He dropped out of Brown to travel west to California, then bounced back and forth from San Francisco and New York City, associating with both the Language School poets and the New York School poets. Wikipedia lists his interests as: caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí , Jack Kerouac and movies. “Anything is possible, anything is undersung,” Coolidge writes in The Crystal Text, a 150 page meditation on a piece of quartz. The light. The light. The light / of its stone enclosure. / I keep spinning the crystal to see all sides / but I can never exactly see the side that is / turned away. A jazz drummer who engaged with experimental audio, in poems he prioritized music over meaning. Coolidge collaborated with Bernadette Mayer to write The Cave, a work of “poetry, prose, dialogue, and song,” from 1972 to 1978, which meditates on “Wittgenstein, the nature of language, and the connections between the present and past.” The work “constantly challenges the reader to question reality, time, and the poets themselves.” It was inspired by Eldon’s Cave in western Massachusetts, which the poets explored together. I wrote a poem about caves once. The setting was Marianna Caverns in Marianna, Florida, not far from where I’m from (Tallahassee), a place I visited once with my college friend Jackie, also a poet. In my poem, there is “iron and manganese, minerals / dripping in the caverns of our bodies, / in bone linings and nerve trunks.” Over twenty years later, my friend and I are both still poets, and we’re still in touch here and there. We’re like a stalactite and a stalagmite, each growing into poetry from opposite directions. I point one way, she points another. But we’re both still in the cave.
-Morgan English