Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Clark Coolidge’s "Hommage à Ron Padgett" is a dense and playful engagement with language, perception, and memory, reflecting both Padgett’s influence and Coolidge’s own affinity for linguistic fragmentation. The poem operates in a space where meaning is constantly shifting, resisting easy interpretation in favor of rhythmic association and layered abstraction. As an homage, it does not seek to describe Padgett directly but rather emulates and distorts aspects of his poetic style—his humor, his loose associations, and his ability to make the ordinary feel surreal.

The opening line—"If there be a love for my poems I insist on it will turn up dented in the mind by the dust they attract to themselves,"—introduces an immediate paradox. The love for the poems is not stated as an inherent fact but as a hypothetical ("if there be"), and its appearance is not pristine but "dented," as if the poems exist only in a worn, secondhand state. The idea that they attract dust suggests both neglect and accumulation, as if poems, like objects, gather residue from the world around them. The phrase "as then I am dubbed a fool but only from the inside" reinforces this self-conscious awareness of poetic reception—there is an internal foolishness, one recognized not externally but as part of the poet’s own mind.

The poem then moves into a meta-commentary on subject matter: "Such is an example of the subjects I have never to search for, they make here a rattle, one with no handle, but available at many's the absent moment, subject to matter, friable and coming to pieces, always the pieces on hand and cut to mind." Here, Coolidge plays with the idea that subjects emerge on their own rather than being sought after. The phrase "a rattle, one with no handle" suggests an object that makes noise but lacks a point of control—perhaps a metaphor for the spontaneous, uncontrollable nature of poetic thought. The repetition of pieces reinforces fragmentation, while "friable" (meaning easily crumbled) implies that thoughts, like poetry, are always in the process of breaking apart and reforming.

A direct address follows: "As never do I mind this, but will you?" This moment of self-awareness acknowledges the poem’s difficulty, turning to the reader to ask whether they, too, can accept this unstructured way of thinking. There is a playfulness here—Coolidge does not frame confusion as a failure but rather as an inherent quality of poetic engagement.

The next passage—"There is always room for a new scent and it seems these rooms come equipped with them, there's one now, the lotion odor of an order of washing the hands last week just arrived at this cell where I write but I forgot that / I handed it in,"—moves into sensory memory. The mention of "a new scent" introduces olfactory perception as a way of accessing thought, as if rooms are naturally filled with lingering impressions. The "lotion odor" is particularly evocative, suggesting a past action (washing hands) that unexpectedly reasserts itself in the present. The phrase "just arrived at this cell where I write" gives the moment a monastic or imprisoning quality, as if writing is both a confinement and an act of solitary ritual. The acknowledgment that the speaker "forgot that / I handed it in" reinforces the theme of slipping memory, as if even the act of transmitting experience is subject to forgetting.

The final section—"crawling back to my breath-honed mirror in the Palace of Forgettal where I stopped by chance to write the further adventures of a never gone by the books life and later continued my reading in biography of a Lowell the one with the floral subservience and an underchair Dentine"—further complicates the poem’s meditation on presence and absence. The phrase "breath-honed mirror" suggests a mirror fogged by breath, implying a blurred or fleeting self-perception. The "Palace of Forgettal" (a playful distortion of forgetfulness) frames memory loss as a grand and almost ceremonial space. The speaker stops there "by chance," reinforcing the poem’s rejection of structured narrative in favor of accidental encounters.

The mention of "a never gone by the books life" suggests a rejection of convention, perhaps referring to Padgett’s own poetic ethos—his refusal to follow strict literary traditions. The final lines introduce a reference to Lowell, likely Robert Lowell, though the phrase "the one with the floral subservience and an underchair Dentine" resists clear identification. "Floral subservience" might allude to a decorative but passive quality in Lowell’s work, while "underchair Dentine" creates a strangely physical, almost discarded image—perhaps gum stuck under a chair, reinforcing the poem’s theme of forgotten or unnoticed things.

Coolidge’s "Hommage à Ron Padgett" mirrors its subject by embracing linguistic play, non-linear thought, and the humor of absurd juxtaposition. Rather than offering a direct tribute, the poem absorbs and refracts Padgett’s sensibility, presenting a world where perception is fleeting, objects accumulate meaning unpredictably, and poetry itself remains an ongoing process of coming to pieces and being cut to mind. The homage, then, is not in subject matter but in the shared delight in the endless, ungraspable possibilities of language.

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