review of
Clark Coolidge's Selected Poems 1962-1985
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 17-25, 2020
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1312961?chapter=1

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1312961?chapter=1

I've reviewed more books by Clark Coolidge than by any other poet. Whether I've ever really 'done him justice' is hard to say but it's obvious that he's at least caught my attn. I've read & reviewed:

Ing (1968) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19537409 )
Space (1970) ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3167946-space )
THE MAINTAINS (1974) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19540011 )
Polaroid (1975) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19544909 )
Quartz Hearts (1978) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19545604 )
Own Face (1978/1993) ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/367563.Own_Face )
American Ones (1981) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19547039 )
A Geology (1988) ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19568620 )
This Time We Are Both (2010) ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/168997773 )

I don't remember when I 1st became aware of his work but I acquired the "10 2 : 12 American Text Sound Pieces" record in 1976 & that has Coolidge's reworking of the preface to John Cage & David Tudor's "Variations IV" on it so I would've at least become aware of him then if not before. Since Cage's work in general & that piece specifically were very important to me at the time Coolidge's repurposing of the semi-infamous borderline disclaimer-type intro to the work provided by the record company that published the recording of Cage & Tudor's performance was of special interest to me too. In retrospect I don't find Coolidge's piece to be that remarkable otherwise, it strikes me as just another cut-up.

I've long since known that Coolidge is a drummer as well as a poet so in honor of receiving this book for review (at my request, Thank You Station Hill Press) I decided to investigate that aspect of his work more. Hence, I bought a CD by "The Serpent Power", originally released on record by Vanguard in 1967. The back cover blurb says:

"A poet's songs and music — The Serpent Power — a form, expression of the poet David Meltzer. It is San Francisco poetry — out of the poetic renaissance — grown into another flowering as San Francisco music — the imagery, the moods of the poems flowing into the imagery of his songs and music—"

The band consists of:

David Meltzer: guitar, harmonica and vocals
Tina Meltzer: vocals
Denny Ellis: rhythm guitar
David Stenson: bass
John Payne: organ
Clark Coolidge: drums

I enjoyed listening to it, I was reminded a little of Country Joe and the Fish, a San Francisco band from around the same time. It seems that The Serpent Power didn't make it past this 1st release. That seems a shame, they had potential. It's probably a partial result of my cheap CD player but in my listening Coolidge's drumming it's subdued in the mix but I can hear it well enough to recognize that he's skilled, although, perhaps, a bit conventional.

The cover of Selected Poems 1962-1985 has a drawing of Coolidge playing drums on it by Susan Coolidge called "Clark at a Serpent Power rehearsal, sitting on a suitcase, wailing away". Given the era covered by this compilation there's quite a bit of overlap in Coolidge's poetry & his The Serpent Power era:

SPACE (1965-69)
THE SO (1966-67)
STRETCHER (1966-67)
TOOLS, MODELS, SPECIFICATIONS (1966-68)
SUITE V (1967)
POEMS (1967-69)

Choosing to quote from SUITE V (1967) immediately poses a problem: perhaps the most immediately remarkable thing about the poem is that every page has one one syllable plural word centered at the top & one one syllable plural word centered at the bottom. In between: blank page. The 1st page has "taps" at the top & "buns" at the bottom. The problem comes w/ trying to reproduce that in this review. As far as I know, the formatting of the reviews prevents such use of space. AT any rate, it's a far cry from David Meltzer's poetry. A psychedelic band based around Coolidge's poetry of the time wd've interested me very much.

There's an introduction by Bill Berkson that I found informative.

