Norma Cole

Norma Cole Poems

Norma Cole Biography

Norma Cole is a poet, painter, and translator. She was born in Toronto, Canada, and attended the University of Toronto for her BA in Modern Languages and MA in French. Her translation works include Danielle Collobert’s Journals (1989), Anne Portugal’s Nude (2001), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properities Of Nitrogen (2004). She has also edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000),an anthology of poetry and poetics by contemporary French writers. Cole has authored various books of poetry, including Natural Light (2009), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (2009), Spinoza in Her Youth (2002), The Vulgar Tongue (2000), and Desire & Its Double (1998). In a review of her 1996 collection Contrafact, Erin Moule of Lemon Hound noted that Cole’s “meanings unfurl and gesture, resonate, play emphatic and contrapuntal gamings with language’s fluency.” Cole’s experimental work SCOUT, a text and image work, was released in 2005. From 2004 to 2006, Cole was the lead artist for Collective Memory, an installation, performance, and publication for “Poetry and its Arts: Bay area Interactions 1954-2004” commissioned by the California Historical Society in San Francisco, California. Cole’s various awards include a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and awards from the Fund for Poetry. Cole has served on the faculty of the MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She has lived in San Francisco since 1977 and teaches at the University of San Francisco. In March 2012, Cole was a featured writer on Harriet.)

The Best Poem Of Norma Cole

from "In Our Own Backyard"

You can't imagine what it's like here. In her past
life, she was a clandestine operator in ancient
Egypt. In a past life she had her heart ripped out,
ritual sacrifice. We all know what that
means, right, to have your heart ripped out. Torn
from the body, one's "own" body, alive and torn.


The unspeaking speaker. The man coughs.
Orientation. Two bells, a motorcar on the
street, on-lookers. H22-3416. Men, maybe
four, inside. Vast numbers of people, faces
turned to the east. Four nurses holding four
swaddled babes, four bottles.


Six men walking forward on a country road
all wearing suits, coats, vests and ties. Upon
his shoulders, one of the men carries a man with
no legs. The man with no legs is wearing a
bathrobe. In a landscape a train passes from
top right to bottom left. People are packed inside
as well as on the roof and holding on at the sides.


One man, naked, his back turned to the
window, light on inside. A bird in a cage hung
on a hook at the top left-hand corner of the
window. A man in profile to the left, eyes closed
mouth open wide, singing. Or thought he was
singing. He did. Or we did. The back of a chair and
three tall mirrors. At their focal point a woman
stands, arms akimbo. She's wearing evening dress
black high heels, long white gown, long black
gloves, necklace, earrings.


Outside the bakery, a horse-drawn hearse
approaches. A woman in an apron tests green grapes
eating them before placing bunches in a wooden
crate. Inside a Quonset hut, there's a long
table with men sitting in chairs writing or paying
attention to one man standing at the table, hands
in the pockets of his jumpsuit. Shirtless men seated
on the floor, some on towels or blankets, are doing
exercises. Friday afternoon, cold grim day. We meet
in the museum, at a picture called "Birmingham."


Sign on exterior wall saying "WELCOME."

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