Riddles of Form

Part Two

Poetry Rocks

Clark Coolidge and Jack Kerouac

Or should that be Jack Kerouac and Clark Coolidge? In terms of literary history it is Kerouac who comes first. However, in terms of personal history, the names are reversed since it was Coolidge who turned me on to Kerouac.
Think, maybe, for a moment about how you make an acquaintance with a writer: a lucky find in the library? A teacher introduces the name into class discussion. That boy friend or girl friend who gives you THAT book as a first present. Books and writers enter your life in many ways. And some never leave.

Coolidge wrote a terrific book called Now It’s Jazz, Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds. It changed Kerouac for me. Utterly. Until then Kerouac had been the preserve of friends and acquaintances, the type who went to India, wore tie-dye shirts, smoked pot while listening to Van Morrison records, read On The Road (and read it badly). I know there’s plenty of drugs and sex in On The Road – but there’s a lot more besides.

What Coolidge locates in Kerouac can be summed up in this sentence:

WRITING MEANS MOTION

There you have it. It’s a lesson you learn once and forever. In one go so much British poetry of the past century falls into perspective. That dull, lifeless, suet pudding diet. There’s better elsewhere ... as Harwood and Raworth and Bonney realised.
I’m not going to rehearse Kerouac’s position in the Beat Movement – you can find detailed accounts elsewhere. Furthermore, I don’t buy into the Kerouac myth, the look which sold a million pairs of jeans as Wiliam Burroughs quipped. For me, it’s what Kerouac does with prose, with the sentence, with words that matters – and holds such transformative power for poetry.

“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything... ”
(On The Road, Part One)

Kerouac exploits the semantic ambiguity of “along the line”. It’s the line as the road, dizzy miles stretching away across the American landscape holding out hope and freedom. The road taken. It’s the line of life written across the palm of your hand by destiny, Fate, the stars, call it what you will. And it’s also the line of writing extending itself across the page. To repeat: writing means motion.



Then there’s that word “Beat”. It’s the dead beat, the down and out, the man on the margins Kerouac was and identified with. Beat is the heart beat, the pulse in your veins, sign of the blood travelling through your body. Beat is also rhythm – all kinds – musical, Cosmic, being ‘in tune’ and ‘in time’ with the movements of the Uni-Verse. And Kerouac adds his own private etymology, relating the word to beatitude – supreme blessedness and happiness, a state of divine grace and Enlightenment. As he wrote: “somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”

So it’s not surprising that the young Clark Coolidge was stunned by his first encounter with Coolidge:

“On the Road was first handed to me by somebody in the dorm at Brown, my sophomore year, 1957-58: “Here, read this”. ... On the Road started to open a vast door I couldn’t then even imagine the edges of. I remember that even his bright clattery name excited me. It seemed to tear a hole in the syllabus of discussable American novelists ... So I poured over page after astounding page, in a mood which told me: You’re on the hinge of a Move”.” (15-16)

There’s another key phrase – “on the hinge of a Move”. There’s always this sense of movement. Here’s Kerouac describing Dean Moriarty’s skill in parking cars. (We’ll look at cars and poetry more later.) Notice here how Kerouac chooses to focus on the interaction between man and machine – intuitive knowledge, hand and head in synch, not book knowledge. Notice also how the prose – well, it’s poetry really – embodies the energy and movement:

“... he’d finished his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. The most fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner’s half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run; working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after-theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap ...”
(On The Road, Part One)

“back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out”

Kerouac drops articles “ (...) tight spot”, uses cartoon-style monosyllable onomatopoeia “hump, snap”, internal rhymes “bounces as he flies out”. The sounds jive - alive with possibility. The very length of the sentence creates a breathless effect, the reader runs to catch up with the words. You don’t overtake when Kerouac’s driving the line.

// did Jean Luc Godard learn from Kerouac’s prose? I’m thinking of ‘A Bout de Souffle’ and the famous jump cuts as Belmondo drives through the country lanes and around Paris.//



Now for Coolidge himself.

Coolidge has written a lot. You could spend a lifetime reading Coolidge’s works. And then some.

Coolidge has written some pretty unreadable poems – by which we’re beginning to understand they’re entirely readable. They simply don’t allow you to take your eyes of the page.

Here’s an early Coolidge poem – it’s just eight words:

ounce code orange
a
the
ohm
trilobite trilobites

There’s another work by Coolidge – Smithsonian Depositions – composed entirely out of words from other people: Robert Smithson himself, Kerouac, Beckett, J.G. Ballard, Arthur Conan Doyle, the list goes on ...

It helps when reading Clark Coolidge to know he’s fascinated by geology, science fiction, Samuel Beckett and jazz.

Coolidge plays the drums. This, too, is important.

Coolidge is important, too.

His text The Crystal Text is my favourite of his works I’ve read so far. Take a look.

