Clark Coolidge

 

Scratching the '70s: The Uncollected Clark Coolidge

By Tom Orange

n perhaps his most important early statement on poetics (included in his contributor's note to Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets), Clark Coolidge states: "Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity" (149). His first perfect-bound and to this day only book with a trade publisher, Space (Harper and Row 1970) mounted an extensive study of these qualities, which his work continues to explore to this day. But while Space on one level signaled a new poetics at the start of a new decade, as something of a selected early poems the book was in fact a culmination of old business. Having learned his lessons from the minimalist gestures of poems like "ounce code orange" and "A D," Coolidge was about to embark upon an extensive project of building up his own language anew: as he 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" (12).

      As with any prolific author--his notoriously voluminous unpublished work easily equals and likely exceeds his published work in sheer page count--Coolidge's book publications tell only part of this story. And the story they tell is an erratic, discontinuous one at that: from the minimalist constellation poems of Space, to the paratactic and polysyntactic maximalism of the 1974 book-length poem Polaroid, and finally to the more personal and traditionally lyric poems of Own Face (1978). Considering uncollected poems from serial and anthology publications of the period, however, offers a much more complete picture of Coolidge's trajectory than can be seen from the published books. Serial poems like "Tiny Messages" (1970) and "Air" (1971) show Coolidge extending the serial logic of the constellation poems, using different syntaxes and word stocks as the connective tissue that enables the book-length poems The Maintains and Polaroid. Similarly, prose and "prosoid" works like "One's Plenties" (1971) and "Karstarts" (1973) find Coolidge working in ordinary language and punctuated sentences in a manner that clearly enables the structural and semantic shift to a more conventional lyric mode in Own Face.