Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics

8. Faulting Description: Mayer, Coolidge, and the Site of Scientific Authority

210 chapter 8 8 Faulting Description Mayer, Coolidge, and the Site of Scientific Authority Write about a place you know: a streetcorner, a pond, a phone booth, a riverbed, whatever. Bring to it everything you know or can know about the place, from its most distant past to the most recent thing you can remember about it. If you haven’t got the time or inclination to research all about the place’s deep past, make it up yourself, but keep in mind the general sorts of changes that the earth has gone through in the last billion years or so. —Bernadette Mayer, The Art of Science Writing, coauthored with Dale Worsley our book made full in faulting more than statement —Clark Coolidge, The Cave, coauthored with Bernadette Mayer Seeming at first to advocate the familiar category of place, Bernadette Mayer’s paragraph destabilizes the very ground it presents—fabricating the natural-­ his­ tori­ cal authority on which such a ground would rely. A similar displacement is at work in the above line from Clark Coolidge—a line that seems to summarize what he and Mayer have set about doing in their collaborative book, The Cave (written between 1972 and 1978, only published in 2008), which moves from a description of an actual cave exploration to a multifaceted account of the linguistic and philosophical “grounds” of this account.1 Despite his training in geology, Coolidge tends not to present the authority of science as a basis or armature for his poetry.2 Instead, his characteristic claim that The Cave has been “made full” by “faulting more than statement” works to intertwine the geological and the poetic, suggesting an inescapable linguistic dimension to the former and a disruptive materiality to the latter.3 That Coolidge and Mayer produced works that fed off the interrelationships between scientific authority and language both distinguishes them from most of their peers in Ameri­ can poetry and connects them to the postminimalist artists of their generation (Coolidge was born in 1939; Faulting Description 211 Mayer in 1945).4 In a passage that Coolidge himself will quote in Smithsonian Depositions, Robert Smithson reciprocally destabilizes the ­ relationship between language and geology: “Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and youwillseeitopenupintoaseriesoffaults,intoaterrainofparticleseachcontaining its own void” (RS, 107). If geology, like natural history, had seemed to provide a bedrock authority for some versions of the poetics of place (“I stand on Main Street like the Diorite / stone” writes Charles Olson in his 1968 volume 2 of The Maximus Poems [MP, 221]), for other poets the vertiginous relationship between scientific authority and language seemed to open abysses rather than ground claims. And these abysses attracted both poets and artists. Inventive, prolific, conceptually complex, and of­ten hilarious, Mayer and Coolidge have both been significant influences on avant-­ garde poetry since the early 1970s—from the later iterations of the New York School to Language writing to the broad range of younger ex­ peri­ men­ talists that might be called post-­ Language writers. Still, while the terms, operations, and goals of the Language writing movement that they helped to catalyze, for instance, have become part of a literary-­ his­ tori­ cal debate, discussions of Coolidge and Mayer, when they exist, remain much more rudimentary.5 Certainly Coolidge and Mayer’s oeuvres—beginning in 1966 with Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric and stretching now to some forty-­two books in Coolidge’s case, and beginning in 1968 with Story and now in­ clud­ ing nineteen books in ­Mayer’s—are far too vari­ous to imagine as strict parallels, especially given that large portions of both writers’ work are still unpublished.6 But it is not only the reception history that suggests links; the two writers identified with each other early on, collaborated on The Cave, and encouraged a kind of extreme ex­ peri­ men­ talism in each other that far outstripped the primary modes of quotidian and occasional writing that were coming to be associated with the later generations of the New York School.7 In a 1975 letter to Mayer, for instance, Coolidge counsels: “Don’t worry! MEMORY is totally READABLE! No doubts, it now has its own life & should go on out to it (published).”8 Despite Coolidge’s assurances, the extreme ex­ peri­ men­ talism of books like the 1975 Memory (and of his own early works such as Space [1970], The Maintains [1974], and Polaroid [1975]) led...