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9 Difficult Harmony The Picturesque Detail in Gilpin, Price, and Clark Coolidge’s space A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations So far there has been no attempt to historicize the work of Clark Coolidge beyond the 1960s; his early work is usually considered inaugural of a minimalist and disjunctive non-referentiality, and he is seen as a pioneer of, or fellow traveler with, Language writing. Jed Rasula’s “News and Noise: Poetry and Distortion ” is an interesting case in point. Rasula reads Coolidge’s Solution Passages through the language of information theory (as I do in the case of Jackson Mac Low in chapter 3), remarking that Coolidge’s early work comprises a plethora of textual entropy with poems that lack the redundancy necessary to convey meaning through noise. The poems offer a non-redundant randomness in extremis, burdening the reader with the daunting task of engaging moments and movements between entropy and message, a veritable “becoming-meaning” as Deleuze would have it, or in Rasula’s own biosemiotic terminology, “ripples of order, transitorily charged with sudden unsolicited evidence of life itself” (Rasula 97). At one point Rasula opens up a meditation on the sister arts of poetry and painting : “The relation of signal to noise is as reciprocal as that between figure and ground in the visual field” (98). Rasula’s reflections on these sister arts are neither isolated nor innovative. The humanist doctrine of ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”) can be traced back through Baroque, Mannerism, and the Renaissance to the poetics of Horace and Aristotle.1 The eighteenth-century poet William Mason, friend and editor of Thomas Gray, chose to write his long poem The English Garden in the then unfashionable blank verse for precisely its affinities to natural landscape.2 150 Chapter 9 In more recent times critics have drawn attention to the Cubist aspirations behind Stein’s Tender Buttons as well as William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell, and to the close parallels between Abstract Expressionism and the poetry of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and other members of the so-called New York School.3 In the present chapter I continue this line of provocation across more historical distance and attempt a rethinking of contemporary disjunctive poetics (here represented in an early work of Clark Coolidge) along the lines of certain aspects of eighteenth-century picturesque theory as outlined by its two major theorists, William Gilpin and Uvedale Price. In this respect my method bears strategic affinities with Nathaniel Mackey’s efforts to break out of predetermined cultural categories by way of purposeful readings across African American and Euro-American avant-gardes.4 Where Mackey seeks creative kinships and affinities across ethnic and regional boundaries, I offer a transhistoric reading across three centuries. My intention, however, is not to mobilize a retrograde aesthetic theory, nor read a sampling of contemporary disjunctive texts through the taste and sensibility of a late-eighteenth-century public, but rather to provoke reflection on buried continuities, unavowed patterns, and connections between some of Gilpin’s and Price’s aesthetic notions and the radical syntactic, grammatical disruptions, formal innovation, and minimalist import evident in some of the early poetry of Clark Coolidge. In this respect the sparse texts that I consider might be accurately situated within a genealogy of the rough and irregular.5 I should state at the outset that this chapter does not exhaust all aspects of picturesque theory, which was designed to advance a mode of vision, a way of grasping reality as a picture.6 I shall not touch on this wider aspect nor on its relation to what Baudrillard terms “hyperrealism” but rather focus on its theorizing of the detail. Discussions of writers along picturesque criteria date back to at least Ben Jonson.7 There are also more recent precedents to this appeal to eighteenthcentury models. Marshall McLuhan traces the evidence of its presence in Tennyson ’s, Rossetti’s, and Swinburne’s work. More recently Brian McHale comments on Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, whose distinctive form as faux fragments of an imaginary, ancient text evokes both the eighteenth-century cult of ruins as well as that same century’s predilection for textual hoaxes and fictional authors, such as Thomas Chatterton’s fifteenth-century Bristol monk Thomas Rowley and James Macpherson’s fraudulent translations of the ancient...

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