A Land There Is No Title To
The Land of All Time by Clark Coolidge.
Lithic Press, 2020. $18
Something else has been stolen from us: indifference.
— Baudrillard
[Presses play on iPhone voice memo. Playback BEGINS.] “Ah-hmm. So, I begin, I want to begin by asking myself... I ask myself, ‘what is a Clark Coolidge?’ Uh, well, the first time I heard that phrase, ‘Clark Coolidge,’ was in a workshop with C.D. Wright. After I had read a poem in front of the group, and, uh, in lieu of a critique, C.D. simply told me that I should read more Clark Coolidge. Actually I don’t remember if it was ‘more Clark Coolidge’ or just ‘Clark Coolidge.’ Anyway, I, uh, immediately went to the library and picked up The Crystal Text and Solution Passages, I think it’s called, which is like a selected poetry volume. I remember getting about halfway through Solution Passages and being struck with a giddiness at Coolidge’s, uh, I guess you could say, virtuosity, with language, though I don’t really like that word, virtuosity. Uh, he seemed to be able to say and do whatever he wanted, basically, while making it sound, at the very least, not hacky or corny. I was simply amazed, in fact I tossed the book across the room in a sort of ecstatic disgust, if that makes sense. I don’t know how else to describe the feeling. Passionate apathy? Almost any contradictory sort of emotive phrase will do, I suppose. But uh, the amount of freedom embodied in his work was, um, theretofore unknown to me and it seemed gratuitous, you know, almost too indulgent, not as in ‘self-indulgent’ but something like it. An outward indulgence. A selfless-indulgence? But it was so admirable at the same time. The, uh, complete abandonment of life-in-itself. He was not expressing anything, but he was actually doing things with words that hadn’t been done. He wasn’t expressing, he was creating new forms for and of expression. It was a moment I’ll never forget, just sitting in the kitchen, early evening, throwing that book across the room... So, uh, I’m supposed to review his newest book. So, I suppose I’ll begin, or try to begin. It’s hard to, uh, talk about work that has no ‘aboutness’ to it, but that’s fine: hopefully, uh, we’ll find other things to talk about.
Still from Twin Peaks. Vulture.com
The Land of All Time... ok, so: everything. Uh, everything contained in time, by time; the fact that time is in everything. The fact that the concept of time contains the concept of the physicality of everything that we can imagine. This is our starting point with Coolidge’s latest book. [Laughter.] The Land of All Time: that all material exudes its opposite, contains its opposite. That Real contains the infinite as much as Infinite does. That reality encompasses some possibilities of the invisible. That real objects exude the invisible music of their creation. That reality denies itself by its constant (re)interpretation. That the grounded-ness of this world has always supported its immateriality, and vice versa, and beyond that. Um, I like to... think of the title of a book as separate from the book. Or as another thing. A shadow of the book maybe. An anxious twin of the text. Anxious because it has no control over the text’s performance but informs it regardless, still relates to it, at root. The same DNA in the title is the same that’s in the text, but the two couldn’t be more different. I think, maybe, a lot of writers treat the title as an entryway, or a signpost. You know, ‘enter here’ or ‘head that way.’ So, uh, I was thinking, to title one’s book The Land of All Time is to label it also the ‘end’ of all time and the ‘and’ of all time. There are sonic and conceptual implications, as is Coolidge’s way, intentionally or not...
Quartz from Tibet. Wikipedia.
The cover of Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981 by Clark Coolidge
Oh, ok, I am flipping through the book randomly [pages fluttering], and I turn to a poem called ASSUMPTIONS on page... 114. And the first thing you notice is that every line in the poem begins with the phrase, starting with... Anaphora. Which, oh my god, ‘starting with’ is how you would describe anaphora. Hilarious. Anaphora is like, a series of lines starting with the same word or phrase. In this case, every line is starting with starting with. What the fuck, man. This guy. It’s like one of those matryoshka dolls, but for poetry. You know?This makes me think, like, uh... Something Spicer said about real lemons.... Or, like, just the idea, of, uh, you know, you can say ‘hand’ to your hand a thousand times, and it will never become the word hand. Write ‘hand’ with your hand a thousand times, and your hand will never mean the word ‘hand.’ But here, Coolidge writes starting with to mean starting with and then he keeps doing that and you’re always starting with... There is no end to poetry... So, perhaps we should end here. [Laughter.] ‘There is no end to poetry.’ The end. No, I’m kidding. This is so funny to me... well, ok, let’s see:
Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991. Felix Gonzalaz-Torres. MoMA.
