Actually, I tend to think that American English has inherent sympathies with percussion. It has to do with how consonants cluster & how vowels are so often contained by them, a relationship that is far less case in romance languages. Consider the following stanza from Coolidge’s The Crystal Text:
Marked cards, enablements to attach comment
or an elastic candle in firm disregard.
Cattle car mottled with starlings, fire truck
gilding out of harm's way a vote for fog.
And the amphibians we will all admit to being.
The crystal apparently on fire. The water
immediately on tap. The light. The light. The light
of its stone enclosure. She spoke, but
we listened.
Coolidge organizes the first three-plus lines around his use of “l”-combinations: bl, ndl, ttl, ttl, rl & ld. They function almost as drum-rolls – one could argue that enablements, with four consonant clusters, very nearly is a paradiddle. This is especially audible in the third line. Note also how often here – and even more so elsewhere in his poetry – Coolidge uses single-syllable words, either two consonants or consonant clusters surrounding a simple vowel, or else just a vowel followed by a consonant . Twenty-nine of the 63 words in this passage fit into those two patterns.
This is something Coolidge appears to have learned from, say, Phil Whalen &/or Jonathan Williams, two of his particular influences, tho the real master of the one-syllable word is Whalen’s old college roomie, Lew Welch, he of the advertising slogan: Raid Kills Bugs Dead. Every word of which follows the “contained vowel” model.
There are obviously ways to discuss all this utilizing traditional metrics, but I would argue that to do so misses what is so often great about Coolidge, which is how his works build upon what he hears in the world.
Coolidge’s model tends to be jazz, but I for one don’t think the relationship (or potential) ends there, whatever its advantages might be. My evidence for this is completely personal. I started Ketjak within days of hearing the West Coast premier of Steve Reich’s Drumming at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 1974. At the time, I had been listening to Reich’s music for close to a decade (my 21st birthday present had been tickets to hear Paul Zukofsky perform the West Coast premier of Violin Phase & even then I’d known the tape loop pieces for a year or two). But I never got how one might translate the accumulative nature of Reich’s phased pieces until I heard it in the countable, audible beating of drums.
