Abstract

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Works Cited

From at least Space (1970) to Smithsonian Depositions (1980), the poetry of Clark Coolidge demonstrates an obsession with landscape and with primal scenes of enclosure. In Own Face (1978), caves, cavers (Floyd Barrow), and cavemen (of the prehistoric variety) feature prominently. Quartz Hearts (1978) and Smithsonian Depositions (1980) also prominently feature caves.

As in Plato's Republic, the cave in Coolidge is an archetypal site of epistemological crisis. I argue that Coolidge's caves also function as sites of impasse where masculine agency is placed in doubt. As opposed to the heroic open landscapes of Jack Kerouac or Robert Smithson or Charles Olson (all heroes of Coolidge), the cavescapes of Coolidge are compromised, enclosed, already memorialized--in effect, dead end tourist traps. In "The Cave Remain," Coolidge declares

The poet-as-hero surveying the open landscape has become an anomic claustrophobe suffering the aftereffects of the munchies. The poet becomes amateur spelunker; the cave is the place where language fails, where the prehistoric returns with a vengeance, and the male loses all communicative capacity, as in "Cavemen":

            Cavemen
    never bar their entrances.

    A rock is the inside of a space.
    A caveman thinks if a rock were
    moved his life would be ended.
    He wears the cave and decorates it.
    Its stillness is a sign of life. (54)

The caveman speaks not through signs, but through objects. The caveman has nothing to hide; nonetheless, he has vanished into his cave, taking with him the modernist dream of apprehending things-in-themselves, as well as the masculinist dream of returning to nature alone. "Robinson's gone dead" (50), Coolidge says deadpannedly. Rather than all roads leading to the frontier, "From all the roads around we enter the landscape of the past" (47). Coolidge parodies those who would return to the cave—including himself. The cave is not simply a site of the primitive, but a site of the post-, a non-space haunted by memory and by the ghost of mobility--and possibly haunted as well by precursors like Olson, Smithson, and Kerouac, all of whom died prematurely within a few years of one another, as if to reject the open fields of the 60s having become the pre-posthistoric caves of the 70s.

Paul Stephens - stephens@bard.edu
[Formatting still under construction]

I want to begin with an epigraph from Robert Smithson's 1971 essay "A Cinematic Atopia":

What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only one shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly "underground" cinema. This would mean visiting many caves and mines. (142)

Much of Clark Coolidge's 1970s poetry can be read as undertaking Smithson's unfinished project, not only for a cinematic atopia, but also for an underground poetic atopia. From at least Space (1970) to Smithsonian Depositions, Coolidge's poetry demonstrates an obsession with landscape, with geology, and with primal scenes of enclosure—and with caves in particular. In Own Face (1978), caves, cavers (Floyd Collins), and cavemen (of the prehistoric variety) feature prominently. Quartz Hearts (1978) and Smithsonian Depositions (1980) also prominently feature caves, as does Mine: The One That One Enters the Stories. Most overtly, caves (or rather a single cave known as Eldon's Cave) are featured in the forthcoming The Cave, co-written with Bernadette Mayer from 1972 to 1978.

In symbolic terms, the cave is the ultimate space of overdetermination: the locus classicus of Platonism; home of "primitive" man; home to the origins of Western art (Lascaux); an underground cinema of sorts; a memorial realm; an inferno; the unconscious; a photographic darkroom; an archetypal womb; a tomb (as for Floyd Collins); a tourist destination; a place of meeting; the belly of the Leviathan; a place of ending (as in Tom Sawyer). The cave can also be, as in the writing of Smithson, a nonsite—which would deny spatial certainties in a world that no longer necessarily believes in originary myths.
The cave takes on all of these symbolic incarnations in Coolidge's 1970s poetry, but I want to focus in particular on the cave as a site where agency, particularly masculine agency, is placed in doubt. The cave is perhaps inevitably gendered female, but the cave is not necessarily a site of impasse—rather as in the title of Coolidge's Solution Passage, or in the poem "Passages to Rilke," the Coolidgean cave is typically figured as a passageway—not necessarily a transcendent passageway, but rather a site of communication, a place of writing, a place where subjectivity is multiple. As opposed to the heroic open landscapes of Jack Kerouac or Robert Smithson or Charles Olson (all heroes of Coolidge), the cavescapes of Coolidge are compromised, enclosed, already memorialized--in effect, tourist traps.