Starting with a swimming pond just off the toll road
starting with eyes on snow dots
starting with a slowness overlooked of late
starting with a painting’s date
starting with a pounding of the marbles
starting with what happened in Budapest last year
starting with the novel on Crown Lake nobody read
starting with a head start left in the lurch
starting with the secretary under the lash...
There’s, uh, modulation of, I don’t know what you would call it. ‘Aura’ sounds too grandiose. Just plain ‘sense’? He’s going from banal to banal-mysterious to casual to factual to the more vague starting with a pounding of the marbles and that’s also abstract to starting with what happened in Budapest last year, which sounds personal... So each turn, each line, is a new trajectory: there’s nowhere we can’t go in a Coolidge poem and we must be prepared for everything... In some poems he makes up names, which is interesting... like sound poetry meets some kind of post-surrealist name-game... And they’re littered throughout the book next to real names. There’s Irving Berlin. There’s, uh, Chief Hosa, Miss Helpmeet... There’s one poem that’s just a bunch of random names strung together... To say Coolidge is playful would be a little, uh, reductive. Perhaps, as serious as a child at play, one of my favorite phrases from Nietzsche, is, uh, more like it.
John Baldessari, Hand and Chin (with entwined hands), 1991. FAMSF.
For instance, again turning randomly to a line, um, the Aladdin sauce with the frim fram... It’s maybe silly, but it’s not slapstick, he’s not afraid to sound completely ridiculous though he’s straight-faced about it. Like Andy Kaufman in a wrestling uniform. But, again, back to my favorite in poetry, though, modulation.... Coolidge does it from between two words to whole lines to whole couplets and stanzas. The things that do not belong together accumulate. The Land of All Time is a landfill. Coolidge is a collector. An aggregator. Of nothing words and luxury words and made-up names and irreal signs: Dismisser North. Gerard Cablemouth. Laughing Padgett? The Laughing Padgett, he’s talking about Ron Padgett? The stupid Sinatra in F flat major: is that even a real musical note? Who knows? Um, the titles also don’t seem to have any real order or bearing on the bodies of the poems... Um, he’s writing through a certain level of disorder and we stay at this level throughout. This foreseeable organized chaos. We’re at this, uh, you know, you have to be able to pick up on these moods. They aren’t references. This isn’t a, uh, poetry of the intellect. I mean, it’s a poetry of the creative intellect, um, asking for more from our negative capability than most things that we can believe in. And The Land of All Time may be the book, I mean, the book is a site of, I shouldn’t say the book, the page, the blank page, the object, the uncreated aspect of this thing that, um, you know, the collection of the blank pages... and their potentiality. I think that’s what he’s getting at: the potentiality of language. That we haven’t even, uh, [sharp exhale] we’re barely... the avant-garde hasn’t ended because the avant-garde hasn’t even begun... I think that’s what’s going on here... At first, I think I wanted to say something along the lines of, uh, Coolidge defying categorization, but that’s too banal.
