the pun tucked into the book’s title. Rather it is the logic of the garden, or of a certain type of garden, & the logic of the poem, our art. Or of a certain type of poem, the sort that Cole Swensen might be called upon to write. And beyond that, possession (or at least possessiveness) of the earth itself, such as royalty might imagine to be their “divine right.”