Clark Coolidge: Kerouac

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Coolidge, Clark

I thought I'd start out with a sort of two-panel quote from Kerouac to give the range of his language. You might think of these examples. as two polar existences of the words in his work. The first:

Black black black black bling bling bling

bling black black black black

bling bling bling bling

black black black black

bling bling bling

38//Sword etc., flat part of an oar or calamity, sudden vio-dashing young fellow, lent gust of wind; forcible stream of leaf, air, blare of a trumpet or horn, blamable deserving of Explosion as of gunpowder, blame, find fault with Blight; censure, imputation of a blatant Brawling noisy, Speakill, blaze, Burn with a blameful meriting flame, send forth a flaming light, less, without blame innocent, torch, firebrand, stream of blamelessly blameless flame of light, bursting out, actness...

And the second one:

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die--In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in my raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.

Now the first of those is from the novel Desolation Angels in the first part of that book where he's in a fire tower in the Cascade Mountains all by himself all summer and obviously he's bored and looking in the dictionary for inspiration or for whatever reason. I looked in the dictionary too and realized that he'd gone from the word "blade" to the word "bleed." Everything in that paragraph comes between those two words: blare, blame and so on. He's working alphabetically through those definitions. I once wrote a whole book using a similar meditation on the dictionary, although I don't think it was inspired by Kerouac. I think I found it or it was an unconscious influence anyway, a book called The Maintains which I almost dedicated to this section of Desolation Angels.

And the second one is from Visions of Cody, so that you can see the vast differences there. From words that are almost totally outside him, he's feeding them back in from an objective source, the dictionary, to what you might call an extreme personal inwards, confessional words, a memory of his own consciousness kind of thing. This might give you some idea of the really quite extraordinary range of his work, which I've always thought of as a lot wider than most impressions would have you think of him.

From there I want to move to what is maybe the key to receiving his work, which is the sound of the work, his voice. I know that "voice" has been talked about a lot but I think there are certain writers, and with some of them we have the luck of the recorded evidence of their voices, where what you get is a kind of magic voice. Once you've heard it you can never read those words again without hearing that voice, even if you don't have a very developed sub-vocal ability. Do you know what

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. I remember one time asking a class here how many people do that, and about half of them did. I was sort of amazed. Somebody like Burroughs, for example, says that he's largely visual but that's a paradox because he's another of those magic voices. You can't forget that Burroughs sound. But Kerouac very definitely. I remember when I was first enthusiastic about his books and I used to lend them to friends, they would take them away and come back and shake their heads and say "I don't know, I just can't read it." And I said "What's the matter?" "Well, the punctuation, I can't...I mean, all those dashes, what the hell is that about?" "That's all night. Sit down and listen to this record." And I'd put on one of those three amazing recordings that came out in 1959, and almost every one of them would go away saying "Oh, yeah, I got it. Yeah, right," and then they could read him without any trouble.

So I'm sure that's true, if you have the music of the words to hold in your head. Here's a tiny example, in his vowels, like "gloom dooms," that's a very Kerouac sound. Or with more of the consonants clicking out: "hotshot freight trains," that's the Kerouac sound in micro. And I mean not separate from the sense, although there's an important issue here that I think Susan Howe was touching on in her workshop this morning, which could indicate a whole other pursuit here just parenthetically. What is the relationship for the writer between what he hears of the words and what he sees once they're written down and fed back into the head that's hearing those words? To me there's an incredible generative cycling that's going on, but there's also a problem with the registration, which is always inexact, a bit like the notation of jazz. If you write improvised jazznotes down in classical 4/4 or whatever measure, you're not going to get the nuances of the rhythm unless you divide it into so many micro-moments that it's nearly impossible to then read and play. Which has happened with some so-called modern classical composers. There are Eliott Carter scores, for example, that as a drummer I've tried to read, which are so divided that I don't see how anyone could fluidly do it.