Maybe Coolidge defines categorization. He does not categorize and therein lies his genius. He writes out the effects of categorization, without categorizing, but being highly categorizable. You’re not upset that you expect him to upset your expectations and then the next minute fulfill them. Even his extreme modulations of diction and mood create a static elevation at which the whole thing hums, like what I was getting at with the, um, disorder talk. It’s almost perfect, the amount of apathy you can feel toward some of these poems. [Laughter.] There are still these sort of, I guess you could say, alien images and sentiments within human language. Like, we’re obsessed with physical expansion but have yet to plumb the depths of linguistic power. And, uh, Coolidge’s work is a reminder of this... neglect and potential. So, Coolidge, here, writing from the beginning of the end of the American avant-garde voice. Another step forward, and we’re back in a vacuum. And they say nothing happens in a vacuum, but they probably aren’t poets... That’s kind of the one story that’s been consistently threaded, or threading, throughout Coolidge’s oeuvre, and has not stopped with, um, The Land of All Time: the unreality of diction, um, the insignificance of expression, the, uh, simulation (?) of both silence and disappearance at once... Um, lexically, syntactically-speaking, you know, uh, these relationships... it’s almost, kind of like, geographic, or ethnographic as well, it’s like, you think you know, we want to simplify things, right? We want to generalize and simplify.
Kazimir Malevich, White on White, 1918. Wikipedia.
We want to say these are these people and those are those people. These are black people, and these are Hispanic people, and these are Asian people, and these are white people. Right, it makes it easier to just get through the day. But where does the, uh... I mean, the details and particularities of fractured existence almost have no end. And I say fractured existence because to me that’s what existence just is, perpetually fractured. Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is generalizable. I think that’s a main... I think that’s another thing Coolidge is getting at. Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is what you think it is. Nothing. Nothing is what it should be. Nothing is what its name is. Because of the potentiality of this universe. This universe is the land of all time. I mean, uh, we don’t think of the universe as a ‘land,’ per se, but even that word ‘land’ itself is both abstract and, uh, grounded, you know, figurative, figural, whatever. The universe is the land of all time: and that’s hilarious too. But who even knows? Who knows if this place or this thing contains all time? So, now, I’m thinking about boundaries. Yeah. I think that, uh, Jesus, yeah, I think a lot of times people like to say ‘Oh there are no rules.’ Even I say that shit, haphazardly. ‘There are no rules to poetry.’ ‘You can write whatever you want.’ But to take it to this extreme, to take it to such an extreme, and I don’t even think Coolidge is, like, I mean, this is extreme for what is going on in contemporary American poetry, but I don’t think it’s extreme, uh, overall. ‘In the grand scheme.’
Félix Labisse, Six Selenides, 1966. Wikiart.
Did you read the piece on waterboarding in Surf Magazine? Whoa. Note there are paint flaps on the wall. Kitty down the well. Peas porridge in a clay pot. Disgrace levels are up in the sticks. Not democracy de-mockery. The registers. He’s hitting different registers. There’s some conceptual punning in there. The waterboarding and surf magazine thing. ‘Democracy de-mockery.’ Sounds like something you’d hear some far-right idiot say. But all the contradictions and ironies and tropes balance each other out... Each poem becomes a little pocket of neutrality. They remind me of this dream I had, in the spring of 2008, about André Breton and wooden blocks. I won’t go into that, right now. It’s funny, I don’t envision very many people getting stirred up by lines such as: note there are paint flaps on the wall. He seems to have foregone all emotion, but at the same time, uh, this intense negation of expression still fulfills some unconscious desire for complete thought. Because a complete thought can always be made. You know. Use any material. Use no material. What exists is the humor of rigor and the rigor of humor. I think that, uh, in the end, um, the humorous and abstract will save us from ourselves. When narration is, like, no longer tenable. When the petty and complete expressions of hope have all been exhausted by, uh, lesser but necessary... evils of Poets. Continuing on, uh, there’s a guy here called Doctor Pro. In the end I saw my father turn into Arnett Cobb. A nobody. That means nothing. I just looked it up. [Laughter.] It’s like saying ‘I just saw my father turn into some other figure.’ Reminds me of that poem, ‘Names Like Barney Cain’s’, I think that’s what it’s called, by someone I can’t remember right now. The dead kid’s dead and what’s more. That’s the end of another line. It’s interesting that they’re all roughly the same format, form, structure. I mean, some of them vary slightly, but, uh, I like that we’re getting something sort of consistent. That’s really the only consistent thing, that the forms of the poems are, um, approximately very similar. It’s also interesting that this late in his writing life he’d revert to something almost sonnet-like.
André Breton, Poem-Object, 1941. MoMA.
