Alien Tatters
Clark Coolidge
publisher: Atelos Books, 2000
isbn: 1-891190-08-3
price: $12.95
Coolidge's latest collection of long poems -- hot on the heels of his massive group of loopy lyrics from The Figures, On The Nameways -- takes the reader to a delicately upsetting space which seems run by the evil twin of Descarte's god, replacing every object in the room until, like in a swoon, one falls squarely into the lush language:
Just kind of a nice frying person. The rest was on the latch moved over. I could just see a foot or threat of one because my head was lying on my head. A bit. Then another weighted hand, sort of spoollike and in spots and dashes. Gaming room with a spread to it.
[72]
"Puzzle Faces" is framed like a discovery narrative, an air of mystery being created by the author's subjunctive sense of meaning and lack of agency as he/she, in a partly lotus-eater state, tries to avoid panic and indecision:
There is something heavy being lifted like a blot from the paper. Are you all prepared? There will be little fun in thin rooms. Might have to barter for favors. This is an uneven clime. I'll have to eat when I can, there being no rooms for it here. Where purest night is considered a sort of vitamin not just anyone should ingest. I watch the lights popping out all the way down the cabin. There must be creatures here who would overlead the populace, just a feeling.
[140]
However, like the other four long prose pieces in this book, it soon breaks down into his idiosyncratic stand-up-parataxis comedy mode, and so rather than follow though, Beckett-like, on the implications of its shady premises, the work becomes a play of surfaces on which anything can strike from a number of angles ("I can't believe the underwear that comes with America"), though always returning somehow to that discovering voice:
Lower on the block was half a chicken. There may be people here who roam, but they are not the semblables. They are mildly warm and senseless. I have to send away and enclose my vocabulary. I am small and that is my name, "Small".
[145]
As Coolidge writes in the afterword, he was very attentive to reportings in the papers of UFO sightings and alien abductions, and had a "huge desire to participate somehow. If I couldn't go, then perhaps at least I might learn to speak the language, and use it to take myself further in, or out, to what?" [199]
The long first poem, "Alien Tatters," takes up this theme most strongly, seeming to describe what happens among these creatures, though they never seem to escape his head:
At first there was so much light in the room with me that I thought it must be the dog. But no. Okay, but I will explain that the grass was green. They gave me the kind of Jello where it still came in a set. Then I got launched somehow and let's forget all about ceilings. When I couldn't see what was below the eyes I always breathed heavily in short pants. But I'm not even sure about the eyes. I can't even see the eats.
[63]
But speaking this language -- as challenging and seemingly whimsical as trying to learn dolphin mating calls -- seems to have been Coolidge's desire since his early minimal poems (collected in Space) through his bee-bop Kerouac prosody (in Sound as Thought) and his other long prose works (Book of During, etc.).
That he decides on a quasi-science fiction theme for his latest book -- though one thoroughly absent of technological fetishism and/or the humanist reclamation of weirdness and otherness (cf. Kinsella's The Visitants) -- is not so unusual given the sheen of philosophical depth that popular culture and digital technology, not to mention the freakish alienation talk shows grant to panopticized suburban life, have given the genre.
While Coolidge may not be for everyone -- one has to really be able to get over long works with no significant "themes," linear narrative or apparent correlation with social realities to read him -- this is a thoroughly enjoyable book and unlike anything else one will find on the shelves this year.
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