Here’s Coolidge’s poem ‘On the Road’

ON THE ROAD

Well, you just have to read and get involved
with things and scribble. The letters
under the mountain, and the wrath that
turns auto. We’ll never sour up any
plans by jabbering on. We’ll whittle
while we run. And in back of it all
the spiral ramp of conversations, higgly-
piggling over hours and starts and landings.
Nobody digs it all better than in
comminglings of flowage, hot off the rocks
back of the batter pen where dimers stand.
And the flash floats out of the stars into
our upraised tips. Writing means motion.
The hover left behind in the lever jacket,
the car park flap, the inhabited sever.
I was ready to take up amazement and
follow the words.

Here it’s really not a case of trying to show how the poem relates to events in the novel. Coolidge just isn’t that sort of poet.
What’s of interest here is how the writing is in motion. How sound is rhythm. In his book on Kerouac, Coolidge confesses to his ‘sub-vocal’ ability:

“Do you know what I mean? I don’t know how many of you, when you read silently, hear every word. In my case it’s impossible not to do it.” (35)

When you read Coolidge you really READ him. The words acquire a mineral-like density. They’re things. Look at a line such as:

The hover left behind in the lever jacket

How he places an article before “hover”, hardening what we typically take as a verb. How “lever” – a noun here due to the definite article – is made to work as an adjective. Go back to that short poem – ‘ounce code orange’ – and see how the words seem arranged like rock specimens on a tray. The normal rules of grammar seem to be of little help here. The poem seems to be jamming up. Words impacting. Sediment.

If early Coolidge focuses on writing as motion by blocking the easy flow of sense, the 1980s Coolidge of ‘On The Road’ is exploring how words can move through sound.

Well, you just have to read and get involved
with things and scribble.

A seemingly effortless opening – in jazz terms it could be an opening theme before the other players start in. It’s the first of many run over lines – Coolidge’s use of the line suggests a forward movement, hairpin bends. Language spools like the scroll Kerouac famously typed his novel on.

with things and scribble. The letters
under the mountain, and the wrath that
turns auto.

Rapidly it becomes difficult to excerpt lines for the effects are dependent on what precedes and follows as much as for what is within the statement. (Why, too, a paraphrase of a Coolidge poem is so challenging. Perhaps that should read pointless?)
Here I like the way Coolidge shows he’s thinking both in terms of the forward momentum of his lines but also thinking of the line as a discrete unit. How, for example, he sets out the key nouns: “things”, “scribble”, “letters” while spacing them – typographically and rhythmically with conjunctions and articles.

The disposition of the words on the page also enact the sense of movement. As, line three “under” is placed on the line below its subject. As in line four, “turns” acquires added emphasis due to the eye’s twist in reading.

We’ll never sour up any
plans by jabbering on. We’ll whittle
while we run.

Coolidge is now in gear and the sounds are starting to gel. Hear how the seemingly prosaic opening “Well, you have ...” has come alive in the reiterated “We’ll never ...” and “We’ll whittle ...”, the short ‘e’ opens up. (How, too, the ear picks up the punning possibility in “wheel” – the steering wheel and the movement itself).

Flat ‘a’ sounds seem also to be working – a kind of slap bass effect – “wrath” from line three carries into “plans” and “jabbering” line five and, further ahead, “back”, “ramp” lines six and seven. Further still, line eleven - back of the batter pen where dimers stand. Read these lines out loud slapping your hand against your leg – you’ll hear how sound and rhythm mesh.

Returning to lines five and six

We’ll whittle/ while we run.

Shouldn’t that be “we’ll whistle while we run”? Or even “whistle while we work”? Of course – and yet of course not. This is Coolidge’s be-bop poetics – taking off from a well-worn phrase. Spinning it. Taking it for a drive. The Seven Dwarves, World War chippiness, Beat cool, all are fused in a phrase. Who says Coolidge is unreadable? I never knew there was so much in it! As he writes elsewhere “sentences are shortness of breath”.

What Coolidge responded to in Kerouac’s prose is present here in his own writing. The sheer delight in turning words over the tongue: those breathed and unbreathed ‘w’/’wh’ sounds played off against the ‘l’ and ‘tl’ sounds with the challenge of the rolled ‘r’ of run. Try it and you’ll see what Coolidge means.

And to anyone out there who might accuse Coolidge of ‘simply playing with words’ the only appropriate retort is: well, what else SHOULD a poet do? (... you just have to read and get involved ...).

Once you get the idea you can find delights all over the poem.

And the flash floats out of the stars into/our upraised tips.

The alliterative energy of the ‘fl’ consonants, the shift from closed ‘a’ vowel of “flash” to the long ‘o’ vowel of “floats”, the stresses of “upraised tips” working in tandem with the ‘t’ and ‘p’ consonants. If this is ‘abstract’ poetry it is simultaneously so physically tangible for any reader who is prepared to READ.

//cycling to the pool yesterday afternoon I suddenly make a bizarre jump from Kerouac and Coolidge to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Look at the poems and certian notebook entries where he splits words apart by sounding etymologies//

Notice we haven’t for a moment asked what the poem ‘means’. The poem IS its meaning. Or if that sounds too glib, why not take Coolidge at his word:

I was ready to take up amazement and
follow the words.

And we’d be well advised to do the same.