Flattening & layering. At close range the lines simply do not reveal themselves. It is only by positioning oneself
within a line so that it stretches away to the right that it has any clarity.
Denise Levertov's idea of organic form, as opposed to blank verse, is a way to begin an aesthetics of modernist
poetry. By blank verse is meant a recording each line as thought or unit or entity. By organic form: the poem as
a whole entity, a cross-section of time and place, a constellation that captures a particular experience, a
particular-in-time. In Coolidge, the experience captured is the one set down, internal to the individual poem, to
its compositional integrity, its limits. Internal to the poem is the experience it is about: the "inscape" of it.
interval
So
not the recording of a reality outside the poem but the reality of the experience in it-or perhaps-during it. What
this process reveals is that which is intended-designed, chosen, picked, arranged, programmed, judged,
manipulated, decided –aesthetical or ethical or moral or political-in other words, that which is human and
which is particular of each human.
Which says nothing of the reference of any phrase or image or element. But the individual reference is
surrendered to the overall reductionista.
At first, stretching the poems in SPACE, a particular phrase sounds right seems well placed, and I attend to a
variety of elements-internal balance, non-syntactic juxtaposition, pun & rhyme & allusion, assonance,
dissonance, alliteration. But a nagging emerges: Is this all there is to it? A glistening surface? A dazzling facade?
Are these only automatons, patterns, mere programmes—with nothing intended about them, nothing of
human meaning? Just intellectual designs? -I feel I need a meaning to accompany this surface of words, to
reassure me that they are about something, mean something. I want a way of reading these words, a way of
interpreting them, that yields a fact, story, statement to accompany this surface. —Here the meaning seems to
lie in the surface. The (outer) surface has collapsed onto-become-the (inner) meaning: so that meaning does not
accompany the surface of words but is simultaneous with it.
Take a line. What is it about? What is it referring to? What picture can I think of to replace it?
It is as if it doesn't care about me but just stares. (He, She, ---.) (Trees, Rocks, Planets, Stars.) Still, I am inside
it as much as under or across. I stare back at myself.
In Coolidge, a poetry of elimination: stripping away any thing that distances, a reducing to bare form, aesthetic,
way of seeing, pure judgement (within the limits of time and place alone).
Because of the multiplicity of ways any of the poems can be interpreted, a critical reading gets bogged down
into diversions and limitations. It is possible to point to directions or ways of meaning, as well as certain textual
qualities, but the poems themselves seem to show these up as incompetent.
For instance, here are some textual remarks on "Calypso" "is et clastic": existential assertion of the type of thing
it (the poem, the experience in the poem, the experience of the poem) is, "clastic", its density plastic (words as
shape) and classic (poetically classical in its use of assonance, alliteration, etc.). "bill & wide": its dimensions, as
also "two wide" and "mixed matted". "Trad stone dumb"-descriptive of what it is, as traditionally stone dumb,
i.e., brute silent presence, dumbly speaking this thing, stoneness. "links": what it does. Single words filling a
line I read as verbs, assertions about it-that which is, becomes, here, the subject-i.e., it links, it keel, it dimes, it
ponds-files, reels, says-it ultimately language, which does all these things, it says and shows what saying is, a
link, mixed, matted, keeling-making tropes that gab.
Throughout his work, Coolidge uses phrases-word clusters-that have a gooeyness and gumminess, a thickness of
texture, hard, ungiving and indigestible-"clump bends trill a jam" "mid punt egg zero" "copra stewage"
"globule" making the poems dense and heavy, filling their space with a high specific gravity that weighs them
down to earth, keeps them resistant to easy assimilation, lets them hold their particular space through time.
The terms of a statement are not assumed. Words are placed. A test (Zukofsky's Test) is that writing
abstracted, subjected to external procedure, still maintains itself. Start anywhere. Later, every word, every part
of the whole, has the same structural weight. "As if words themselves had been questioned and forced to give up
their hidden meanings." Can writing be taken apart with no loss? An "objective" pressure is applied to
language. "A kind of allover structure," structure at points all the same. A writer is by vocation lost in time.
Anything can be by nature proposed. The growing layers of clouds might scour one's brains of worldly
thoughts. Words subjected to a radical procedure. The entire work brought back in on itself every time.
Reading against background noise, dimensionless in character. To follow those returning birds would strain my
eyes. There is no clear line.
The counter-clockwise motion of most sounds in the head. I can convincingly absent myself from any
situation. I was there. Industrious silence-ever a word source. The will is likely to be named. The past
contributes. I can move forward in a straight line. A sentence is a completed thought. I to further what I say. So
a long work will provide a power in its own right. I speak from the point of initial response. Lost in time.
Flattening & layering. At close range the lines simply do not reveal themselves. It is only by positioning oneself
within a line so that it stretches away to the right that it has any clarity. And the definition or emergence of
distinct figures occurs as the distance resolves. A long-range view by the effect of perspective compresses the
length and foreshortening reinforces the edges.
You are not I. No one but me could possibly be. I know that, and I know where I have been and what I
have done ever since yesterday
when I walked out the gate during the train wreck. Everyone was signing la cucaracha! Saved their voices. Better visuals.
Gloriosky flattening & layering.
Gentle Harrisburg poet Marty Esworthy will be featured Dec.3 at Poetry Spoken Here, City Arts, 118 W. Philadelphia St., in York, PA 17401.
