…for I can sing
And speak to him in many sorts of music.
—Twelfth Night (1.2.54–55)
Characteristic of Norma Cole’s literary production is the highly charged montage of singularities—a crystallizing, disjunctive assemblage. This principle of montage is pushed to a breaking point in her latest collection of poetry, Alibi Lullaby, written after her recovery from a stroke, which left her disabled and at first aphasic.[1] Particularly in the extended final selection, “Lost Dance,” the reader encounters dismembered vocables, “no account syllables” (44), and “minimal grammar” (20) amid a recurrent stutter effect, all this making for an open-ended, discontinuous continuity—a punctuated flow:
words people energies
somewhere in there
that that punctuation
recovery my spoken
moving never never
play something else
. . . . . . . . .
the
the
the the
the
the night
dreams
writing harbor
wall refugees
portraits palais
exile barge
history space
space (67–68)
Such vocal fragmentation leaves the reader, as it were, up in the air; a corresponding social fragmentation is at issue in the poems. “Conditions are melting in the present moment” (50), while “massacres continue / on summer nights”; there is “not / enough dreamtime” (56–57), and the poet is left with “open questions” resisting resolution (39), “bodies of // knowledge / resisting a solution” (25). The continuity of everyday experience itself is transformed, even imperiled. The two-line poem “An Ordinary Evening,”[2] which exemplifies Cole’s subtle art of citation, carries an epigraph from James Baldwin’s 1962 “A Letter to My Nephew”: “To act is to be committed, to be committed is to be in danger.” Dissolving ordinary syntax, the poem draws the conclusion: “An ordinary evening / is to be in danger” (61). The shattering of norms and the melting of bonds are reflected in the language of the poet who witnesses it all.
Cole’s crystallizing micrological tendency—she invokes poet Jack Spicer’s formula of “an infinitely small vocabulary”[3]—is legible in her increasingly recognized work as a visual artist, spanning as it does several decades. In her graphic art particularly, as in her poetry, one is met with a signature distillation into dynamic minima. “Containment of energy, energy of containment,” as she succinctly puts it in a catalogue essay of 1991, specifically in connection with chromatic relations, the primordial metabolic interplay of colors generating a “time internal to painting.”[4] “Compression builds” (To Be At Music, 130): The more densely and richly concentrated the containment, the greater its radiant energy and germinative power. Conversely, “composition…includes fragment, gap, rupture and suture” (161). In other words, in the context of minimalist artwork where paradox usually rules, expansion in concentration and distance in proximity become methodological or navigational principles, such that the customary continuum of time and space may be interrupted and reapportioned. Instrumental to this dialectic of energy and containment is the technique of cross-reference and manifold citation—“citation is invocation” (103)—along with a practice of “delicate balance in improvisation” (38). Cole can thus speak of an open-ended composite form as the site of an emergent space of historical reverberation and historical interrogation, a layered protean field of presence wherein mimetic acuteness of rendering may coexist with ghostly adumbration. At issue in this soberly and vertiginously unfolding image space, with its “logic of dismemberment”[5] and its gapped extension, is a hopeful, if defamiliarizing, “poetics of dispossession” (58), in which form becomes a matter simultaneously of immediacy, possibility, and emptiness (175).
