Clark Coolidge

As usual, it's weird writing these reviews. It cd, hypothetically, all depend on my mood. Eg: I cd write: "Who gives a shit? It's poetry, I hate poetry." & it wd be as true as something very different that I might write.

I've been an experimental writer, I probably still am. It's not one of my highest priorities but it still tickles my brain now & then - then my brain sneezes instead of farting. In my days of greater investigation of things that can be done w/ language, I was looking for writers whose writing struck me as original, or just struck me - preferably w/o injury.

Coolidge has always been a beacon of originality. It doesn't matter one whit to me if I 'understand' what he's trying to do, what matters to me is that when I read the words they seem fresh - preferably fresh in a way that seems truly distinct to the writer - & that's Coolidge fer ya.

In his poem "CABINET VOLTAIRE", section 3 is roughly as follows:

3.


tradict


theless


it gether
tastic
for


gin tion



and sarily
and
sests


He uses fragments of words. "tradict" cd have a phantom limb 'completing' it as "contradict", "theless" cd be "nonetheless", "gether" -> "together", "tastic" -> "fantastic", "tion" -> "recognition", "sarily" -> "necessarily"; but what about "sests"? The last syllable of this section?

The very title of the bk is a 'mere' suffix. The Guston painting on the front has brush strokes enclosed by the cover, the one on the back has brush strucks enclosed by more brush strokes. By the time one has made it from the front to the back have the fragments become more complete by the process of reading them?… (meer)

One of the things that can be specified when manually adding bks here is the "primary language". When entering bks like "SPACE" I hesitate to even say that that's English. But English it is, just an English that's so fragmented & syntactically screwed w/ that most people who read English wd find it incomprehensible.

I actually got my copy of this in a thrift store. Astounding. That's kept me looking thru bks in thrift stores for decades since. After all, there might be something as unique as "SPACE" in one of them again someday.

When the poems have names, the names often seem more conventional than what follows. Eg: "CIRCLE DEVILS". That's evocative enuf.. but then the poem starts:

"6th floor seated on a brief card game sometimes called
it a hut or boat kelp does not shut or struggle cheap"

& where DID those "CIRCLE DEVILS" go, exactly?

The inside cover blurb says: "At first glance, Clark Coolidge's poems appear to be completely impenetrable parades of apparently unrelated words arranged in meaningless patterns across the page. If you keep reading, though, the poems begin to have s strange effectiveness, and eventually you begin to see the words in an entirely new and exhilirating way." I agree. & whoever wrote that sd it better than I ever will.

… (meer)

When manually entering bks here a text appears after the title's been typed in that reads: "The book you are adding may already exist in our database. If it appears below, please use that edition instead of adding a new one." & then it goes on to list the possibilities. Apparently, the way it works is that the system just throws up a bunch of titles that might have one word in common w/ what one's entered. Sometimes, it's even more abstract than that. This, of course, is a great way of automatically generating found poetry. At the bottom of this review are the 1st 10 possibilities that I was given. The 4th one is, apparently, a later edition of the same bk that I've created here. I didn't notice it in the midst of the other irrelevancies until I'd already created the edition of the bk I'm reviewing here. Most of the time w/ the bks I enter, all pre-existing entries are irrelevant & drastically different from what I'm writing about.

Anyway, the funny thing to me about this is that I was thinking about what I cd write further about why I like Coolidge's writing & I was thinking about the title: "THE MAINTAINS". I realized that just the title alone has a peculiarly stimulating effect for me. It cd be read as if it means that "the" (the article or simply "the" as itself, as an object) "maintains" ("maintains" something? "maintains" a function of definitive anchoring?) &/OR "THE MAINTAINS" as in a specific, definitive "maintains" - as if "maintains" is a noun instead of a verb. By beginning the title w/ the definitive article & following it w/ a word that's not usually a noun, Coolidge both creates something that seems to be a solid reference & simultaneously evades such solidity. So having the found poetry of GoodReads database irrelevant spin-offs seems like an appropriate way of nounifying verbosity. I like it.

This was probably my favorite Coolidge bk when I read it. It's written in stanzas w/ varying numbers of lines. The words are usually (always?) only 1 to 4 syllables long & I think of words as bricks again - as I did in relation to Alan Davies' writing. Maybe they're bricks of ice - will they ever melt? Do they melt in Coolidge's mouth when he reads them aloud?

It's a somewhat idiotic subcultural commonplace to say something like "You shd see that movie when you're tripping!" but I think of that here. What might seem incomprehensible in 'normal' states of mind might very well lock into place for a profound experience when in a state of expanded consciousness.

Spontaneous Healing : How to Discover and Embrace Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

Visioneering: God's Blueprint for Developing and Maintaining Personal Vision

MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-290): Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, Second Edition

The Maintains

Guitar Player Repair Guide: How to Set Up, Maintain, and Repair Electrics and Acoustics Second Edition

New Fix-It-Yourself Manual: How to Repair, Clean, and Maintain Anything and Everything in and Around Your Home

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands

Perfect Weight: The Complete Mind-Body Program for Achieving and Maintaining Your Ideal Weight

Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands

… (meer)

The top of page 97:

"dial around forth enough means that there since
it's still lest closely light dial an around times as yet lots
dial by seen apart than by lots as forth a there that this leave
in case let lest dial really single a matter of one tending may
a lot of match twin seat case will dial leaving places gotten to turn around"

I can approximately date when I read this bk by seeing the smoke/soot stain across the top. This dates it as something that was in my collection in 1985 before my apartment was set fire to early that yr. I think my interest in Coolidge was starting to wane at the time. Maybe I had 'better' things to think about - like how utterly vicious the society I lived in was.… (meer)