Sand, and Then by Cole Swensen if you think of it as glass, you can’t help but then think of it in an hourglass, and from there, you can’t help but think of it as time, and thus of time as something—anything—trapped inside something else that’s made of itself. Excerpt From Our Interview with Cole Swensen KARAN I am a lover of prose poems — it’s my favorite form to read & write — and you’ve been one of the great champions of hybrid work for decades. And this is your first book of poems that is all prose poems — will you speak about that choice? Did you set out to write a book of poems that were all justified/devoid of line-breaks? What did/does the form do for you? COLE Ooo! Great question! Actually, the book that immediately preceded this one, And And And, which is similar to Veer in its take and tone but is focused on issues of language, is also all prose poems. I’ve thought a lot about this shift, and I think it has to do with rhythm. With a prose poem, the assumption is that because it’s prose, traditional poetic elements, such as sound, meter, and rhythm, are not present, so when, in fact, they are—as they usually are in my work—they create a tension of contrast and perhaps work more subtly, sneaking in under the radar, so to speak, which may give them a different sort of efficacy.
