Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Dutiful Hardness" by Clark Coolidge is a poem that challenges conventional narrative and imagery, presenting a fragmented and surreal landscape where disparate elements collide to create a sense of dislocation and estrangement. Through a series of vivid, yet cryptic images, Coolidge explores themes of alienation, the search for meaning in a chaotic world, and the tension between the material and the spiritual, or the mundane and the profound.

The poem opens with "In the holy hallway of dry slaves," a line that immediately conjures an atmosphere of desolation and suffering, juxtaposed with the sacred or consecrated ("holy"). This opening sets the tone for a poem that moves through spaces and images that are both revered and abandoned, valuable and worthless.

The mention of "another iced window this one leaves / 3 bucks and a synthesizer down a drink" introduces a surreal, dream-like quality, where objects and actions are disconnected from their usual contexts. This sense of the absurd continues with the image of tiptoeing "on the money a length of garment / swings in the chest hole darkness is had," suggesting a world turned upside down, where the familiar becomes strange, and darkness is something that can be possessed or experienced as a physical entity.

"Cult of the Cave of the Not Okay" and "Olney Street about where I took my presence" further the exploration of alienation and the quest for belonging or understanding in spaces that are marked by exclusion or negation ("Not Okay"). The reference to "the brass of a kindergarten class" could symbolize innocence or the beginnings of knowledge, overshadowed by the harsh realities of the world outside.

The poem navigates through locations and scenes that evoke both the mundane and the extraordinary, from "Sunderland the place of the fossil face" to "green tattersall golf spinnaker," blending the language of geology, sport, and fashion in a way that defies easy categorization or interpretation.

The line "you know what he just died of? death" is a stark reminder of the ultimate commonality of human experience, presented in a manner that is both blunt and absurd, highlighting the poem's engagement with the ineffable and the inevitable.

The poem closes with a reflection on unknowability and the limitations of human understanding, "let's not pretend we know our motives / as the plane rose the other one didn't." This concluding image, with its implication of ascent and stasis, captures the poem's essence—a journey through a world that is at once bewildering, beautiful, and impenetrable, where meaning is elusive and comprehension is always just out of reach.

"Dutiful Hardness" invites the reader to engage with the text on a level beyond the literal, to find coherence in the incoherent and to seek connections among the seemingly disconnected. Through its dense imagery and elliptical language, the poem challenges us to contemplate the complexities of existence and the paradoxes that define the human condition.

POEM TEXT: http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-10.html

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