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Humanities Express
- Publisher: College of Humanities of The Ohio State University
- Volume IIII Issue 4
- April 2008
- Humanities Express Home
Humanities Faculty Spotlight:
Henri Cole
It is with great pride that the College of Humanities welcomes Henri Cole as a new full professor in the Department of English this year. His poetry says everything that all of us need to say, only better:
The stakes of Henri Cole's poetry are high; the rigor of his expectations elevates his poetry to a plane shared by very few of the greatest poets of our time: Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney. "Poetry," says the poet in "Dune," from his most recent collection Blackbird and Wolf (2007), "is stronger / than I am and makes me do what it wants."
Henri Cole comes to us already covered in glory, as the 2007 winner of a United States Artists Fellowship, awarded to 50 American artists in the fields of design, literature, traditional arts, dance, media, music, theater and visual arts each year. This is only one of his many awards: in 1989 he was awarded the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, in 1995 the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2004 the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Middle Earth, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of six books of poems: Blackbird and Wolf (2007), Middle Earth (2004), The Visible Man (1998), The Look of Things (1995), The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989), and The Marble Queen (1986). He has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Brandeis University, and Smith College, and has held residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, the Liguria Study Center, Hawthornden Castle, and the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. His professorship in the Department of English at The Ohio State University is his first permanent position as a faculty member.
"A good poem," says Professor Cole, "is at least two poems: the poem of emotion and the poem of language. Both balls must be in the air at the same time." It is a pleasure and a privilege to have Henri Cole, poet of emotion and poet of language, on our faculty.
The Poetry of Henri Cole
Henri Cole
Little poem,
help me to say all I need to say, better.
This line, from "Chiffon Morning," is a window into Henri Cole's extraordinary body of work. "Chiffon Morning" is a sonnet sequence on six events in the poet's childhood, from the 1998 collection The Visible Man. Cole's understated exhortation to his own muse reveals a hesitation before the task of creation, a diffidence also heard in "The Blue Grotto," from the same collection:
help me to say all I need to say, better.
Once again, description,
unemotional shorthand
for sublimated wisdom,
fails to conjure what we felt;
the poem yearns for something more.
Or again, from "Apollo," a long sequence at the end of The Visible Man:
unemotional shorthand
for sublimated wisdom,
fails to conjure what we felt;
the poem yearns for something more.
To write what is human, not escapist;
that is the problem of the hand moving
apart from my body.
that is the problem of the hand moving
apart from my body.
The stakes of Henri Cole's poetry are high; the rigor of his expectations elevates his poetry to a plane shared by very few of the greatest poets of our time: Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney. "Poetry," says the poet in "Dune," from his most recent collection Blackbird and Wolf (2007), "is stronger / than I am and makes me do what it wants."
Henri Cole comes to us already covered in glory, as the 2007 winner of a United States Artists Fellowship, awarded to 50 American artists in the fields of design, literature, traditional arts, dance, media, music, theater and visual arts each year. This is only one of his many awards: in 1989 he was awarded the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, in 1995 the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2004 the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Middle Earth, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of six books of poems: Blackbird and Wolf (2007), Middle Earth (2004), The Visible Man (1998), The Look of Things (1995), The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989), and The Marble Queen (1986). He has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Brandeis University, and Smith College, and has held residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, the Liguria Study Center, Hawthornden Castle, and the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. His professorship in the Department of English at The Ohio State University is his first permanent position as a faculty member.
"A good poem," says Professor Cole, "is at least two poems: the poem of emotion and the poem of language. Both balls must be in the air at the same time." It is a pleasure and a privilege to have Henri Cole, poet of emotion and poet of language, on our faculty.
