The Crystal Text

by Clark Coolidge

The occasion for this poetic meditation is a colorless quartz crystal sitting upon the writer's desk. The crystal is as still and irreducible as a death's head in St. Jerome's study or Cezanne's studio. But what would the crystal reveal, if it could speak? How might the issue of its presence be brought into language? The poet of The Crystal Text, by means of a rare stamina of attention and listening vulnerability, seeks to become the medium of the crystal's transmissions. Like many other Coolidge works, The Crystal Text sounds the depths of a visionary excavation of present being. Faced daily, Coolidge's quest is to know anything, to write everything. And what is revealed here in the glancing light of his language's mineral beauty is the writing mind itself. Its precision, its weights and measures, its peerless word choice and shutter speed all combine in passages of inspired momentum to bring the reader cognitions of a unique and exemplary kind.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

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

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just heard The Crystal Text read aloud, start to finish, at a group event in Portland, and can’t imagine encountering it any other way. Coolidge’s trademark fizz and hum threads through the poem, but so do pragmatic doubts about language, meaning, and form, which come up in an especially intense way in an arc of thought this long. “Is the heart of poetry a stillness, and my beloved/momentum something else, additional, mongrel?” Is The Crystal Text “our” Prelude? A little of yes to both.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I turned on the radio, static. A kind of
muscular bell shoving aside all other signals and
leaving its traces in mystery shows, telephone
exchanges, musical snatches. Radio should come
with a hood like a car."

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The crystal is always showing a world/ That does not exist except in remission./It does not contain but transposes./The whole point of this/house is to change the light./No one is to live there in fact
Its precise location is not known…/Yes, the crystal is a house/one is inhabited by” (37)

“What if the light shard remained/On the floor after the sun had passed on?” (34)

“And if I am afraid, then what? Spin the crystal (35).

“The crystal could not be white/for it was not seen. Sounds as if it was through./ But never finished like the unread book, the off-center/orange, the duck below…A question is a hand reaching. The crystal.” (76)

Then the eye in the crystal moved./ I picked the crystal up and rubbed it both ways across my/ brow then down onto the ridge of my nose./ Anyway it would shine like the blade of a knife/ with forgotten use. Rows of centuries, the reflections/ across its facets. If only I could recall uselessness (125).

“I can finally write the word “belief” here./ I believe that the crystal is where I left it,/ the exact point at which I last saw it./ In that sense it can be said to depend on me./ My knowledge of it, however slight so far, has/ become its life” (126).

The crystal holds light but is not hollow./ A sweep of the pen does not even cut the page./ All/clear/ ideas/ Tend to be/ tended to/ end wrongly/ The crystal/the vice/ of no choice” (151)

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

A language supreme! This guy does good stuff with the material powers of language.

The poet spends a year writing to, for, through a crystal on his desk. Relatable, see Dürer's Melancholia.

My only hang up is the amount of lines that end in "weak" words--such as "the" or "of" etc. Which makes the text feel like it is lineated to be poetry. (I sound like my friend Devin. I might be metabolizing him.) (One might consider the notebook the poet is composing the piece within. Although this does not account for the typerwriter.) (There are sections of tight poems tho.) The tension I feel might be between the work as a performance text and a "book length poem." All aside: It is a poetic project, and it is good. The strength of these sections, which are pretty much all of the book, comes from the sentence as a unit to riff within.


Read and weep at the vectors of the crystal!

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This text has stuck with me since finishing last week in an uncharacteristic way. I had the thought while reading that he seems to have wholly commit himself to his dream self, or writing from his unconscious understanding of the world.

I might be imposing, but Coolidge putting his jazzy and frenetic mind towards a sort of meditation practice (with the crystal as the subject of his concentration) seems to have generated introspections on the hermetic nature of writing and the "silence" at the heart of poetry. What's so great about it is that this silence is ~almost~ at odds with his maximalist poetic impulses (“Is the heart of poetry a stillness, and my beloved/momentum something else, additional, mongrel?”). In this way, it felt like he was facing down his suffering in these pages: the impermanence of his poetic imagery, for sure, but also his misanthropy and sexual frustration.

This is of course infused with the ecstatic, psychedelic use of language that his "beloved momentum" brings about, at points to an astonishing effect. It’s not so much that he’s having his cake and eating it too, more that he’s discovering his proclivities are that of a cakes. The Crystal Cake.

[Bon Nandre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I simply think his stuff is more wild & "entertaining" when he is doing pure verse, this prose/prose poem format makes the book a bit stiff rhytmically & Coolidge is usually very supple. It's slightly more thematically oriented than his other texts so maybe that's partly the reason why this is "widely" read & available. "Entry level" Coolidge but... I prefer "Solution passage" (1986) or the recent "88 sonnets" (2012) (to name just a few).

[Wesley Harden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pondering a crystal atop a table. Cogitations present in the phenomena; no need for the a priori. The grander order of things (or the entropic universe) being present in the single thing. The crystal dissolves.

[e · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a poem for poets- for someone who loves words and loves thinking about words. Clark Coolidge uses “the crystal” as a metaphorical lens through which he views everything in this poem. He explores perspective, history, language, and the many facets of what it is that make us human, through the crystal, with clarity and resonance.
He places a great deal of importance on how words sound and feel, and often the images mirror the creation of poetry:

“A prosewriter’s mind’s mass is through plots
but a poet’s is fielded of words...”

Coolidge travels so deep within the language and imagery that he invents words. The Crystal Text is a world where “moonhair” exists. The effect is beautiful and stirring. Coolidge manipulates language into poetic, unusually-phrased pairs , such as: “fade urge” and “emergent bed”. These and other pairs throughout the poem are like fragments of light in the crystal shards; quick and sharp.
Each section of The Crystal Text is related, yet contains its own world. There does not seem to be a particular formula that is followed, they begin and end in their own time. I could almost feel the way Coolidge succinctly constructed them...if that makes sense. It is that feeling you get when you “just know” when a poem is complete- again, this is a poem well suited to be read by poets. Coolidge alludes to the act of writing and the act of writing the very poem we are reading. (“These words here are already too much.”) He also alludes to how poetry breaks apart and pieces language back together, how the poet can shape it, much like how crystals are formed, both almost violently.
The mind is also subject to Coolidge’s poetic analysis, and the crystal often represents knowledge and becomes a , as he puts it , “a chameleon” of imagery. The language in this poem perfectly mimic the crystal, even on the level of the words themselves. (“Lights are in perfect darkness perfect axes touch.” ) The crystal itself melds into the poetry (“Invention of names that have catalytic spines narrowing gaps and interest churns...”) – the crystal becomes the cipher for the content of the poem, of viewing the world through it.
This poem, although analytical and studied, also has some simply gorgeous moments, there were some images/stanzas/moments that gave me that poetic “aaaaaah feeling”:

“the rays of sunshelf through nightdust.”
“I howl and the world starves its nerves. I will make concert of the wings the clouds have clattered.”
“ I feel this sentence turn on the flinch of a laugh.”
“Moonhair should be the verb.”
“the rats that hoard remnants of meteor instrument...”

DAMN.

The Crystal Text is an encapsulation of all of these things, of language- on an almost molecular level. It seems to be both of the universe and one life led... simultaneously a macrocosmic and microcosmic experience .

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I put the crystal / to my brow and turn.

A 152 page poem in which Clark Coolidge opens his mind to everything and then follows the ink. It's about the relation between the sound and meaning of language, and a lot of other things.