It’s a shame that Clark Coolidge wasn’t a teacher, because he coherently puts together this thoughts regarding a kind of poetry that gives most people trouble. In his 1977 address to the Naropa Institute, he is able to explain his syntax-challenged poetry in a way that makes sense. His interest in geology is helpful, because he is able to use crystal growth as a way to begin accessing his work. Other geological phenomena such as fault lines and sedimentation are employed, as well. 
In his essay, At Clark Coolidge: Allegory and the Early Works, Michael Golston illuminates Coolidge’s work with the torch of structuralism, using Roman Jakobsen to back him up. Quoting from Coolidge’s Smithsonian Deposition, Golston takes note of the innate structuralism found there. “. . . The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes.” These “sunken axes” he refers to are the horizontal axes of language, which represent narrative and metonymy. The vertical axis represents metaphor, and also poetry. If we connect the horizontal axis with augmentation and accretion, we can connect the vertical axis with deletion, ellipsis and economy. In his speech to the students at Naropa, Coolidge touches on this, without even directly relating it to structuralist theory:
I mean, these guys had seen Cubism and Surrealism and Chirico and Picasso and the Social Realists in this country in the thirties. It wasn't like which one to choose or how to make something out of that. It was whether you could paint at all. Whether art was possible at all. Start from scratch. No kidding. I mean, up against it. So, those two quotes. This is why I like to book end this with them. Because one of them, the Beckett, is a "mess." It's everything, it's "let's have everything," it's "let's grab part of everything." The other one is "nothing." Ignorance. Nobody understood art.
Horizontal: PUT EVERYTHING IN. Vertical: TAKE EVERYTHING OUT.
Golston suggests that Coolidge does both things in his writing, and something extra: Coolidge plays with syntax in a way that troubles the very function of language. He harrows language until it forms different codes for different people. Golston asks, “What does it mean to project the metalingual syntax of the index, a horizontal syntax of metonymy, onto the vertical or metaphorical structure of poetry?” (304)
For Coolidge, this is where geology comes in. The formation of crystalline structures is the preferred analogy for dealing with his work. “You start with matter, not with rules . . . Stone has a certain cleavage. You can't make it look a certain way if the stone is not constructed to allow you to do that.” He goes on to say that a crystal, once it starts growing, has a vector, and it will keep growing until it runs out of room, at which point you have a large mass of crystals. When he says “vector,” he means the trajectory a word’s meaning will take on its travel through Association Land (my term).
Golston answers his own question, regarding the shift from the horizontal to the vertical axis. “Organizing these traces of indexical syntax into the vertical structure of poetry creates a recursive text which endlessly points back into itself as it simultaneously points to ‘the wor(l)d.’” (306)
This double process can occur not simply because re-arranged language no longer makes sense and therefore can be “coded” however we wish, but because we discover a new faith in the material elements of the poem. It shows us that while syntax is what holds together meaning, metaphor is where art the noun is free to art as a verb.
There has recently been a documentary made about the role of sound vibrations in the creation of crystal structures. With his background in percussion, and geology, it seems like Coolidge would have found great interest in these discoveries.
In his essay, At Clark Coolidge: Allegory and the Early Works, Michael Golston illuminates Coolidge’s work with the torch of structuralism, using Roman Jakobsen to back him up. Quoting from Coolidge’s Smithsonian Deposition, Golston takes note of the innate structuralism found there. “. . . The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes.” These “sunken axes” he refers to are the horizontal axes of language, which represent narrative and metonymy. The vertical axis represents metaphor, and also poetry. If we connect the horizontal axis with augmentation and accretion, we can connect the vertical axis with deletion, ellipsis and economy. In his speech to the students at Naropa, Coolidge touches on this, without even directly relating it to structuralist theory:
I mean, these guys had seen Cubism and Surrealism and Chirico and Picasso and the Social Realists in this country in the thirties. It wasn't like which one to choose or how to make something out of that. It was whether you could paint at all. Whether art was possible at all. Start from scratch. No kidding. I mean, up against it. So, those two quotes. This is why I like to book end this with them. Because one of them, the Beckett, is a "mess." It's everything, it's "let's have everything," it's "let's grab part of everything." The other one is "nothing." Ignorance. Nobody understood art.
Horizontal: PUT EVERYTHING IN. Vertical: TAKE EVERYTHING OUT.
Golston suggests that Coolidge does both things in his writing, and something extra: Coolidge plays with syntax in a way that troubles the very function of language. He harrows language until it forms different codes for different people. Golston asks, “What does it mean to project the metalingual syntax of the index, a horizontal syntax of metonymy, onto the vertical or metaphorical structure of poetry?” (304)
For Coolidge, this is where geology comes in. The formation of crystalline structures is the preferred analogy for dealing with his work. “You start with matter, not with rules . . . Stone has a certain cleavage. You can't make it look a certain way if the stone is not constructed to allow you to do that.” He goes on to say that a crystal, once it starts growing, has a vector, and it will keep growing until it runs out of room, at which point you have a large mass of crystals. When he says “vector,” he means the trajectory a word’s meaning will take on its travel through Association Land (my term).
Golston answers his own question, regarding the shift from the horizontal to the vertical axis. “Organizing these traces of indexical syntax into the vertical structure of poetry creates a recursive text which endlessly points back into itself as it simultaneously points to ‘the wor(l)d.’” (306)
This double process can occur not simply because re-arranged language no longer makes sense and therefore can be “coded” however we wish, but because we discover a new faith in the material elements of the poem. It shows us that while syntax is what holds together meaning, metaphor is where art the noun is free to art as a verb.
There has recently been a documentary made about the role of sound vibrations in the creation of crystal structures. With his background in percussion, and geology, it seems like Coolidge would have found great interest in these discoveries.