Writers seem to have more boundaries - maybe it's because making art is more physical, but they just seem freer. Visual artists tend to be freer than writers are. I love Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Vija Celmins, Alice Neel. I am probably most nurtured by visual art. In a conversation with the journalist Christopher Lydon last year, Cole explained: It is no surprise, then, that Cole is drawn not only to Bourgeois’ sculptures but to other visual artists whose work is highly crafted, symbolically charged, and emotionally intense. Cole’s work, like that of Bourgeois, strives for balance between highly controlled technique with solid materials, and intense emotion as it is revealed in abstraction and symbol. Henri Cole’s poems in Pierce the Skin, the new selected volume published by Farrar Straus Giroux that spans six books and twenty-five years, achieve the same effect of fluidity, transience, and emblematic vulnerability as Bourgeois’ steel spider. Despite its solid construction, the lithe, angular design of the spider makes it seem precarious - more sinew than steel - and the title Maman, French for mother, reinforces this sense of vulnerability as terrifying as the giant spider may be, she is simply the model of a mother protecting her sac of marble eggs, hovering above horrified museum-goers. Artist Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture Maman is grotesque and elegant, vulnerable and out of place on its long uneven legs. A thirty-foot spider made of stainless steel perches outside of London’s Tate Modern Museum.

Middle Earth by Henri Cole