T O M O R A N G E
____________________________________________________CLARK COOLIDGE'S VISUAL ARTS
INTERTEXTS 1968-1976
What I'm presenting to you this evening is a thematic or thematized excerpt from a book-length project that traces Clark Coolidge's poetic trajectory from his earliest extant writings (1962) to the beginning of what I consider his mature work (1978).1 This excerpt focuses on his use of texts by visual artists as intertexts for his own work during the period. Now I need to offer the following disclaimers: first, I'll be highlighting a very small portion of Coolidge's vast output--in sheer quantity his unpublished work probably equals if not exceeds the published work. And second, the visual arts are only one region among many interests from which Coolidge's texts draw. So here tonight I will present three Coolidge texts with identifiable intertexts by visual artists, and for each text I will 1) identify the compositional strategies that Coolidge seems to have used to arrive at his own text, 2) describe the effects that such strategies give his texts, and then 3) suggest the larger implications that each case holds for Coolidge's poetics as a whole.
Just to offer a brief overview for those unacquainted with his work: Coolidge considers himself to have come of age in the 1950s, and of the many figures or cultural phenomena of that era that Coolidge considers generative for his own poetic practice I should highlight three here. First, the work of Jack Kerouac: in the short 1982 essay "A First Reading of On the Road and Later," Coolidge writes that
Kerouac made the first connection for me between my life in a suddenly more generative world and the necessity of putting words down on paper. Writing came free of the books I had read and became an actual work I could do. . . . I had thought the writer must first have it all in his head and only then put it into words, but no. I began to see how it was really excitingly done: You wrote from what you didn't know toward whatever could be picked up in the act. Poetry starts here.... I have no doubt that he is the central writer of my place and time.2
Second is jazz, especially its bop and post-bebop formulations of the 1950s: Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck and Cecil Taylor for example, and particularly the innovations in drumming pioneered by Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. (It has become something of a commonplace whenever Coolidge's poetry is discussed to refer knowingly and in hushed tones to Coolidge's own early stint as a jazz drummer.) And third, there is the Abstract Expressionist painting of the New York school, particularly Philip Guston, with whom Coolidge had a close personal friendship. Coolidge speaks of his conversations with Guston in which the painter describes how the fundamental question he faced as an artist was not what kind of art to make but how to go about making art at all, going back to the very basics of making that first mark on the canvas.3
Coolidge's early poetic affinities--from Kerouac (whose work he came upon 1957-1958) through William Carlos Williams, the Beats and Black Mountain poets (1962-1963), to John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara (1964-1965)--can be seen in his first publications, although by 1966 he was writing what he called "constellation poems" of just a handful of words scattered across the page; soon he would be doing the same with word parts.4 In his contributor's note to Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets, Coolidge states: "Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity," and these words to some extent still guide his poetics nearly 40 years later.5 Coolidge also told Lee Bartlett in the early 1980s, "my feeling was that I had to start small and generate a language of my own. . . . even in those days when someone might be looking at a poem of mine of ten seemingly separate words, I was thinking of larger structures."6 I maintain that after breaking language down to its constituent parts in his poetry of the late 1960s, Coolidge undertakes a building up of his own language anew in his celebrated book-length poems of the early 1970s, The Maintains and Polaroid, along with his notorious "longprose" work, a projected 1000-page prose text that Coolidge worked on primarily from 1973-1978 and which he abandoned, untitled and unfinished at over 600pp in 1981.
In taking up Coolidge's visual arts intertexts, I want to begin with a serial poem called "Cabinet Voltaire," from Ing, which was published in 1968 by Angel Hair Books with a cover by Philip Guston.7 The title clearly plays on the Cabaret Voltaire, the Zurich café where Dada was born in 1916. And in a statement for the retrospective Angel Hair Anthology recently brought out by Granary Books, Coolidge states that Ing "was built in a double/mirror structure around two long poems, A D (I can't recall the source of) and Cabinet Voltaire (sic) which came from a scanning of Motherwell's Dada Painters and Poets."8 Additionally, a complete holograph manuscript of the poem among Coolidge's papers at the SUNY-Buffalo Poetry Collection contains notations by Coolidge indicating the authors and in some cases the precise page numbers from the Motherwell anthology that provided the source material of each section for the poem.9
From these notes it is possible to determine the compositional strategies that Coolidge employed to arrive at the text of "Cabinet Voltaire." For example, for section 7 of the poem Coolidge uses Tristan Tzara's "Zurich Chronicle" as a source text. Comparing the two texts makes Coolidge's compositional strategies quite evident: namely, scanning down the left margin of the source page in question for words and word parts that are then assembled into lines and stanzas largely in the order in which Coolidge finds them. For example, the stanza
taniety
timent
isme
burstsis taken from the left margin of four successive lines in the Tzara text. This is not common practice for the poem as a whole, but it affords me the most convenient illustration of Coolidge's method in "Cabinet Voltaire," which more typically consists of taking more scattered words and word parts from the open Motherwell pages (recto and verso) and arranging them (usually in the order in which they occurred) into his own lines and stanzas. This reflects what Coolidge describes in the aforementioned Angel Hair note as his then "fascination with word-fragmentation, building from syllabic plucks, particularly the ends of words (I now notice)." With a few exceptions, this strategy is followed pretty consistently throughout "Cabinet Voltaire."
