Quartz Hearts

by Clark Coolidge

Quartz Hearts by Clark Coolidge was published in 1978.

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Often associated with the Language School his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies, Coolidge often finds correspondence in his work. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

Reviews

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quartz Hearts is an experiment in sentences (a sort of Coolidge take on the new sentence?) that forms a bridge between his earlier experiments in taking apart language in SPACE, Suite V, and Polaroid to his sprawling work of sentences in A Book Beginning What and Ending Away (or what was known as his “longprose” for quite some time before its eventual publication). What I find very interesting is the Notes at the end of the text, which sort of gives a sense of what the sentences are attempting to do in a way. As Coolidge notes that:

“Quartz Hearts overlaps work on both the last section of Polaroid and the beginning of my long (as yet untitled) “prosoid” work. It is in every sense a hinge work, reflecting a fresh interest in sentence structure as axial armature, the final movement of Polaroid had pushed me toward, the “prosoid”’s length would explore in full” (56).

Quartz Hearts and this “prosoid” work that wld eventually become A Book Beginning What represent this shift in Coolidge’s work towards deconstructing language, in a sense, and then rebuilding it back up from what he discovered in his tinkering w/ the smallest units of language & sense. In this way his poetics does manifest itself as one of a geologist, and his whole work, which cld be seen as one long one as his hero Kerouac’s, is like the Mammoth Cave of writing that Coolidge has entered. It is caving as writing, geology as poetry. Coolidge says of his poetics

“A lot of my early work was trying to revive the energy in the language by going back and taking it apart. I was sometimes misapprehended as trying to destroy the language… I wanted to take it apart, look at it, try to revive it for myself and then try to build it back up. The longprose was an attempt to do this using sentence structure.”

And that’s where the bridge between Polaroid - A Book is found in Quartz Hearts. In these earlier works Coolidge was down excavating language, not trying to find an “essence” of language or the poem, as to what is the poem. Rather, Coolidge cares more about arrangement and how to arrange words so as to produce new energies within language. His method is more a method of decomposition (w/out connotation to destruction as he says) in taking all of these materials of language and decomposing, or maybe a better way to say it wld be rearranging them, to produce a new syntax, a new sound, a new language, and most importantly a new poem. W/ Quartz Hearts and A Book, Coolidge has come back from the cave of language and is ready to apply all that he has learned into “sentence structure as axial armature” to produce a monumental work that desires to become the same length as Mammoth Cave. As Coolidge has also noted of his method, “I thought: why can’t I use all of language? Not limit myself.” Quartz Hearts (and all of his work) represents this impetus towards A Book and trying to create what he envisioned as an Everything Work. Truly, why must we limit ourselves in use of language as pinned to sense? Why cannot we use all of language? Coolidge takes this daring work and has never since left this cave he has dug into. Coolidge himself gives prescription to his methodology in the notes section of Quartz Hearts, “I find: ‘Quartz Hearts (a long grouping of aggregate works?)’ and on the page following the last words of Quartz Hearts this entry [in his notebook]: ‘Quartz Hearts: meditations on the state(s) of things, in other words words…” (56). And from this mediation on words as words, Coolidge lists a “journal of this work’s procession” (56). And he gives the sources of where the sentences arose from in the work. Another interesting note is from Beethoven writing on a manuscript “stolen together from various theses and thoses” (57). Which adequately sums up this method of decomposition and rearrangement that Coolidge works with. And it is from this “meditation on the state(s) of things, in other words words…” that Coolidge wld begin to work on A Book as what wld come next from this experiment within sentence structure. And it all follows logical sense in terms of his work’s evolution and from going inside language to building it back up from what he had found within.

And even w/ all the ideas of geology here, one cannot forgot the sonic textures of Coolidge’s sentences. Even within sentences, each of the sections has such a sonic quality to it, sound as thought, that makes the reading so enjoyable. Coolidge, to me, as I’ve stated before sounds so much like Derek Bailey (who both were majorly influenced by Beckett!) and Cecil Taylor. Although one can’t also forgot the bebop rhythms running throughout of Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and others. But Bailey and Taylor remain the two points of sound that I continually hear within Coolidge’s sound. Imagine a jam session w/ the three of them! Both Bailey and Taylor were also seen as “destroyers” of sound rather than what they were actually doing — going deep within the structures of sound and from there rebuilding it anew to generate new syntaxes of sound & relations of melody & rhythm. From how Coolidge wld break down language in SPACE to its rebuilding back into a new syntactical structure in a Book you can hear how Taylor or Bailey wld break down sound and rebuild them into a new syntax of sound. To hear Taylor from Jazz Advance to Dark to Themselves is to hear an entirely new language of sound being built.

Quartz Hearts is an incredible middle word that begins to generate the syntax and structure that Coolidge wld pursue at length in his work, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away. But as a work in its own right it’s an incredible collection of sentences and meditation on words as words. On one final note — I see a lot of similarity between Coolidge & Silliman in creating expansive works dealing with words & their relation to everyday life. Certainly different styles, Silliman is no jazz drummer, but there is a certain way of viewing daily life and it’s rearrangement into the poem that strikes me as being very close to the two of them. With Silliman having worked on the same poem forever, “Ketjak,” and the idea of Coolidge’s Everything Work and how A Book represents that, there is a lot of closeness in both of these poets trying to create epics (wrong use of the word maybe?) of everyday life through language and what can be found in that.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge are my favourite artist. Damn prolific and amazing!!!

[Sofia · Rating 2 out of 5]

To think is to sap one's dreams?

A little too discrete in its shifts for my liking but the language is very rich, reappearance of the word "quartz," makes me interested in reading the apparently more straight-forward Own Face, knowing well how submersion in experiment can lead to lovely intuitive convention. One might, hypothetically, practice something of the sort purposefully, focusing on aspects of syntax/sound/semantics to load one's palette.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I would like for writing to do what it only could.
I would like my mind to be there. What is a cat.
Never the paper, let's let it occur. Where it is?
One can't gainsay an outstripping. Quite
feeble and so cylindrical. Idling by
the marina one day the kites were up.
A definition is as the end of its string.
At the cat but not through."

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

This bk seems to be somewhat of a departure from the earlier 4 bks by Coolidge that I've reviewed so far here ("ING", "SPACE", "THE MAINTAINS", "POLAROID"). That's b/c there's punctuation. Especially PERIODS, some commas, some question marks. It makes it seem so declarative after a while. As if it's all so matter-of-fact. Page 28:

"The location of a diagram is in green on blue.
Next considering a whitish black and the sharp
corner it's near. Olympia beer passing in
the sky and its wall. A door space to
further diagrams, white on blue, a window.
That yellow flower, on flat, on white, where's
its shadow, is too big. A sudden crease,
that takes the air 90º back into space. The
various clothes there are in a closet where
this all gets vertical and stops.
What's a cat."

The appearance of a description - but not necessarily a description meant to evoke an exact image in a reader's mind - more likely a description that picks & chooses pieces here & there that can add up to a new whole, like picking yr favorite nuts out of trail mix & eating only those, digesting them, leaving the rest for another writer (if one cares to pick the mix apart further).

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good it makes me want to weep.