You know, this is the guy who wrote Book Beginning What and Ending Away, one of the great, expansive, epic books of prose poetry. That thing is written in block, no, well, yeah, block paragraphs, left justified, I believe, and you would think that even with a book like that, at, what, 600, no, over 500 pages, almost 600 pages, which he wrote from 1973 to 1981, he would have said everything he needed to say in his manner. And there’s so much in that book, there’s so much new material, there are so many new relationships between words established in that book, uh, he built. But now, I think he’s trying to get down to the more molecular level, it’s not these strands of thought that just go on. He’s working with very precise phrases, clauses. Uhhh, he’s building off of... Wooo... yeah, and it’s not about disorientation, that’s not the word I’m looking for, the book is, uh, it places you into a world where you are, you don’t have anything to hold onto, you’re floating in space and then you latch onto the first thing that looks familiar as you move through each poem. Because you don’t know what’s going to come next. Like, look at this next poem I just flipped to, called SPORTS BARN:
Sketch of DB Cooper. FBI.
How did you get to Thomas the Books?
With a seeking velvet? occidental wingdings helped
ok so glass permeates a new adventure
that’s fine all fine told me to fold in the relic
thoughts of wax carcasses and so much soliciting
but why doing this? won moonlight Carol Misteds
couldn’t have collected fervor unluckily
poetry’s a terminal cottage my bandit’s snack
erected wraiths of imaginal pimp hats rimshots from beyond
specific curtains from early childhood? Not-swords
to crumble in the noxious purse of readership
I like to take chances with illusion him
as if he or she were the fruit of a fly
...To me, this book poses the question: do we exist beyond common delineation? And the mere force of this work suggests we do. Of course, we do. Of course, c’mon. This poetry makes me believe in an afterlife, in many afterlives, in beforelives, in no one life. That the person who wrote A Book Beginning What and Ending Away should settle into the brief lyric poem says something. ‘Excess’ now is purely in confounding meaning. No longer material excess of language as comfort. Maybe we don’t need it. That, uh, the quantitative properties of words do not add to their qualitative mystery. I mean, it seems obvious, but many poets, myself included, have given in to the seduction of more is more. But on the other hand a maximalism of wholly real qualitative meaning is boring. And Coolidge does neither. These feel like self-fulfilling prophecies. And it’s a beautiful perspective, for me, to believe that Clark Coolidge is still learning from his own writing. Still learning the art from himself.
Cover of A Book Beginning What and Ending Away by Clark Coolidge.
Buddhist temple made of original glass. Like, what? Coke bottles. Buddhas don’t bless anybody. Live in the Buddha’s backyard. Drunk in the temple they develop nerves. Were any of you here ten minutes ago? Never let your slides show. Want to trade faces with us? I’m not president I’m Toothfiller. Do you understand all this smashing of glasses? The person to hang on is you. Nothing about that is expected, could ever be expected. You sort of need to feel out, or make your own, path. And, uh, this is getting at tactility now also. I think he’s getting at tactility in language. And it’s a very, like, uh, these feel like concrete poems, but they aren’t, and by that, I mean, the language is so, the relationships between words is so strained, and the relationships between the lines is so strained, that every word starts to, like, its singularity begins to, you know, have weight. Like when Saroyan wrote ‘lighght.’ You know, just adding that extra ‘gh’ completely, uh, disoriented the whole thing, disoriented the reader, but then created, like, a center of focus, gave gravity to a not-real word. And, here, I think the weight of the words increases via their displacement, disjuncture, by their, uh, misuse? Not misuse. It’s not a misuse. They’re used differently, but it’s not negative. So what do we see here? We see the pure power of creation. The powers of poetic creation and accretion are still vibrant, vital. Still alive. It can still be new. And beautiful. It can still be new and beautiful. And there’s always a beauty in the new. There’s always a beauty in the strange. There’s always a beauty in the off.
Jokhang Temple. Tibetpedia.