So what does the poem achieve? Coolidge is here exploring what I call verbal valence, that is, testing the laws of morphology to see the relative capability of words and word parts to attach to one another and thus achieve sense. For example, I consider "taneity" and "timent" to have a relatively low valence: they seem able to adhere to little else beyond "spontaneity" and "sentiment" respectively (which are in fact the complete words from the source text). By contrast, the suffix "-isme" not only signals to us the presence of the French language, but it also has a higher valence because it can attach to any number of word stems to denote aesthetic, politcal and cultural movements. Moreover, the juxtaposition of "isme" with "bursts" as Coolidge has done here suggests that any attempts to codify cultural movements such as Impressionism or Postmodernism into rigid sets of dogma will be bound to fail because the artifacts themselves will transcend or "burst" those bounds--a sentiment that is of course very close to what Tzara expresses in his "Zurich Chronicle."10 Speaking not of "Cabinet Voltaire" but "A D," the other long poem from Ing composed in a similar fashion, Steve McCaffery writes:
the spatial placement of the graphemes and the sheer fact of their density command equal attention. . . . Compositionally it's the engineering of these two drives towards a form understood as both potential sign and matter that is central. Syntax is transformed to become a calculus of densities and a geomantic ordering of pure experiences."11
Though what he describes as "densities" here I am calling "valence," McCaffery's analysis is quite on the mark; and while his appeal to divination here may be unique to his own interests, Coolidge's interest in what happens when words and things that aren't supposed to go together are made to do so has an "otherworldly" dimension to it. In the 1976 notebook entries that Michael Palmer published in his Code of Signals anthology, Coolidge writes: "I want everything to come together. / And then I want it to all go away, / leaving behind one thing that was never / in the pile to begin with. / The world is not enough. I want something / else to appear."12
The next text I want to consider here was also composed in 1968 but only published a year later in the March 1969 issue (#15) of The World. Edited at the time by Anne Waldman, The World was a side-stapled mimeo magazine in an oversized legal format (8½ by 14 inches) and something of a house organ for the 2nd generation of New York School poets operating in and around the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. (And here I'd refer you to Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome for a thoughtful overview.13) Coolidge's piece bears the curious title "The (Part I)" and is also one of his earliest published prose pieces.14 It remains uncollected to this day, although Coolidge included it in a 150+ page book-length collection of prose pieces he assembled in 1973 called One's Plenties: Collected Proses 1969-1973.
In his correspondence with me, Coolidge indicates that the source text for "The (Part I)" was an Andy Warhol interview, and with Kenny Goldsmith's help I determined the specific source text to be Gretchen Berg's "Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol," which was published in the May 1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinema in English.15 Again, a side-by-side comparison makes Coolidge's compositional strategy apparent: namely, taking words almost exactly as they appear in the sequence of the source text, but instead of reading vertically down the left margin as in "Cabinet Voltaire," Coolidge reads horizontally along the lines of the Warhol text, but here making more liberal use of inversions and substitutions as he goes along.
For example, Warhol's sentence "I'd prefer to remain a mystery, I never like to give my background" becomes, in Coolidge's text, "I'd never like a mystery"; where Warhol continues "and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I'm asked," Coolidge writes "I make it every time I'm asked." Notice how these simple excisions and inversions have effected a significant change in the meaningful content of Warhol's words: the whole effacement of the ego in the light of fame and publicity more or less disappears from the first part of Warhol's sentence; and the idea of continually revising one's own biographical information ("I make it all up different every time I'm asked") becomes perhaps suggestive of sexual promiscuity ("I make it every time I'm asked"). In the last third of the paragraph, Warhol states that "All the publicity I've gotten . . . it's so funny, really . . it's not that they don't understand me, I think everyone understands everyone, non-communication is not a problem." In Coolidge's text this statement becomes first, "Funny, it's all publicity, really," which is fairly consistent with Warhol's own sense; but then Coolidge continues: "They don't understand that everyone understands everyone is not a problem." Hardly revising the original word order at all, Coolidge instead makes a few key excisions, seizing on Warhol's repetitions of "everyone" and "understand" and thus distilling the materials down to a syntactic density reminiscent of Gertrude Stein.
