This Time We Are Both

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*Clark Coolidge. This Time We Are Both. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. 93 pp.

This was written in the late 80s, so has that classic Coolidge style from that era. That explains why I like it so much. I thought he had returned to form, but no, it's because its is an older book. Well, it is new to me at least.

Good poets tend to think of poetic form as the vibrant core of the art form. Critics who are hermeneutically oriented, oriented toward the question of what poetry means, tend to view that kind of formalism as dull and sterile. I never understood the idea that tropes were central to poetry. I mean, yes, I understand that poetry uses a lot of metaphor, catachresis, metonymy, chiasmus, and other things with fancy Greek names.

Some examples: Coolidge's speakings and writings on Kerouac; Lorca on Spanish lullabies; Rodríguez on children's games.

Coolidge talks about three kinds of creative activities in Kerouac's writing: blowing (like blowing over the chord changes), sketching, and babbleflow. In other words, musical, visual, and verbal improvisations. With much overlap.

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*Clark Coolidge. SPACE. 1970. 120 pp.

This has been on my shelf for a while. I think I've read most of it by now, in fits and spurts. I like the poem on page 86:

listene
secting
erences

miliari
ontempt
opposit

compani
bilitie
pontane

nerousl
ercussi
ndition

aluable
rievable
fluence

berness
ionalis
deliber

(240)

*Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer. The Cave. 2009. 69 pp.

This is a collaboration begun in 1972 and concluded in 1978, brought out by Adventures in poetry this year with a prologue by Marcella Durand. There are dialogues between "Beckett" and "Collins," "Hawthorne" and "Melville," longer prose pieces. I've looked through this quickly but will have to study it at length.

I learned a new word from this book: "phreatic."

(235)

Odes of Roba 1991. 158 pp.

This one took me an awful long time to get through. I skimmed over a couple of longer poems toward the end too--that after reading about 50% aloud to myself over the past weeks. Overall it's just not on the level of Own Face or Crystal Text. The problem, once again, is a kind of garrulousness. I feel like I'm Coolidge's biggest fan, so if I feel this way, I'm sure I can't be the only one. Now it's back to reading Flow Chart, which I've also been doing for more than a few days.

It does help when reading CC to have his specific voice in my head. I'll listen to a bit at PennSound before reading and try to hear the poems with that particular emphasis and intonation.

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*The Crystal Text. 1986. 1996. 152 pp.

What can I say about this? Although I tend to prefer concise writers over verbose one, Coolidge is an exception. No, not really, since what I tend to prefer about him are his concise bits rather than his "plethoric mode." This is some of the best writing existent in English, especially in some of the briefer fragments toward the end.

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*Coolidge. Mesh. 1988. 39 pp.

There is an exploration here of a semi-pornographic imagination. The last poem, "Movement on a Dream," ends like this:

And she turns, I turn, the whole erotic is a
turning. Tends to the stillness of the obsessive,
never a blurring, however violent nondistortive, the
plates of the blends rising separable. That will I
defend myself against my own dreams? The girl caught in
the pool of thought covers whatever still of this
making own. The pearl in the skull never to be
exhausted. And I drape her more than
I bare her to me. All the movement still
my own.

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*Coolidge. At Egypt. 1988. 80 pp.

Culminating Coolidge's great work of the 80s is this book, a long poem divided into 12 section published by The Figures. There is so much in that preposition "at." That's how he situates himself there, not "In Egypt," which would be merely banal.

I liked this, this time, more than on other readings of it. I've now read 10% of the third percent.

(58)

*Clark Coolidge. Ing. 1968. no pagination.


One of the only books of poetry named after a morpheme. The early, abstract Coolidge has its peculiar charm, as in this collector's item with a cover by Guston.

"ing" is a recurring syllable here, in a book that breaks language down to the level of morpheme and syllable. He likes to suggests words by cutting them off "taneity" inevitably suggests "spontaneity," for example. "straction" is "abstraction."

I got my copy of Lola Velasco's El sueño de las piedras yesterday.

She who rests
above a landscape
of skeletons,
and wonders
how it is possible
that the universe (still) exists.



***

I checked out The Rova Improvisations from the public library. I don't own this book, for some reason.

"The music is a physical world / the sensing organ must reach into / synaesthesiac exchange of senses."

