Norma Cole

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Norma Cole (born May 12, 1945) is a contemporary American poet, visual artist, and frequent translator from the French. She received her M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. A Canadian by birth, Norma Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977.

Contents

[edit] Overview

For nearly twenty years, Norma Cole's work has received great acclaim for her: "openness to traditions and practices, artists and writings, radically divergent from her own". [1] Recently, she collaborated with The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at SFSU in honor of their fiftieth anniversary. There she helped to create a site-specific gallery installation titled Collective Memory which opened on December 11, 2004 and ran through April 16, 2005. The project was described as:

  • " a departure from her earlier work, extending what has been primarily a written, literary practice to the expanded dimensions of a public space...Aimed at exploring and embodying the creative process involved in making poetry, Cole...worked both on site and off, inviting, responding to, and incorporating into her text the comments, perceptions, and contributions of visitors...opening the possibilities for more active exchange with others.

And:

  • Aspects of the installation will change over time, providing an evolving and adaptable creative space, altered by the objects and people moving through it...the project will openly demonstrate that poetry making is not an insular and isolated activity, acceptable as long as it’s on the perimeter of society, but an integrated art form based in communal exchange, from which we need to learn." [2]

Among other awards, she is the recipient of the Gerbode Poetry Prize and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. "The Poetics of Vertigo" --- delivered as the 1998 "George Oppen Memorial Lecture"--- won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. With Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins she won the Purchase Award for the photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize".

[edit] Selected publications & translations

[edit] Poetry books & chapbooks

Mace Hill Remap (Paris: Moving Letters,1988). [ e-text version available: see External links section (below)]

Metamorphopsia (Poets & Poets, 1988).

My Bird Book (Littoral, 1991).

Mars (Listening Chamber, Berkeley, California 1994).

Moira (O Books, 1995).

Contrafact (Poets & Poets, 1996).

Quotable Gestures, (CREAPHIS/un bureau sur l’Atlantique, France, 1998)

Desire & its Double (Instress, 1998).

The Vulgar Tongue (a+bend, 2000).

Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn Press, Richmond, CA, 2002) ISBN 1-890650-09-9.

A little a & a (Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles, 2002).

Burns (Belladonna Books, 2002).

Do the Monkey (Zasterle, 2006) ISBN 84-87467-44-X.

[edit] Text & Image

SCOUT, text/image work in CD ROM format, (Krupskaya, 2004).

At All: Tom Raworth & His Collages (Hooke Press, 2006).

[edit] Translations

It Then by Danielle Collobert (O Books, 1989).

The Surrealists Look at Art, essays by Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Soupault, Tzara, edited and translated with Michael Palmer, (Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1990).

This Story is Mine: Little Autobiographical Dictionary of Elegy by Emmanuel Hocquard, (Instress, 1999).

A Discursive Space: Interviews with Jean Daive, (Duration Press, Sausalito, California, 1999.

Crosscut Universe, an anthology of poetry / poetics by contemporary French writers, editor and translated (Burning Deck, 2000).

Nude by Anne Portugal [Le Plus simple appareil], (Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, California, 2001)

Distant Noise by Jean Frémon, (with Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky, Cole Swensen), (Avec Books, Penngrove, California, 2003).

Notebooks 1956-1978 by Danielle Collobert, (Litmus Press, 2003) ISBN 0-9723331-1-8

The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen by Fouad Gabriel Naffah (Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, California, 2004).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ CWF - Norma Cole
  2. ^ ibid.

[edit] External links