You know. This is not, uh, Coolidge has always been in a class of his own, in my opinion. He’s always had his own voice. Which, I mean, sounds bad to say, but really, any poet worth their salt, developed enough to become a truly independent mind... gains their own voice, I mean that’s nothing special to Coolidge, but some voices just sound the same. Ahhhh... what else can I say though? This book is new. It’s new. By that, I mean it’s really new. [Laughter.] I don’t mean it’s making something new that was old, I don’t mean that it just came out, I don’t mean renewal. I mean this is New. New new. This is the always new. I am turning to a random page again. [Pages flutter.] 73. There’s a poem called INTERLOCUTOR, and, uh, as an interlocutor, the poet writes:
We stayed at the Echo Bar Motel
later at the Metal Bra Annex
they give you free forceps we drove
from Idaho to Maine in a minute
a maid truck it had a hump
we were well enough contained back then
and there thought I’d become a concert mentor
that or a water witcher the need for
a novel called The Door To The Fjord?
could do that then we could make love
or move a lake one and later
I don’t know what we’d do maybe buy
more daylight from Arizona bring water from
that hole in your mother’s farm
So I take a poem like this, INTERLOCUTOR, it’s interesting, he does this thing where he’s putting tabs in the middle of the lines, there’s one in this poem with two tabbed spaces, or move a lake one and later, two huge tabbed spaces on either side of the word one, it looks like maybe four hits of the space bar. So it almost appears as though there are these small holes through the poem, also, which I guess kind of lets you know that everything is, well, so maybe I take it back, about the consistency I said earlier, the consistency, continuity is called into question visually and as this translates to continuity of thought, um... an interlocutor is something that happens in the middle, right? In the middle of the action.... I know an interlocutory appeal is when you appeal a ruling on a motion that happens in the middle of a trial, right? You appeal a ruling on a preliminary injunction, or something like that, so there are, it is about pausing, intermittence, it’s about what happens within boundaries to create more space. It’s opening up a window to infinite space in the middle of something bound, beginning and end, and all of a sudden you open it up as an interlocutor comes in and begins speaking. Literally, an interlocutor is, the common definition, is one who simply partakes in a conversation, and conversations must have beginnings and ends, but I think in the middle, when you’re in engaged in that conversation, that it essentially seems boundless, and I think that’s, uh, obviously, uh, another concern here, when you’re in language, when you’re parleying, in the act of speaking or writing, you’re boundless. And that’s a good, I guess, representative idea, or something for the whole book.
I don’t know... There’s also, you know, misprision, misprision, misprision... But also, like, infinite sound locked in place... or silence, however you want to see it. And that’s the thing too: the enigma of these two ideas, that enigma perfects what your poems become, the sort of taboo of being at the border of certainty and absurdity and still calling it literature. [Clothes rustling.] We stayed at the Echo Bar Motel. No idea what that could possibly mean. Echo bar. I don’t know. Later at the Metal Bra Annex. Bar motel, metal bra. Annex. Annexation. An extension of, or a taking of something, but they give you free forceps. What a weird image. From Idaho to Maine in a minute. That’s pretty funny, actually. A maid truck. Again, no idea. A maid truck? It had a hump. [Laughter.] I mean, definitely a surrealist conveyance here, right. Sounds like Péret to me. But here, this is what strikes me the most, water witcher. Why not just say ‘witch’? Water witch. It’s so strange. And everything, it’s sort of in the center of the poem, like everything is swirling around that image, right. A whirlpool. There are options here: could do that then we could make love / or move a lake one and later. Do this, do that. One or the other. It’s the same thing. And it’s uncanny. I don’t know what we’d do. [Pages rustling.]
