Clark Coolidge

 Excerpt

Clark Coolidge 
Arrangement 
from Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute (1978)

So I began to look at minerals and I began to collect them, and I remember my folks bought me one of those little boxes with the cardboard dividers and little specimens. Little dollar tiny box, calcite crystal, put it on a page and see how the words doubled. Okay, I took that home and I began to go out and find rocks, began to bug my parents to take me out on Saturday to quarries and my father didn't want to go; he wanted to stay home and listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, and I had to go out to some quarry and pick up rocks. I began to learn the names. And not just the names but where they came from, what they were made of. You understand, I had no desire to do anything with this to be professional. Later I did, but at this point it was just pure fascination. What are those things?

In fact, I remember a funny incident in Providence, Rhode Island, where Brown University is. Because my father was professor of music there, I got to know the chairman of the geology department. He used to let me go and open the drawers and look at all the minerals. And I remember being in there one day and there were these guys and they were all working with Bunsen burners and blowpipes and everything and they were smashing rocks with hammers and they were taking a test, an exam. I was in junior high school and they were in sophomore year or something, and one of them saw me looking through the drawers and he said, "Hey, come here, what is this?" "Sure," I said, "that's an apatite crystal from Ontario." He said, "Thank you," and he wrote it down. So I got chastised of course: "Don't do that, this is a serious test." But I remember it struck me that they were going through all these procedures, these rules they were taught; that you burn the thing and you get the bead of it, you put it in a solution, it turns a certain color, you write something down, there's mathematics, and then you find out. I didn't have to do that. I picked the thing up, I looked at it, I held it in my hand, maybe I sniffed it, maybe I licked it, and I knew what it was and I knew where it was from, just purely from looking and touching and having them. This was the way I learned this. Now, alright, this gave me trouble with education.

That's another reason I feel strange here, because I hated school and in fact I had two years of a major in geology. I got to the point where I thought maybe I would become a geologist but when I found out what geologists do, it wasn't what I had imagined. I had a very romantic image, I guess. I thought I would be standing in the Gobi Desert with a pick, finding dinosaur eggs or something, like Roy Chapman Andrews. And, no, that's not what it is, you know. I mean, when I did this, I hit the school and majored in geology just at the time when, in the late fifties, geology was changing from being a descriptive science to a real high-toned mathematical, geophysical, super-laboratory stress-and-strain type science. Anybody who looked at rocks and collected minerals and got something out of that . . . Forget it. I'd get in the laboratory, look through the microscope, "Yeah, sure." Slide rule.

. Tiny shelled creatures