Creative Capital

In the agro-urban landscape of the United States, we’re not inclined to think of gardens as public spaces. Gardens lie outside your own door, on your property (if land is what you own); they’re where you grow radishes and impatiens. Until the modern age, that’s more or less what gardens were in France, too. Except that gardens in France were built for royalty and aristocracy, elaborate affairs with nary a vegetable to be found. Instead, there were rose-covered arbors, tree-lined paths, and lacy topiaries. Today, European urban centers are punctuated by gardens that are public gathering places. These spaces are at the heart of Cole Swensen’s new book of poems, Ours: The Gardens of André Le Nôtre.

Swensen, whose 2004 book, Goest, was a finalist for the National Book Award, has a hybrid text for the hybrid subject she is taking on: the garden as public space, public space versus private space, gardens as they change over time, and what functions gardens serve, decoratively and collectively.

André Le Nôtre was the premier landscape engineer of 17th-century French royalty. He designed the gardens at Versailles, as well as the Tuileries, Chantilly, and Fountainebleau, among others. Swensen’s interest in Le Nôtre encompasses the intensely formal aspects of his designs; how they’ve evolved, over the centuries, from exclusive royal playgrounds to celebrated city promenades; how that evolution exquisitely frames the passage of time; and the psyche of the artist who dealt in such flamboyant and geometrical manipulations of nature. In Le Nôtre’s work, Swensen sees a parallel to poetry in the dynamic exchange between limits and the illimitable. All of this comes into play in Ours, variously, and often simultaneously: “André Le Nôtre thought that by gardening along the strictest principles of geometry, time / would come apart in his hands. There goes private property.”

Swensen is, predictably, a gardener—a longstanding vice that she claims apartment living has thwarted. But it was her interest in public space that drew her to the project. But it was her interest in public space, and the way that public space forms the public mind, that drew her to the project. In a certain respect, Le Nôtre is the Dante Alighieri of landscaping. Like Dante, he worked from an interdisciplinary framework, in this case inspired by complex geometries, astrology, and astronomy: “He dreamed of a spherical garden / and listened to the spring tighten / as he wound the clock.” From Swensen’s perspective, the gardens were philosophical: “In an effort to make the garden standing proof / of the ascendancy of reason over nature, strict rules governed its layout.” And the gardens were like paintings, utterly artistic: “Le Nôtre tried / to make every alley extend endlessly toward its final leap.”

An award-winning translator and author of ten collections (the latest, The Glass Age, was published in January 2007), Swensen describes Ours as a radical new direction. “I’ve always written what has been easily categorized as poetry,” she says, but this project incorporates elements of art criticism and creative non-fiction. “The 17th century,” she writes, “saw a curious rapprochement between gardens and war—fortifications were less interested in going up . . . than they were in going out . . . ” Her teacherly tone, the surprising juxtaposition of war and gardens, dovetail into a fanciful anthropomorphizing of the fortress. The art criticism is even less restrained, though no less effective either as poetry or criticism: “Turning a corner; it’s usually in turning a corner too fast, or in glancing back, / the width of each terrace is out of proportion to its length.” One might take exception to Swensen’s claim that she’s shifting direction with this long, elaborate poem. Formalism in its broadest sense redraws the quotidian—as does American poetry—revealing its novelty and complexity. And what is more quotidian than a garden? Or more fascinating?