Cole Swensen's Early February Morning

Cole Swensen's "Early February Morning”

Written by Francis Raven

Cole Swensen's It's Alive She Says, is located in the archives of Duration Press, home to many innovative out of print books and chapbooks. (Full disclosure: Duration Press published an electronic chapbook of mine). The poem "Early February Morning" is located on page 15 and can be found at: http://www.durationpress.com/archives/cswensen/itsalive/its%20alive%20she%20says.pdf.

"Early February Morning" is a poem which rewards the reader's winter. It begins, "The cold is stored in shirts/falls out of sleeves/ahead of our arms and makes/small crashing sounds..." The metaphysics of this first stanza comes to light later in the poem when it becomes clear that Swensen believes that people are the measure of all, but that that measure measures humans. This view is shown in the poem when Swensen writes that the cold "falls out of sleeves", that although humans create the coldness, it nevertheless falls "ahead of our arms”. That is, the coldness we create can never be seen to be created by us. It becomes part of the world that is ahead of us, ready for us to find. This aspect of our world becomes part of the way our world hangs together. It is, in effect, part of what makes this world our world.

The coldness which falls out of the narrator’s sleeves makes “small crashing sounds causing light”. This image connects the frozen sounds of coldness with the friction they might create, eventually generating light. That connection resonates within the line: “the sun is still frozen”. It is an almost contradictory image which is made possible by Swensen’s poetic belief that humans create their coldness which falls and creates the friction of light and also of the sun. Although Swensen’’s poem is full of images of light, those who live in a frozen land are not awake: “the rooms around me/are brittle with sleep”. Brittleness is one of the cold’s most well worn adjectives and reinforces her image of “crashing sounds”. Swensen turns this normal logic into poetry when she writes that the shards that break off in cold times create friction which, in turn, creates light. However, it should be clear by now that none of this would be possible without man.

If this point has not been made perspicuous it becomes exceedingly so in the next lines of the poem: “No, a tree falling in a forest makes no sound unless there’s somebody to hear it.” These are the lines which are the key to the whole poem. They are also the lines which give away the poem too directly. The fact that they are the key to the poem automatically renders them less poetic. Because of this Swensen should have written them more poetically than the rest.Instead she gives into the line’s prosaic tendencies. But even if it is not the perfect way to write a line which unlocks the poem, it is the natural way.

Fortunately, Swensen recovers the poem’s poetic qualities in the last two lines: “Again, the earth is barely real,/this morning all the birds are listening.” The first line in this couplet was the line that initially drew me to the poem for it implies that the earth is teetering on the brink of nonexistence. This is strange because the reason Swensen believes the earth is “barely real” is that it is not being perceived, but our perception relies upon an earth to live upon. This is the circular problem which Heidegger reveals and addresses in his explication of Holderlin’s line, “Poetically man dwells”.