Key to my argument is a reading of the Coolidge/Mayer The Cave as a central, and as-yet-underrecognized component of Coolidge's writing. Marcella Durand, in her introduction calls The Cave "an extraordinary document, a palmpsest of a moment in literary history," and suggests that "The Cave documents, in an unusually transparent way, the meeting of minds between two of the most innovative and original writers of the late 20th century. It also accompanied an extraordinary period of writing for Coolidge and Mayer, during which both writers were pushing the limits of how far they could write" (n.p.) With this statement I wholeheartedly agree, and I think readers of Coolidge and Mayer will be impressed both at the quality and the range of The Cave. Given the extraordinary complexity of The Cave I can only give it passing consideration here, but I would stress the uniqueness of the work—it would be hard to find another collaboration of male/female non-lovers from the period which is so extensive.

The cave in Coolidge is often figured as Wittgenstein's Cave, which is to say, the cave is composed of language. In "The Cave Remain," [from Own Face] Coolidge declares

The poet-as-hero surveying the open landscape has become an anomic claustrophobe suffering the aftereffects of the munchies. The poet becomes amateur spelunker; the cave is the place where language fails, where the prehistoric returns with a vengeance, and the male loses all communicative capacity, as in "Cavemen":


The caveman speaks not through signs, but through objects. The caveman has nothing to hide; nonetheless, he has vanished into his cave, taking with him the modernist dream of apprehending things-in-themselves, as well as the masculinist dream of returning to nature alone. "Robinson's gone dead" (50), Coolidge says deadpannedly. Rather than all roads leading to the frontier, "From all the roads around we enter the landscape of the past" (47). Coolidge parodies those who would return to the cave—including himself. The cave is not simply a site of the primitive, but a site of the post-, a non-space haunted by memory and by the ghost of mobility--and haunted as well by precursors like Olson, Smithson, and Kerouac, all of whom died prematurely within a few years of one another, as if to reject the open fields of the 60s having become the posthistoric caves of the 70s. Consider for instance this passage from Mine: The One That Enters the Stories (written in 1979-80):


The speaker of the poem (or story) is in effect under a mountain of tradition from prehistory to the present--spanning from the invention of writing on the walls of caves to a state of information "overload" by way of Moby Dick (the belly of the whale being its own cavern of sorts). Earlier in the book, a similar episode occurs where Coolidge likens the cave to the space of his study:


The poet in his place of writing finds no escape from memory, and portrays the associative rhythms of writing from a place of interiority, which is not however, a privileged place of lyric authority.

Coolidge's caver is instead a voyeur of the dark who inhabits a landscape of history and language. In Quartz Hearts, Coolidge includes a postscript, which notes that "A journal of this work's procession would note the following regions." Under the category of regions, Coolidge lists books, films, musical works, as well as caves. The list moves seamlessly between artistic creations and physical locations:


Rather than emerging from immaterial sources—the history of ideas or images—Coolidge frames his writing as being a kind of geographical and/or geological appropriation, a pastiche of the material world. Tom Orange describes this as:


Coolidge is not merely rendering stream-of-consciousness associative patterns, he is in effect "writing through" landscapes, just as they write through him, i.e. he surrenders agency to the degraded spaces of tourism and/or of spatial abandonment, mines for instance. Coolidge in other words is a textual miner of what has already been mined. In Smithsonian Depositions, for instance, he moves abruptly from the sublime of the cave to the kitsch of a motel/casino culture which surrounds the cave as attraction:


The electric Devonian is at once oxymoronic and realistic. One can imagine the ancient geologic formations Coolidge describes as literally illuminated by electric light, and yet the parking lot of the title is no longer being described. The poet is a kind of roving perceiver through a world of sensory overload. One might note in the context of this conference that the term "information overload" was coined by Alvin Toffler in 1970. Here, as elsewhere, Coolidge is simultaneously describing a landscape and a mindscape of involuntary association. Coolidge's most radical work in this vein is perhaps The Maintains, which can be read as investigation of geologic time, as well as a linguistic fossil record, which takes the form of a literal writing through of the dictionary (or of a re-writing of the dictionary):


The cave does not allow for a primeval idealism. The cave is radically linguistic, a world of impacted grammar, of non-sequiturs. The poet never reaches the end of the cave, as in the Coolidge/Mayer collaboration:

Rather than being an epistemological vacuum, the cave is a set of communicative relations waiting to be discovered. The problem is too much data and not enough knowledge, too many signs and not enough symbols. Collaboration is one possible response to the alienation of the lone writer confronted by a surplus of language and a surplus of landscape:

Being in the cave, Coolidge and Mayer write later, is "like living in the dictionary" (66). Near the end of The Cave, Coolidge and Mayer take up the personae of their literary idols, fellow Berkshires writers Melville and Hawthorne. A dialogue between two poets becomes a dialogue with literary history, a passage rather than an abyss. The last section of The Cave is appropriately titled, "Clark and Bernadette in the Paradise of the Last Passage." Inferno, purgatory, and paradise become conflated—not in an apocalyptic vision of the last judgment, but rather with a sense of the open, the unexplored—an escape not into the mind of the lone genius, but rather a passage into the minds of two writers ostensibly writing about a single location.

A fuller consideration of The Cave would inquire further into the nature of collaboration, and read the book in terms of its multiple genres, voices, and frames of reference. In lieu of such a comprehensive reading, I'd like to somewhat presumptuously quote Gilles Deleuze's 1969 Logic of Sense, which I think offers a nice counterpoint to Coolidge and Mayer.


Deleuze opposes Plato's cave to Nietzsche's cave, and suggests that Nietzsche's cave is one where language is embodied and made material. There is no getting outside of the cave. The explorer must descend into the depths rather than ascending into the beautiful rationality of the forms. The cave is figured as immanent endless passage not to the beyond but to the here and now. The Cave is both domestic and exotic, embodied and empty, primordial and futurist, masculine and feminine. In Call Me Ishmael, Olson had taken "SPACE to be the central fact of man born to America from Folsom Cave to now." Coolidge rewrites the formula: from Space onwards, his books interiorize and collapse space. As if in reply to the oceanic spaces of Maximus, Coolidge responds with a compacted space of something along the lines of a Minimus figure--a lyric ego which is dissolved not through exteriorization but through interiorization. Coolidge's frontiers are inner space and outer space, rather than the westward spaces of the frontier or the oceangoing spaces of Melville. The space of the cave is impacted, introverted, the sublime turned inside-out. The Cave is etymological, but it is not necessarily genealogical—the patriarchal poetry embedded in proper names upon the landscape is placed under erasure in the cave. There is no central fact to man or woman born to America—the nation does not emerge from a cave, it emerges from a language. To quote Coolidge and Mayer: "A cave is a total body of thought" (29). I urge that we read that sentence both literally and allegorically. The cave is a body, the cave is a mind, the cave is co-llective—in the root sense of reading together, as we are today, and as Clark and Bernadette will again be doing tomorrow morning.

Coolidge, Clark. Mine: The One That Enters the Stories. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2004.

---. Own Face. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1993.

---. Quartz Hearts. San Francisco: This Press, 1978.

---. Smithsonian Depositions and Subject to a Film. New York: Vehicle Editions, 1980.

---. The Maintains. San Francisco: This Press, 1974.

Coolidge, Clark and Bernadette Mayer. The Cave. New York: Adventures in Poetry,
2008.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Orange, Tom. Unpublished PhD Dissertation.

Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: UC Press, 1996.