Clark Coolidge
On The Nameways: Volume One
publisher: The Figures
isbn: 1-930589-02-6
price: $12.50
Like Ashbery in his recent "Girls on the Run," Coolidge indulges in fantasies of serious play among grownups, creating, in this long series of short poems (for which there will, presumably, be a Volume II), a landscape in which words themelves become characters, suggest psychological dimensions, and in the end depart having pleased, perverted or deceived:
In the Land of Oo Bla Dee
stooping distance from the Renal Tailpiece
wore the uniform to the very edge
clasping of the mudguard
Progress Hornblower was a liar
they never set his pants on fire
it all came due on Whiteman's Day
metallurgy of a log
But there's a lowline limiter
and Jimmy Semester is lifting it
riffs and breaths all hauled away
a general snuffing a total rolling
just no end to these shifting witnesses
but there'll come a day
[42]
There is something that is not so much anti-intellectual but defiantly slap-happy about the way Coolidge uses language, and it's not because he always quite sure what he's doing (as he freely admits):
The Pillgollick has soiled himself again
stop fishing for end rhymes
would you paint beer cans?
I laugh at myself in Backwardsland
is there a brain at the end of this line?
Tsathoggua!
[64]
If the Americans could not be given credit for having invented Surrealism, Coolidge proves that the basic premises of automatic writing -- separated from Freudian symbolism and card-carrying Marxism -- still thrum as the undertone to our mutually scrambled, consumerized, and even infantalized, consciousnesses, as he takes his digitized bee-bop prosody -- there's a touch of Kerouac still here despite the "word-centered" Langpo nuances -- to the people in witty, electric doses:
The Indian on the penis
the sign of the only stable seating
in this country
BRAP
but it seemed like to me it wasn't
as hot as it had been
the porcelien fart had a flame embossed
in time to come a bone to lend
and the ovens came crashing from
the fly granite scars
an umbilical wallet it was
the engine on my father's hands
(bent).
[13]
The cumulative effect is of hearing a quirky, jazz-suffused, horny, literate, art-induced, troubled, lazy, friendly, rhythmically polyglot, Stein-bobbled, cranky and constantly energized mind-at-play, scribbling while watching an old Jack Nicholson video on the television.
Fans of Coolidge might be disappointed that On the Nameways doesn't extend beyond the exciting, hallucinogenic writing of his earlier collections of short poems, such as Solution Passages and Sound as Thought (not to mention his long prose works), and at times doesn't rack up its effects the way it could -- the more minimal poems, for instance, suggest Creeley, but Coolidge fails to go for the kill with a stunning finish -- but for newcomers to this important American poet, this is a great, mostly entertaining, place to start.
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