By John Melillo

 

Poetry is strong, stronger than tense, longer than tense,
more than a habit of wrist, a blister of finding, a
throat to go. It lands me
in blind lands, it hovers my solace.

(from “Means (To Have in Mind to Wish to Tell) as Lures (Lyre of Loss)” in Solution Passage)

What do we make of the poet Clark Coolidge? What is to be made of him?

made thought which of it
all of which a kind yet
best it in and on should must
whatever it is often once to do

(from “Made Thought” in Space)

We see lexical and syllabic atoms aggregate in Coolidge’s particular ways: new sentences, grammars, syntaxes, and sounds. We seem to see and hear only dissolution, the remainders of communication. But always, within Coolidge’s bent, warped, inclined, atomistic word-murmur, there remains an implicit question—a question that could be asked in dizzying number of ways: What is this? What does it mean? What means this? What makes meaning?

it’s were means
how both will how only this where
for ever that such a kind means
however tends that one can only
till both are what’s there what’s itself
how it’s often by hence such a

(from Polaroid)

A relationship between “means” as noun and “means” as verb comes into play. What are the means of meaning? Sounds, repetitions, echoes, imitations, redundancy, rhythm… or, even, “what’s there what’s itself.” What is there there (to echo Gertrude Stein) is the what that is there—not only the word “what” but the taking place of language, the occupying of a position from which or in which language occurs and emits. This “what” is not a thing “in itself”—a kind of philosophical object beyond sense and self. It is, rather, the cacophony of language as sound. Or, better, the cacophony of sound coming into and forming the space of language. In the words of a collection of Coolidge’s poetry, it is Sound as Thought.

But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the
final catch, trounced morning
this is awful but none other available, words reach
and visually fail to tie audibly retire
the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of
turning aside remind.

(“Argument Over, Amounting” from Sound as Thought)

Such organizations of sound constantly return us to their construction, their existence as constructions. Coolidge trained as a jazz musician, and he is still a performing drummer. One can hear, particularly in the repetitions and strange, dissonant, often hard-to-speak consonant clusters an attitude towards language itself as a musical instrument, a stock of particular sounds to aggregate in whatever way works in the moment. Language becomes a percussive apparatus, a sound-synthesizer.

But has come over popular on the Canarsie carbon lines. A test to string it out between finger and trestle. The windows are dimmed felt in mint orange. A train line your air car but it sticks out along. The schoolbook is lost behind the paintings, and the merriness gone gorge. Summer is a pant. A cup of Za-Rex thrown back later in the bebop line. I’ve got teeth you’ve got. 

(from American Ones: Noise and Its Presentiments)

You can hear how Coolidge attends to “a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity” (from the anthology, The Young American Poets). The layering of spondaic interruptions: “dimmed felt,” “mint orange,” “train line,” “air car,” “schoolbook,” etc. The alliterations: “come,” “Canarsie,” “carbon.” The consonantal transformations from “test” to “trestle.” The movement of interior sound-shapes: The wINdows are dIMMed felt IN mINt orange. The whole dance of tongue and palate—an exhausting and exhaustive dance, a kind of jazz “blowing” built not out of breath unit but word-unit, page-space and disrupted syntax.

However, Coolidge reverses Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” Rather than the sounds ornamenting a solid proposition, what we hear is resistance, a kind of catching, scratching incantation separating words and the things they name. These resistances cut against the grain of sentence structures and rhetorical cliché. Coolidge uses everyday language, words familiar to our making sense of (making meaning out of) the world, and yet he arranges those words in such a way that we simultaneously expect, at every moment, the complete sentence, the quiver of a familiar meaning or ending, but such expectations are always subverted, inverted, left unfulfilled.

To walk in a short cave must a song on all fours tighten always try and to scale a song that then who shall stop it. This is just as if it was a tube. A diapason full in felt then seen. A perhaps may do the donors more the donuts. 

(from “Music” in A Book Beginning What and Ending Away)

Coolidge’s work, then, is not simply “nonsense” nor is it “pure sound.” It is composition radicalized, language uprooted and re-routed. That is, it is a way of organizing, arranging, mixing, repeating, re-using, and reappropriating words in order “to scale a song.” This work rearranges not only the fundamental structures, abiding logics or “scales” of “song,” it also asks us to think about “scale” as a form of measurement, a way of ordering time and space. I have necessarily had to give short samples of work in this introduction, but Coolidge’s most recent work, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away, which is an unfinished work from the late 70s and early 80s, stretches to over 600 pages. The gigantic scale of such a text (and its unfinished status) rearranges the relationship of word to word, word to sentence, word to book, and word to language: these words move not only in periods based on sentence-like structures but also in larger waves of repetition and energy. In such a long work, Coolidge creates a kind of fractal multiplicity: microscopic sound-structures and macroscopic “clouds” of loosely appropriated language swirl in ever-widening vortices and rhythmic structures.

The effect of this is to create a striated, atmospheric condition for language. Words and syllables are structures of repetition through time, piles of aggregated and compacted mouth-sound densities, traces of inflection crystallized and fractured, playback recordings with every human as an emitter. In creating moments in which everyday language can precipitate into new particles of possibility, Coolidge allows his reading listeners to catch word sounds and place them into the happening of language, here, now in the midst of and by means of a cacophony of all possible messages:

…A poet used the word
“lozenge,” he didn’t write it. Some other and more careless
scribe wanted me to write one of those but the hell with what lies off
him. I remain stormy in my paradise. I pull up my pants when
the itch takes me, drops hitting page. Writing is a prayer for
always it starts at the portal lockless to me at last leads
to the mystery of everything that has always been written.

(from “On Induction of The Hand” in Solution Passage)