What the excision and editing process achieves for Coolidge in "The (Part I)" is a text that retains while occasionally subverting the thematic traces of its Warholian intertext--the artist's relationship to fame, publicity and the cultures of art--at the same time that it enables Coolidge to find another order of syntax hidden within Warhol's. That is, in terms of sentence construction, Warhol's long, periodic sentences often spill over into grammatically incorrect "run-on" sentences--doubtless due in part to the difficulty of transcribing an interview and somewhat arbitrarily deciding how to punctuate spoken sentences.
By contrast, Coolidge's sentences are much shorter, and the stops come in unusual places, seeming to accentuate the lack of ordinary sense making. His sentences are very deliberate: to take four of them in succession: "I don't have an image anyway. I'm influenced by unfavorable painters. Everyone is in art. I love life & the living influence." Sentences become discrete verbal objects subject to manipulation like the word parts of "Cabinet Voltaire," but here yielding a "narrative I" that inhabits an indeterminate space somewhere between the confessional and the declarative, the self-effacing and the self-absorbed. This is an important tendency in Coolidge's poetic trajectory that will lie dormant for a number of years before reemerging as a dominant tendency (what might be called his "lyric turn" in Own Face).
For the third and final use of a visual arts intertext I want to consider here, we have to move ahead in the chronology of Coolidge's publications to October 1974, when he completed Smithsonian Depositions, a prose work unprecedented in his oeuvre to date and published in 1980 by Annabel Lee under her Vehicle Editions imprint in a single volume together with another prose work from the period, Subject to a Film.16 While the latter is a meditation on film occasioned by, among other things, watching the movie Jaws be filmed on location in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (where Coolidge's parents frequently spent their summers), Smithsonian Depositions is a prose text that collages pieces of his own writing with wholesale portions of texts from a variety of fields listed at the end of the book: from poetry (William Carlos Williams and Bernadette Mayer), fiction (J. G. Ballard), and periodicals (the New Yorker and the New York Times) to geology textbooks, film almanacs, the liner notes to a Steve Lacy solo saxophone recording, and films by Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais.
The final item in the list of sources, though, is simply "the writings of Robert Smithson" (SD 44), the artist famous for his earth-works such as "The Spiral Jetty," a 1500-foot long, 15-foot wide coil composed of rock, dirt, salt crystals and red algae extending from a shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Coolidge as a poet interested in visual art and geology would have much in common with this visual artist interested in poetry and geology and born the year before him; but Smithson's writings appealed to Coolidge at least equally: Jack Flam, the editor of Smithson's Collected Writings, suggests that "Smithson treated written texts as if they too. . . were made of solid materials; as if words were not only abstract signs for things and concepts, but also a form of matter."17
Coolidge's compositional strategy in Smithsonian Depositions can be seen from the opening page: whatever the source of the preceding materials, the fifth paragraph begins with "Then Passaic Center loomed like a dull adjective. Each 'store' in it was an adjective unto the next, a chain of adjectives disguised as stores" (SD 9) -- a direct quotation from Smithson's 1967 "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (RSCW 72) though it is not acknowledged as such. What does Coolidge achieve by such wholesale importation of others' words into his own text? Let us recall first that a "deposition" is a de-posing of something, a removal or separation of something from its position or place, so that Coolidge's Smithsonian Depositions are verbal materials that have been de-posed from their original place or position. "Deposits" are also de-posed or dis-placed through natural processes, such as sediment deposited in a river delta or minerals deposited below the earth's crust. Thus what seems at first like an unnatural act of appropriating another's text might turn out to be quite natural after all when viewed from a different perspective, namely that of words as material objects.
Second, we need to consider Coolidge's indication in a letter to Michael Palmer dated June 20, 1975 his preference for the word "embedding" rather than "collage."18 To "embed" is to fix something into a surrounding mass, thus not only keeping us in the geological realm but also maintaining precisely that sense of words as a material objects that is fundamental to Coolidge and Smithson in their practices. Smithson's words about Passaic Center, for example, are objects taken out of their original context and placed into the new bed of language that is Coolidge's Smithsonian Depositions, into the condition of sharing this new material space with Coolidge's own words and the words of his numerous sources.