"In the late 1960s, our friendship solidified over my acting as an intermediary in asking Philip Guston to make a cover drawing—it ended up being two drawings, front and back—for Clark's book Ing (1968), which was also how Clark and Guston first met, and soon began collaborating, and how the series of poem pictures Guston made with assorted younger poets' poems over the next ten years began, as well." - p xv

The drawings, which look to me like paintings done with a brush & acrylic are basically black vertical lines somewhat boxed in. This isn't 'hard-line', there's no attempt at sharp straight geometric edges, the lines are obviously hand-done, the brushed-on paint or ink is applied w/ uneven application, it's more like an arrangement of beans, of something organic, w/ each line having its subtle differences: a place where the paint doesn't cover here, a fatter stroke there. One cd say that it's minimal — in a similar spirit to Coolidge's bk, a bk that uses a suffix as its title, something that's usually just a part of a word rather than something that stands on its own. The poems inside are sparse too — but not as sparse as the title of the bk. No poems from Ing were selected for this compilation. The 1st 3 lines from its 1st poem are:

"these

ing

those"

Make of it what you will.

"Having to start somewhere, with an idiosyncratic feeling for prosody prepared by his musical training, he began by imitating, along with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Philip Whalen." - p xvi

Hhmm.. I missed that, maybe I've never read that earliest work or maybe I just didn't notice. Have I ever imitated anyone? Maybe.. It seems more accurate to say that I've been inspired by many people. Coolidge's work is peppered w/ references to other poets & musicians, I'm not sure what it's salted wit.

"Events in music between 1957 and '59 that we responded to, and took as artistic models in our separate ways, included John Cage's Indeterminacy, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk's stints at the Five Spot and his Riverside recordings of that period, Cecil Taylor, Robert Craft's Complete Anton Webern and the New Directions in Music 2/Morton Feldman LP (liner notes by Frank O'Hara and cover drawing by Philip Guston)." - p xvii

I wd've been 3 to 6 during the time specified but when I got old enuf to learn about such things most of the above proved important to me as well. It must've been astounding & wonderful to be able to experience such things as they appeared.

"What we shared then, and talked about only later, was a need and readiness for a mode of writing other than what Coolidge has called "frozen literature," a feeling that words, and the sentences they came all-too-neatly wrapped in, required refreshing via intensive disruption and rearrangement. It seemed urgent for the language we had been taught and that was all around us to be short-circuited and aired out in order to give words more breathing space and physicality, away from their preauthorized, anticipated meanings, so they could exist and mean more in themselves' - p xviii

Naturally, any avant-garde creator, wch Coolidge may or may not consider himself as being, strives to break past the limits established by previous creators. I do the same. Simultaneously, I find previous writing exhilirating & just fine the way it is. Catullus, Villon, Dickinson.. they're fine. If Coolidge's ambition is as Berkson describes above I'd say that Coolidge succeeded at an amazing level.

"Evidently, it is all improvisation: the performative winging it, as unplanned as intense, a case of stamina and decisiveness, admitting of no bluff or cliché, but riding on sustained wonder about whatever's at hand. Coolidge's titles, small wonders in themselves, come last, as if by interpretive afterthought" - p xxi

Well, I can accept that as generally accurate but there's at least one exception, & probably more, that of "The Diamonds" (1966) in which the top line is one centered one syllable word, the 2nd is 2 centered one syllable words, the 3rd is 3, & so on until the middle wch is 13 centered one syllable words after wch the quantity of words per line decreases one word per line — hence forming the shape of a diamond. Even if the form of the 1st poem in this series came spontaneously, the following poems obviously didn't since they all follow the same form. Still, Coolidge's love of improvisation is at least a little obvious by his enthusiasm for jazz musicians — even though the many musicians mentioned in the poems aren't necessarily primarily known as exclusively improvisors.

The earliest poem in this collection (1962), is fairly obviously descriptive, so maybe it's one of the imitative ones mentioned by Berkson:

"MEDITATION IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

Blue sky
few crags, the slopes
are green

air
whistling by
the granite stopwatch" - p 1

But by page 2, in "Noon Shed" from Motor Growers 'Pedia (1963-65), Coolidge has already taken a leap forward (excuse the lack of correctly quoted indentation here):

"this day is grin machine shed
powder red rust over every
thing girl & tree
(slow moons

ocher snuff & ideas

I breathe past beauty
kicks?
(on an armor slat sky

& the mine-disaster printed
on a dark tin wafer" - p 2

From Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric (1964-66) comes the 1st mention of a spelunker who's a recurring feature of many Coolidge poems in "The Death of Floyd Collins".

