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disintegrating syntax : clark coolidge
This week, I eagerly devoured the poems in Clark Coolidge's book Space, from 1970. I don't know much about Coolidge aside from this book, but I'm looking forward to learning more.
When I began reading the book, I thought that perhaps one of Coolidge's driving fascination was a love of things—the poems in the early sections of the book are built are characterized by a wild proliferation of nouns:
mica flask moves layout hasty
bunkum geode olive loin candle
mines repeating sky hot dregs, in cast
lank oiler blocks, hats sinkwig pyrite & hasty troll by the rim (from "The Tab")
At times the juxtapositions of things and their descriptors almost cohere into Surrealist images:
armies of harps & bleeding film, so?
(from "Echo & Mildew") envelope larva bulk machine, parts of a hill
(from "Dripstone Assembly")
but other times the nouns come so quickly that they confound the image-making part of the brain:
mauve sod gaps ring sinter close to bells slice opals lens rust to spice
(from "The Eight Rains")
The experience of reading these long chains of words is an experience not of sense-making but rather of a quick cascade of mental associations. The ability to make "sense" of the poems is eroded even further by the book's later sections, where the focus shifts from concrete nouns to abstract nouns, pronouns, and articles. Units of syntactical "meaning" grow ever shorter:
Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It's a gim, a de. (from "These")
In the book's final section, the poems rarely maintain "sense" for even the duration of a single word:
tion
inertia
ity be having
eight priate
via
iny flatting im
dense in ness (from an untitled poem)
A number of the poems from Space can be read here, although the sense of progression that I outlined above, which provides a genuine sense of mounting exhiliration, is likely to be lost when reading just a few sample poems. Fortunately, you can download the entire book as a PDF from this site, or see the whole book in scanned form here, courtesy of the I-can't-believe-I-never-noticed-this-before Eclipse Project, a collection of "digital facsimiles of the most significant out-of-print small-press books and journals from the past quarter-century, as well as major new works of experimental writing."
Further reading: Coolidge interview, on improvisational music, naming and other themes that seem to come up on occasion around here.
Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary |
