Norma Cole and Adrian Lürssen: October 12, 2023

Norma Cole and Adrian Lürssen present a collaboratively written work, with Lürssen beginning by telling of their friendship and introducing their collaboration. They then read the resulting set of poems, titled Briefings.

Norma Cole opens by telling of talking with poet Barbara Guest during the early days of the Bosnian War, and reading a four-line poem written in response to a news report from a journalist on site in Bosnia. This is followed by a poem written "as an email" to Robert Duncan, "a long time after he died" ("Dear Robert"). She then asks for a moment of silence with the audience in contemplation of "civilians caught up in war, in any war, all war." 

Cole notes that she had read her poetry one time previously at the Wattis, in conjunction with a 2013 exhibition of Etel Adnan's work ("Words and Places, Etel Adnan") and that she read on that occasion alongside Joanne Kyger. She then reads a succession of mostly brief poems, among these "Halloween, Too" (for Joanne Kyger), "The Dream Had Now Ended," "The Horse Declares," "'I Wish I Could Say What I Am'" (after Julian Cannonball Adderley), "Paradise Least," "Planetude" (for Etel Adnan), and "Spinoza's Daughter." While reading from the collaborative book Actualities, Cole holds up the accompanying images of paintings in that book by Marina Adams. 

Adrian Lürssen opens by noting that for years he "lived under Etel [Adnan]'s Mt. Tam," and he would walk the mountain trails every morning, often reciting to himself Norma Cole's short poem (with which Cole began her reading) containing the line "human is to wander," and that it occurred to him that one could write a book from those four lines. 

He then reads a selection of his poems from his book titled Human is to Wander, including "No Longer in a Mother Tongue," "Crown of Leaves" (after the photographic work of Richard Mosse), "Fourth Song of the Child Soldiers," and poems from the sequence "A Is For Angola," among others, while providing context for most of the poems as he proceeds. He tells, among other things, of having with his parents emigrated from apartheid South Africa while that state, under the white-minority political regime, was conducting its many years-long war in Angola.