In that same letter to Palmer, Coolidge describes how in Smithsonian Depositions, details from his own life are interlayered with those of Smithson, likening details remembered from earlier in one's life to "unconformities," a geological term that refers to the discontinuities between different layers of earth and rock. He describes further how it's the textual disruptions and discontinuities that enable him to even use autobiographical material in the first place. We can see this embedding of the autobiographical in an additional passage from Smithsonian Depositions:
"I would get down on all fours and in such a way that my knees and hands would touch; I would then let my head droop with its own weight while swinging it in all directions like a pendulum, so as to make all my blood flow into it" (12).
The speaker goes on to describe the "voluptuous dizziness" that resulted and how the hallucinations that emerged from this resembled fried eggs. Coolidge has reproduced this paragraph directly from one of his listed sources, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali.19
But what's important here is how the text of Smithsonian Depositions reads in its very next paragraph: "In the grade school room the windows fascinated, though they remained nearly the same wall-picture, with great slight variants of a woman sweeping her driveway. Tipping stacks of manila sheets and chalk noise, blackboard dust" (12). This speaker here continues with recollections of grade school experience, with art projects and paintings of dinosaurs that the children had done, one in particular, we are told,
a project to be folded up square and incinerated with trash heaps of spellingtests bookreports crayondrawings of P38s submarines and Jap Zeros flying to pieces across a sky of radiating red lines. I kneel on a thumbtack and stare at the silver disc flush with my kneecap. I stare, eyes tear, iced air. . . (12-13)
The passage seems to move quickly from a very vivid description of a place where much childhood time was spent--"Sun angles on gouged varnish dark desk, the crawltime of electric tickface," the wonderful Kerouacean compounds suggesting clock time perhaps hyperbolically approaching geological time--to the seeming expendability of not just grade school art projects but the whole educational process, concluding with the homophonic riffing of the last six syllables "I stare, eyes tear, iced air." One suspects that the "crayondrawing of P38s submarines and Jap Zeros flying to pieces" are in some respects the product an American society at the height of World War II, in which even grade school children are taught to reiterate the destruction of the "Jap" enemy. The final image here is especially striking: the child seems to have not even felt any pain upon initial contact between knee and thumbtack, the eyes tearing (with no cry of pain?) only after staring dumbstruck at the visual image of "the silver disc flush with my kneecap."
What is the source of this second paragraph, and how does it relate to the preceding paragraph? I'll answer the first question momentarily. But as to the relationship between these two paragraphs embedded as verbal objects into Smithsonian Depositions, one does not even need to know that the first comes from Salvador Dali's autobiography to see how the two are related: clearly both speakers are recollecting experiences as grade school aged children. These are also highly visually-oriented; even though the first speaker's visual hallucinations are the result of a silly game of making one's self dizzy, the net effect does not seem to differ much from the out-of-body staring at the thumbtack stuck in one's own kneecap as the second speaker describes it.
But we can draw further parallels between the speakers of these two passages by going to the specific page Coolidge excerpts from Dali's autobiography, where we read that "external danger has the virtue of provoking and enhancing the phantasms and representations," continuing in a footnote that "the present war has furnished me several striking examples on this subject: during the air-raid alarms in Paris I would draw the curled-up and foetus-like attitudes that people would adopt in the shelters" (31 n.1). In other words, "the present war," i.e. World War II (the autobiography was written in 1941) encourages Dali to recall his own youthful endeavors in drawing during the time of World War I (he was born in 1904). Thus both speakers share the childhood experience of expressing themselves visually under the conditions of war.
It should come as no surprise, in fact, that the published record contains evidence that Coolidge is describing his own experience in second paragraph from Smithsonian Depositions. In the "Arrangement" talk he gave at the Naropa Institute in 1977, Coolidge discusses the paintings not of Salvador Dali but another surrealist, Yves Tanguy, and the way that Tanguy's landscape forms appear to be of indeterminate material-"It may be on water, it may be the desert, but anyway, there are these forms. Are they mineral, are they animal, are they about to move or are they frozen there since before time? Fantastic" (149).
He then continues by discussing one of Tanguy's juvenile paintings, of an ocean liner with "endless rows of little windows," and immediately relates it to his own experience:
Like, I was in first grade during the Second World War and we used a lot of red crayon. We had the Jap Zeros being shot down and the submarines, and the pictures were all filled up with red. You liked to draw big fighting ships and put in millions of windows. You get totally involved in that, you forgot what it was all about, what was the story? (150)
The reference here in the Naropa talk to red crayon, "Jap zeros" and submarines should be sufficient indication that his own experiences described here are the very same ones included in Smithsonian Depositions. Indeed it may be this kind of "total involvement," the "forgetting what it was all about" as Coolidge recalls it with over thirty years of hindsight in 1977, that causes the speaker in Smithsonian Depositions the delayed reaction to the thumbtack stuck in his knee. By embedding his own autobiographical material with that of Dali, Coolidge achieves at once an identifying and distancing effect; that is, by identifying with the speaker in the source text, he is able to achieve the degree of distance from his own autobiography necessary in order for the material to be admitted into the work in the first place.