So, uh, I guess I want to talk about the object of the book itself. A lot of reviews don’t do that, and I think it’s important. The way, the way a book looks, or the way it’s constructed. Sometimes that, also, also, determines if and when you’re going to read it. So, the book itself is wide. It’s square. Um, the outside, the colors are, it’s mostly black with orange text, there’s a fire going on in the background, so it’s, like, a primitive scene, or it could even be kind of jokey-scary, like Halloween-themed or something. Orange inserts are right on the inside of the cover at the front and back of the book. The cover has, like, four shadowy figures around a fire. You know. Shadows. Obscured expressions. Everything unknown. The back of the book just says: and then / they all left the planet. Very ominous. [Laughter.] So there is a serious ominous feel here, too, I guess. It’s by no means a small book. Like I said, it’s wide, and there’s some heft to it. A lot of white space on every page, so the format of the book allows for a lot of blank space around these mostly short, stout poems of fairly short lines. [Pages rustling.] I just opened the book and some of my older notes fell out. Let’s see what I wrote. ‘Sign up for muffled sushi.’ ‘Squid on the hotel sky.’ ‘Circling light on a cigarette face.’ ‘The threat of an intended future.’ ‘The truth is real, but is it interesting?’ Oh that’s the line! The truth is real but is it interesting? Jesus Christ. There are some real gems in this book like that. That’s the other beautiful thing about this book. You get these, there’s a lot of, uh, and it’s not meaningless. It’s meaningless, I don’t mean that pejoratively, I mean meaningless in the way that meaningless equalizes everything. In the way that meaningless is equitable. It’s not banal. It’s just what it is. It’s just a fact. There’s a lot in here that represents the meaninglessness of things being placed next to each other arbitrarily, which is what we come across every day. That sort of meaning or meaninglessness that defines much of the world for such, uh, solitary beings as poets. I mean, it’s like, Coolidge isn’t concerned so much with who we are, or who he is, but what we aren’t, what he isn’t. The fact that we are not things. A Clark Coolidge is a Clark Coolidge. Ok, and, uh, I’d be willing to wager that Coolidge’s work outlasts us because it sees into time. It is outside. Outsider.
Halloween movie poster.
These are the essential meanings and allusions that stay, that remain, after symbolism has been eroded. Primary fragments, sketches, rubble, ruins, from which one will inevitably piece together another new new. It’s all kinetic. It seems that the only available vision was likelihood its antics. Right, walk to the beach means walk to the edge. It’s a miracle that Coolidge can isolate words among words. You know, and every now and then you get these lines that just say something completely honest. But also erupting as spontaneous wisdom: power needs no reason for anything. Another great line. ‘To the very crystal, the book, the getaway.’ ‘Skimped, as goo is lifted, ghosts need a trim.’ The man with no money turned comic. Perfect. ‘Drink, then shattered stun, fix the light.’ ‘Drift.’ The truth is real but is it interesting? ‘Divided by lung tissue, the black pearls of these poems fall to the floor.’ And again, back to the title, The Land of All Time. And the very first poem is called GOODBYE. The secret of the text hides in plain sight. It’s in the text. It reads like its own criticism. It analyzes itself. Evaluates itself. The dream light turns a phrase, the changing contexts... These poems represent schemata of dreaming. That we haven’t run out of names for things or feelings. That there is a solution, or remedy, for poetry? And what kind of question is that? Is the art sick of itself? Horizons are spent doing this. He keeps on playing with the planet. And it says, and keep on playing with this planet. ‘The mood barrel barrels, giving, protruding, slightly, the face and its vanishings.’ It’s milk weather. Yeesh. ‘The color of Hawaii, test paper in the stream.’ ‘Substance, whatever.’ ‘A conversation without a percipient’s response.’ In media res in medias res. We never get quite to meaning. Never get quite there. ‘Microscopic cabs all over the Negritude.’ ‘Breezemat on the floorway proves the kids drown out the waves with their cries.’ ‘Realms of morphine and fur, a copse.’ ‘The emergency of the morning star.’ ‘Song. Sang Freud. Spread on the chalcedony, a land there is no title to.’ And where is that? I guess it would be the imagination.” [Playback ENDS.]
Edward Hopper, Two Comedians, 1965. EdwardHopper.
Still from Pulp Fiction.
NOTES
*This is a transcription of a recording in response to The Land of All Time.
**Italicized sentences are probably excerpts from the book.
*** “Phrases and sentences in single quotation marks might be from the book, but I may have mis-transcribed them... or they are my own eccentric musings and I can’t tell the difference... for the most part.”