Cole’s paradoxical minimalist principles and her citational strategy can be seen to inform an exemplary work in pastel and charcoal from 2014, Viola, Twelfth Night.[6] Cole’s figure confronts us—is there an inkling of two eyes and a nose?[7] —with an untoward field of lime green or yellow-green within the ostensible hood, a tilted rubbery square of a face, the slight blurring on two sides intimating a play of shadows. A lock of hair, likewise shaded, falls over the middle forehead area, and the cool pale field of color—reminiscent, up close, of a child’s crayon—seems to recede behind it. By her whole demeanor the figure shrinks and draws away even as she looks out at us, or on us, or through us, leaving a palpable gap, a felt absence in her presence. At once vibrant and austere, this work by its title alone brings together festivity and melancholy: Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, whose title alludes to the end of the Christmas season (the Eve of Epiphany commemorating the visit of gift-bearing alien Magi), is often regarded as the last of his “romantic” or “happy” comedies and—with its gallery of fashionably melancholy, semi-reclusive characters—a bridge to the tragic period. The central character Viola, whose name echoes both “violet” and “viola d’amore,” is, for all her good will and good cheer, the most thoroughly hidden. “I am not what I am,” she riddles in the guise of Cesario, coyly admonishing the countess Olivia, who perhaps appreciates her satirical inversion of the biblical verse.[8] And, of course, for the play’s original audience watching a boy pretending to be a lady pretending to be a gentleman, there were additional comic folds in the texture of slightly subversive, self-reflexive masquerade. The transformative mirror of art is “simultaneously reflecting and deflecting” (To Be At Music, 102).
William Hazlitt remarked in 1818 that “the great and secret charm of Twelfth Night is the character of Viola,” and he underscored what he considered to be the character’s arch sweetness.[9] Contributing to this charm—Olivia in fact accuses her of doing enchantment—is no doubt her excellence at scheming.[10] With her characteristic mixture of modesty and boldness, Viola tells Olivia, during their first conversation, “What I am and what I would are as secret as maidenhead” (1.5.209–10). Similarly, in a note on the poetry of Robin Blaser titled “A Minimum of Matter,” Cole lays emphasis on a “resistance of the image to being seen,” a resistance that crucially and invisibly generates the poem (106). This applies suggestively to the figure of Viola in both the play and the drawing, with their respective layers of generative resistance: Cole’s Viola, too, is effectively masked, if not entirely faceless or featureless.[11] Is that a head of hair with a few loose strands or is there a head-covering of some kind? Perhaps a hood and mantle (like Little Red Riding Hood’s or a nun’s béguin)? The notational quality of the drawing augments an apparently irresolvable ambiguity, just as, in the play, ambiguity imbues Viola’s confessional “history” of a fictional sister’s pining melancholy, recounted to an uncomprehending Orsino partly in terms of blended colors:
A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i’th’ bud
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? (2.4.110–15)[12]
“Poor monster,” Viola calls herself at one point (2.2.34), she whose characteristic posture, in her relations with both Olivia and Orsino, is simultaneous advance and retreat. The yellow-green of Cole’s drawing (not forgetting the artist’s admonition, in “Yellow and…,” that our experience of color is not a function of naming) recalls Shakespeare’s “green and yellow melancholy”; as with the “poor monster,” concealment feeds on Cole’s gently budding and perhaps sitting Viola.
Yet for all its modestly monumental blankness, the drawing radiates a characteristic improvisatory energy in keeping with that of Shakespeare’s comic heroines and of the fast-paced, slightly screwball action of Twelfth Night. Almost magical is the drawing’s animation and articulation of empty space as compositional element—for example, in the area sloping down from the neck to the figure’s left shoulder (the paper itself, with its ornamental border of partly ripped perforations, contributing to the effect of spontaneity). Critical to this conjuring process is the greatly varying density of Cole’s line. There is a rhythmic correspondence between vertical assertions above and below—between the lines indicating locks of hair and the lines denoting the figure’s torso. A variably intertwining double line at center, roughly parallel with the central lock of hair, would mark the closure of the cloak or mantle, the textured intersection of two obliquely contoured planes. Her left shoulder is turned tenderly toward the viewer, while her left arm is rendered by a single line ending in the most delicate of threads, as though trailing into the emptiness.
Manifold are the connections here to the line work in Cole’s poetry, as in “Occasional Placeholder,” where line breaks generate an improvisatory energy of expectation:
limbs of memories
the doves are coming
at the station
a taxi
the doves, a kite
caught in the
power lines
the bridge in a fog (Alibi Lullaby, 31)
Lines here break metrically, syntactically, and visually, more noticeably for the brevity of these couplets. They at once disclose and bridge an emptiness, a moment of expressive rupture in the emergent “sutured” constellation, with its “leaping rhythm” (85) and its pulsing textured intersection of elements both formal and substantial—mobile limbs and lines, unexpected stations and bridges, all subtly communicating through the lucid fog, the sudden detail work of memory.