The section of excerpts from SPACE (1965-69) presents a whopping 19 poems, wch might seem potentially the whole bk, but it's only 19 out of a total of 84 in the original. SPACE was published by Harper & Row, a surprisingly large press considering SPACE's exceptional, & uncommercial, nature. Harper & Row are to be commended! Take this 1st stanza from "Machinations Calcite":

"acetone imprinted
oblique swatch on the skin car barn oil wall
ocarina & mumps
much wet green
I'd leave sole key to this game to my friend, sheet water cat" - p 9

The last line reminds me of lines from my own Telepathy Receptivity Training (1975-?) in wch I transcribe(d) language in my mind while I'm half asleep:

"because I lived in the same house, 40 yrs, underwater"

or

"knack & carack, the carrying away by pens changalamp"

The Diamonds were refreshing for me, they were the only poems I'd seen of Coolidge's that were so obviously shaped. Not only are they diamond shaped, as previously described, but they consist of 3 letter words presented in alphabetical order from top-to-bottom, left-to-right. But there are exceptions. Whether these exceptions are mistakes or deliberate disruptions I don't know. My pointing them out is my way of showing that I pd attn.

The poem beginning w/ "ace" has these 2 lines:

"but bye cab cad cam can cap car cat caw cob cog
cod con coo cop cot cow coy cry cob cud cue cup cur" - p 30

Note that "cod" is out of alphabetical order. The poem beginning w/ "gee" has these 2 lines:

"ode off old one ohm ore
orb our out ova owe" - p 31

Notice that "ohm" & "orb" are both out of place. How the Poetry Police let this guy get away w/ this stuff is beyond me. Then there's the poem beginning w/ "pro":

"vow wry why who wad wag wan war" - p 33

What's that old mnemonic? Wry before who except after vow? Something like that. I'm beginning to suspect that Coolidge was under the influence of those dreaded 20th drugs when he wrote these: sugar, pot, alcohol.. who knows? Maybe even TV!! As if that's not bad enuf, starting on page 34 he just defenestrates it all starts using other forms of organization. Consider the left side of the poem beginning "for":

for
sap
the
led
the
was
won
and
the
the
the
not
the
was
the
six
one
car
and
can
the
and
was
and
was

The guy's starting to get repetitious. By page 34 the guy's just going wild. The poem beginning "mat" has these 2 lines:

"urn ken mat bow lip urn
ken mat bow lip earn" - p 34

He actually makes a pun. Doesn't he know that it's bad enuf to introduce a 4 letter word? He inner bean counter was probably pacified rather than hospitalized by the next 2 poems. The poem beginning "non" has this as its left side:

non
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin
tin

The next vertical row in is this:

non
non
non
non
non
non
non
non
non
non
non
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
out
tin
off

In the meantime, yrs truly went to a park & declared 2 Coolidge poems from this bk "nature poems" & made a short movie of the reading of them:

626. "Reading 2 nature poems by Clark Coolidge"
- 1080p
- 2:32
- shot July 15, 2020; edit finished July 18, 2020
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/DEnv8pb7yIA
- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/reading-coollidge

You've really got to watch out for poets like this, they're tricky little buggers. You never know what wanton paths they might lead your unconscious down. Speaking of wch, here's the 1st stanza of "THE SO" from the bk of the same name:

"slender gel from cracking odes
"punch you," hot, "Hey! Out!"
lime cool green eel key, echo, smite
"it at last," sag gum in
hang, "watching the wrist is . . ."
batter sea lode, lodged against, "much!"
silk is, argonaut match head
"Selby's crazy!", terrible hot tornado
ink licked in small rod, "Summer is . . ."
relic tricycle hit
smile, toad, rills, "Objection, please!"
mended seams, ripen that
remainder amphibian, "Xylophone right next"
simple, oh, "you!"" - p 44

Language use like this keeps the reader guessing, the words bounce around like lottery numbers in a washing machine. It doesn't even almost 'make sense', it throws sense out the window into the loving arms of a trampouline while the firemen look the other way. The language ain't misbehavin', it's spankin' & thankin'.

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1312961?chapter=1 ( )