The larger implications for Coolidge's work as a whole that I hope you can draw from this admittedly selective presentation are, as I see it, first, the understanding of language as a material object. This enables, second, a poetic trajectory from the late sixties to the middle seventies in which Coolidge moves from breaking language down to its rudimentary components in order to see what meanings and things can and cannot be made, to building up his own language anew. Clearly in Smithsonian Depositions that new language is not "his own" per se, having been appropriated from a variety of sources. But, third and finally, this appropriation affords Coolidge the opportunity to expand the field of what is proper to his writing; admitting an autobiographical, even confessional mode of address into his work here, he is laying the groundwork or seeking permission for the emergence of a speaking subject or "lyric I" that we find running from Own Face through to the poems begun as On the Nameways that Coolidge continues to work on today.
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1. This talk was given at the 121st Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Washington DC, December 28, 2005, as part of the panel "Pastiches and Palimtexts: Source Texts in Contemporary Experimental Poetry." Thanks to Camille Martin for organizing the panel, and to the audience members and fellow panelists (Randall Couch, Michael Cross and Elisabeth Joyce) for the ensuing discussion.
2. Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999), pages 16-18.
3. See, for example, "Arrangement," in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute, edited by Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb (Boulder & London: Shambhala, 1978), page 159. Also available online at Coolidge's Electronic Poetry Center Author's Page. Although an obvious subject for discussion would be the collaborations Coolidge did with Guston that were published as Baffling Means (Stockbridge, MA: O-blek Editions, 1991), I will not be considering that work here.
4. See "Arrangement" 161-162 and the ensuing discussion.
5. Paul Carroll, ed. The Young American Poets (Chicago and New York: Follett, 1968), page 149.
6. Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, ed. Lee Bartlett (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), page 12.
7. Ing (New York: Angel Hair Books, 1968), not paginated. Long out of print, ING is now available in digital form on the Eclipse website that Craig Dworkin put together when he was at Princeton University.
8. In the "Memoirs" section of The Angel Hair Anthology, ed. Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh (New York: Granary Books, 2001), page 581.
9. The Clark Coolidge Papers, Poetry Collection, Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo, Box 10 Folder 9. Thanks to Michael Basinski for his invaluable assistance and enthusiasm.
10. Elisabeth Joyce makes a very astute observation: "isme" is also "is me," thus adding a whole dimension of subjectivity and ontology into the discussion.
11. Steve McCaffery, "The Death of the Subject: The Implications of Counter-Communication in Recent Language-Centered Writing" (Open Letter, Third Series Number 7 [Summer 1977]), page 72. The essay was revised for its inclusion in North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-86 (New York: Roof Books, 1986). McCaffery's description of Coolidge's transformation of syntax into "a geomantic ordering of pure experiences" not only recalls Rational Geomancy, the title of his "collected research reports" conducted in collaboration with bp Nichol under the guise of the Toronto Research Group; It's also a very appropriate description of the plot summary Coolidge gives of "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by Lewis Padgett, a science fiction story he read in junior high, during his July 1977 "Arrangement" talk at Naropa (given roughly the same time that McCaffery's essay was published in Open Letter). See "Arrangement" 145-146.
12. "From Notebooks 1972-1976," in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), page 175. Available online at the Duration Press archives (PDF 584K).
13. Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
14. "The (Part I)," The World 15.2 (March 1969), not paginated. The earliest published prose piece by Coolidge I can find is "The Breaks," in the final issue of Joglars (#3, 1966).
15. Gretchen Berg, "Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol." Cahiers du Cinema in English 10 (May 1967). 38-43. This interview has been collected in I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews 1962-1987, edited by Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).
16. Smithsonian Depositions and Subject to a Film (New York: Vehicle Editions, 1980). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text as SD. Also available online at the Eclipse project.
17. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (1979, reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), page xv. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text as RSCW.
18. Coolidge's letters to Palmer are in the Michael Palmer Papers, Poetry Collection, Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo (uncatalogued).
19. Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier (1942, reprinted New York: Dover, 1993), pages 31-32. Dali's Secret Life also provides the material for a portion of the longprose that was published as "A Lecture" in This 10 (Winter 1979-1980, not paginated).
