Papers of poet, artist and translator Norma Cole. Cole lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and collaborated with American, French and Canadian poets. The collection includes correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, translations, photographs, negatives, sound and video recordings, digital media, artwork and ephemera.
Norma Cole Papers, 1940-2014 (bulk 1985-2014) (MSS 766)
Restrictions: Original media formats, including negatives, are restricted. Viewing/listening copies
may be available for researchers.
Extent: 36 Linear feet (84 archives boxes, 3 card file boxes, 1 flat box, and 1 map case folder), + .477 GB of digital files
Digital Content
Audiovisual recordings and some born-digital files are available online.
Poet, translator, visual artist and curator Norma Cole was born in Toronto, Canada on May 12, 1945. Although Anglophone by birth, she began to learn and speak French during her middle-school years. She studied at the University of Toronto, receiving a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literature (French and Italian) in 1967 and an M.A. in French Language and Literature in 1969. After finishing university, she spent several years living in a small French village in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes near Nice. While there, she began to form relationships with French writers and furthered an extensive knowledge of French films that continued throughout her career. She also began to draw and sculpt, leading to a lifelong involvement with the visual arts, and gave birth to a son.
She returned to Toronto in 1971, where she completed a degree in early childhood education. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977, where she soon met and became involved with a circle of poets around Robert Duncan that included Michael Palmer, David Levi Strauss, Laura Moriarty and Aaron Shurin. During return trips to France in the 1970s and 80s she met the poets Claude Royet-Journoud and Emmanuel Hocquard, whose work was among the first she translated for English publication. Cole's bilingualism and interest in phenomenology led to her involvement with the Language school of poetry during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Cole first published her own poetry at age 41 (in the magazine Temblor); her first book (Mace Hill Remap, published by the press of a French poet, Joseph Simas) and first appearance in an anthology (O/One An Anthology) were published two years later. Since then, she has published over thirty books and chapbooks, including Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (City Lights, 2009), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (Omnidawn, 2012), and the artists' book Collective Memory (Granary Books, 2006). The latter coincided with an art installation of the same title that she curated for the exhibition "Poetry and Its Arts: Bay Area Interactions, 1954-2004" at the California Historical Society, in which she could often be seen inhabiting a 1950s living room, an instance of a project to translate purely verbal work into the expanded dimensions of performance.
Her translations include A Woman with Several Lives by Jean Daive (2011), It Then by Danielle Collobert (1989) and her Notebooks (2003), The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen by Fouad Gabriel Naffah (2004), and This Story is Mine by Emmanuel Hocquard.
Cole's work has been recognized by awards and grants from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry, the Gertrude Stein Award (3 times), the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose (for her essay/lecture "The Poetics of Vertigo"), and the French Ministry of Culture. She has served on numerous editorial boards and boards of directors. She has read from her own work (over 125 times, including UC San Diego in 1989 and 2000) and lectured widely in the U.S., Canada, and France, and held adjunct and visiting professorships and residencies at over two dozen institutions, including the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the Naropa Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. She continues to live in San Francisco with frequent return visits to France.
Papers of poet, artist and translator Norma Cole. Cole lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and collaborated with American, French and Canadian poets. The collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, translations, photographs, negatives, sound and video recordings, digital media, artwork and ephemera.
Arranged in thirteen series: 1) BIOGRAPHICAL, 2) CORRESPONDENCE, 3) WRITINGS BY COLE, 4) COLLABORATIVE WORKS, 5) WORKS BY OTHERS, 6) TRANSLATIONS, 7) ARTWORK, 8) EPHEMERA, 9) SUBJECT FILES, 10) PHOTOGRAPHS 11) SOUND RECORDINGS, 12) VIDEO RECORDINGS and 13) DIGITAL FILES.