The drawing of Viola, then, presents us with a graphic translation of Cole’s literary principle of disjunctive assemblage. Fully there, a patient presence watching, waiting, taking us in, Viola steadfastly works her enchantment while, phantom-like, persistently withdrawing—a double gesture characteristic of Norma Cole’s art in its constantly renewed action at a distance, its glimpsing of emptiness at every turn, as though dancing while falling. With such alluring resistance to show, the drawing performs its own grave and playful shadow dance[13] in time to a punctuated rhythm. After all, in Twelfth Night, “drowned Viola” is survivor of a “most happy [ship]wreck” (5.1.237, 262). Which is to say, she embodies recovery.
Notes:
[1] Alibi Lullaby (Oakland, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2025).
[2] The title recalling Wallace Stevens’s much longer poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” with its “perpetual meditation” and its “transparencies of sound.”
[3] Spicer is invoked in “A Minimum of Matter” (2002), in Norma Cole, To Be At Music: Essays & Talks (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), 102. Spicer’s phrase originally appears in his “Second letter to Federico Garcia Lorca” (1957). On Cole’s multifaceted production, see “That Tongue Be Time”: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making, ed. Dale M. Smith (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2025).
[4] “Singularities: The Paintings of Stanley Whitney,” in To Be At Music, 130. Compare 155 concerning “polyrhythmic color” (“Yellow and…” [2002]).
[5] Norma Cole, Fate News (Oakland, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), 79.
[6] The drawing (11½ x 9 inches) was first exhibited with this title in November 2014 at Margaret Tedesco’s [ 2nd floor projects ] in San Francisco (see note 12 below) and now hangs in my study (HE).
[7] Among the twenty-six rich, subtle, and intriguing untitled images on view online from the 1988 “Tahiti Series” (oil stick on paper), there is one of a young man seen from the waist up, with his hand to his face, the features of which—eye, nose, and mouth—are evoked in a similarly ghostly manner (https://www.normacole.org/works-on-paper, accessed 2/12/2026).
[8] Twelfth Night, or What You Will, ed. Keir Elam (London: Arden, 2008), 3.1.139. All citations of the play are from this edition. Viola’s line—like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121—plays on Exodus 3:14 and 1 Corinthians 15:10: “I am what I am.”
[9] William Hazlitt, “From Characters of Shakespear’s Plays,” in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, ed. Herschel Baker (New York: Signet, 1965), 171, 170.
[10] Samuel Johnson had earlier noted this. Cited in Twelfth Night (Arden), 169n52.
[11] About two-thirds of the way through the unnumbered pages of Norma Cole’s Drawings (Garner, NC: Further Other Book Works, 2020), there is a sequence of five human figures—framed, like Viola, in terms of head and torso—the third of which is virtually faceless, bearing only a single rhythmic line suggesting a simpering Cheshire cat smile along with a couple tiny folds where a chin would be.
[12] The lines are quoted in part by Laura Moriarty in commenting on Cole’s drawing Viola, Twelfth Night, which she viewed at [ 2nd floor projects ] in 2014. See “Co-eternal Beam: Norma Cole’s Art,” The Poetry Foundation (April 13, 2015). “The figure was green and gestural and sure and seemed to be staring out at me, though she had no eyes.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/04/co-eternal-beam-norma-coles-art, accessed 2/13/2026).
[13] “When Maria tells Sir Toby that ‘[Malvolio] has been yonder i’ the sun practicing behavior to his own shadow,’ she goes near to the heart of this shadow-dance of a play—Orsino, Olivia and Malvolio all, in different fashion, practice behavior to their own shadows.” John Dover Wilson, “Twelfth Night,” in Twelfth Night (Signet), 191.