I might have mentioned my method for reading Clark Coolidge. Going through Solution Passage, for example, I mark poems I like with a check mark, and poems that go beyond that with an additional star or asterisk. Although CC is one of my favorite living poets I am not at all an uncritical reader. As I've owned this book for many years the poems with stars are gradually increasing as a percentage of the whole, but there are still many poems I don't get. In order to get that check mark I have to be able to justify to myself the relation of part to whole. (Shorter poems have a certain advantage here.) Contrary to what you might think, I tend to value poems I understand better over those I don't, within the work of CC.

Here's an example of one that gets a star:

SPOKE OF JUMBLED GORGES

Lace back of mountains my fretted
vehicle on ice it shows

Blamed, all the stones, their streaks, then sky
opens bowl to the rained and rolling day

Fire, this chart beyond has got of crystal through
icicle wall of fricative semblance

Then PatternDemons whisper
in the PalmLines of my stone

Like taking a breath in vaccum light
the pounds of brain that store me

To me this is beatiful, coherent, and clear. It's only as difficult as it needs to be, not a step beyond that. I feel I could explicate it though I certainly don't want to do so pedantically. There are about 21 poems in this almost 400 page book that I like about this much, and maybe about 80 that have mere check mark. When I go back to the book then I have several strategies open to me. I can just go through and read twenty poems. I can read about 100 that I know I'll like. Or I can go in search of new poems that I hadn't quite appreciated on other multiple readings. Or I can go through a particular section and read poems in all three categories. I inevitably find a few that get a new check, or previously checked poems to be promoted with stars. I do appreciate the poems that have held out against me for many years. Such obduracy is to be admired in them.

It's hard to think of a really interesting poet who doesn't have some serious flaws. All significant reading is a back-and-forth movement of identification and rejection. I'm trying to think of any nonproblematic writers I am really devoted to. That's why detractive criticism is cheap. Any fool can see that Pound, Stein, and Lorca are deeply flawed writers. Any one can see that Creeley can be dull and sentimental; that Ashbery is garrulous, Stevens and Guest precious, Schuyler and Keats over-lush, Berrigan self-indulgent, Campion thin. However, if that's all you see then you aren't a particularly good reader either. It's like someone telling you that Beethoven is bombastic. Well yes, we already knew that thank you very much.

Blindness and Insight applies to the poet too, not just the critic. The problematic part of poet's work is usually so close to the core of that poet's achievement that it cannot be excised. The most irritating aspects of Pound's work are not found on the fringes of that work, but very close to the center.

The Duplications: Clark Coolidge, Three Poems

This at one time seemd outrageously modern--

"somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence"

Omitting the space after the comma, how incomprehensible that made the poem. There was a guy named Stanley Coblenz, I believe, who in the 1960s was writing books like The Poetry Circus in which Cummings, Eliot, Moore were castigated because they were too prosaic. From Cummings to Coolidge is not too big a step:

"The tune of a cold trunk is thin
mute cat behind glass
that I write at all is bannered
in the close grains of sight outlasted"

From Creeley or Niedecker to Armantrout is a baby step. Silliman is easier to read than Duncan. Bernstein is easier than Stevens (doesn't make him better).

Language poetry is a conservative movement, trying to maintain the discoveries of modernism; to have all that not lost in the rising tide of workshopped lyrics. In order to be conservative in this way, it has to push forward just a little bit.

What is "craft"? It usually means conformity to a period style. The well-crafted poem is one that in Poetry will not seem like it shouldn't belong there. Usually the amateur poem that has been revised in order to look like a well-crafted poem is still basically an amateur poem. It's lost its amateur status but hasn't gained very much. Isn't that the moment to reach for a more profound sense of craft?

***

Weinberger famously called Bly "A windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language."

"These days I ask myself again and more acutely the relation (if there is one?) between language forms and the wordless shapes of time. Perhaps there is no direct exchange. All I can be sure of is that I am able to possess them both within one body and one mind." --Clark Coolidge, "A Note on Bop"

This quote comes as close as anything I have read to explaining my own sense that poetry is fundamentally concerned with the relation between "sound forms cut in time" or "the articulation of sound forms in time" and time itself as lived experience.

I listen for a poet's "time feel."