Fate News. Norma Cole. Omnidawn, 2018. 108 pages.
Modernity would have us believe that time is an arrow, an unbroken line hurtling towards a foregone conclusion. It's convenient to believe that our lives and thoughts follow elementary causality, Event A leading to Event B resulting in Feeling C. The pressures of an increasingly mechanized and pressurized society doesn't leave much room for T.S. Eliot's "hundred visions and revisions,/ Before the taking of a toast and tea." The pressures of capital would prefer we simply get on with things.
Like nature, however, there are rarely straight lines to be found in life, especially an artistic life. Time moves in circles, spirals, ellipses. It rushes forward, doubles back on itself. Sometimes it stops entirely.
In Norma Cole's Fate News, time is not an arrow. It is not an easy diagram detailing the minutiae of history or biography or a mathematical formula delivering straightforward answers. Instead, Cole focuses on different forms of time - the celestial time of planets; the cyclical time of dormant plants, resurrecting with the thaw; the suspended motion of being utterly lost in the moment. Instead of straight lines, Cole fixates on the intersection, the ruptures from which burning Angels and grace burst forth. As she writes in "AMONG THINGS," "sounds of sanding, making, working/ framing a set-up, just some/angels revealing a crack, repetitive/ action references a carpet." These fissures are the birthplace of poetry, according to Cole, which she compares to an undertow, quoting the Persian poet Hafez later in the same poem. They're also the source of real revolution, revealing a world much like our own but slightly transformed, referenced in a quote from philosopher Walter Benjamin about Hasidic Jewish beliefs about the world to come.
Fate News is organized around four different modes of perceiving time. The first, Local, concerns itself with time on a cosmic scale, converting the fortuitous eye of Jupiter into "angels,/ Smoldering, red, ocher, yellow, & white," as well as the small moments that direct our lives - "Local action, provisionally." as she puts it in "FOURTH OF JULY, 2015." Perhaps most importantly, she reflects on the moments of suspended animation, which she expresses most poignantly in "THE PAINTER'S MEASURE," giving voice to the artist's ability to collapse time into a static image and live inside it. "Resistance, deep-rooted, time/ becomes sight incarnate, embodied sight incarnate, embodied/ control framing chaos, space beyond/ clarity, branches of lavender, thistle/ grinding binding wetting the colors." In Fate News, poetry is the "control framing chaos." It's also the "space beyond." With her powerful language, careful observations, blazing heart, and open spirit, she is able to capture the quotidian and banal as evocatively as the incomprehensibly grand. This fluctuation from large to small and back again calls into question the actual forces that guide our lives, politics and passion, slight moments and passing fancies and sometimes sheer, blind luck, like a young girl not being able to take a trip to Niagara Falls because "a horse had reared up and came crashing down on the hood of his car" in "DISTRACTION."
Ongoing, the second segment, concerns itself with Geologic Time, from vast, incomprehensible forces to the ever-present now of plant life, in a series of minimalist center-aligned poems. Stay Songs For Stanley Whitney explores the hallucinatory depth of artistic time in greater detail. Section 4 could serve as an epigraph if Cole were of the habit of explaining herself. "This way/ world is/ point of/ departure, painter's/ attention in/ time for/ the work./ Resolutions need/ space, open/ presence, take/ place." Finally, Harmolodics expresses the minor moments that make up life - a dog discovering its own shadow, a flight from San Francisco to Newark, a woman kissing a photograph at an Indian store on 5th Avenue. It's a testament to Cole's power as both a poet and a keen observer of the human experience that make Fate News such a consequential work.
Cole's been exploring the revolutionary power and impact of art her entire creative career, heading immediately to Paris after getting her Master's Degree in French language and literature from the University of Toronto in 1969 to soak up the revolutionary spirit in the wake of the General Strike of 1968. With Fate News, she reminds us of the power of counting stars, watching forget-me-nots, rhododendron, lilac. She is as moved by a man in a pickup truck going for a run with his dog as the vastness of Jupiter's orbit. She reminds us that Angels are everywhere, waiting to blaze forth and point the way to a better world. How are we supposed to know how good things could be without imagination?
Using a mixture of prose and free verse, Fate News at times reads like metaphysical philosophy as poetry. She quotes continental philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Spinoza as often as other poets. With her disregard of poetic conventions like meter and rhyme, she shows herself willing to grab whatever tools are at her disposal to express her world and the way she sees it. Given her talent as both a philosopher as well as a visual artist, her choice of poetry as a medium speaks volumes. Few other artforms are as able to be so open-ended, so impressionistic, setting a series of symbols and images to the page and letting the reader make of it what they will. The poems in Fate News can cause fissures if you let them, ready to unleash fiery angels and hidden depths, to pry your eyes open and let you really see. Seeing is the beginning of a revolutionary spirit, opening your eyes, mind, and heart to the world around you, freeing your mind to imagine what could be.
Fate News by Norma Cole is out on Omnidawn.