Clark Coolidge

Episode 6: Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer smiling at the camera with her hair in braids — Photo of Bernadette Mayer courtesy of Walker Art Center.

Bernadette Mayer, whose poetry is included in the Rail Park, is the author of over thirty books, including Midwinter Day, The Golden Book of Words, Utopia, Studying Hunger, and Sonnets, to name just a few. Her most recent book is Work and Days.

June 5, 2020

Our endless ear (PoemTalk #124)

Jack Kerouac, 'Old Angel Midnight'

PoemTalk

From left to right: J. C. Cloutier, Michelle Taransky, and Clark Coolidge.

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J. C. Cloutier, Michelle Taransky, and Clark Coolidge joined Al Filreis to talk about Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight, a sprawling work of prose poetry consuming forty pages of the Library of America Kerouac: Collected Poems. A recording of Kerouac performing the first page is available here. His model was Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Up late in the Low East Side, he listened for sounds coming through a tenement window from the court below and made words of them. Such making is the plot of the book. The effort sometimes results in what Clark Coolidge has called “babble flow.” Old Angel Midnight is an interlinguistic record of voices augmented by “neologisms, mental associations, puns and wordmixes” and “nonlanguages.”

May 15, 2018

Crowdsourced close reading: Four members of the ModPo community discuss Clark Coolidge's (and Charlie Parker's) 'Blues for Alice'

Al Filreis

Anika Lani and Raymond Maxwell during the November 1, 2015 discussion for ModPo

One of many collaborations you’ll find in ModPo’s collection of crowdsourced close readings: Raymond Maxwell, Colleen Knight, Anika Lani, and Mark Snyder meet by GoogleHangout to discuss Clark Coolidge’s “Blues for Alice” (in the context of Charlie Parker and more): link to YouTube. (Note that the discussion starts at 5:35.) If you are enrolled in ModPo (free; enroll here), go to the ModPo CCCR (“Community Crowdsourced Close Readings”) syllabus here.

'Reading List' 2016

Pierre Joris

I was asked to write this piece in late December for the January issue of the Harriet blog The Reading List, a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog, a

'It felt like many lifetimes'

The last issue of Angel Hair

Laura Sims

Angel Hair 6, cover art by George Schneeman

“Only three years had passed,” Lewis Warsh writes of publishing the journal Angel Hair, “but it felt like many lifetimes.” By 1969, when the last issue of Angel Hair appeared, Warsh and Waldman had begun publishing books--mainly because many of their poet friends needed publishers for their book-length collections, but also because The World, a new magazine published by the Poetry Project, was covering much of the same ground as Angel Hair. “I also felt,” Warsh says, “that we had made our point in trying to define a poetry community without coastal boundaries--a community based on a feeling of connectedness that transcended small aesthetic differences, all the usual traps that contribute to a blinkered pony vision of the world.”

Poetic protocols

An interview with Craig Dworkin

James La Marre

Craig Dworkin

Note: Craig Dworkin, author of Parse (Atelos, 2008), No Medium (MIT Press, 2013), and founding senior editor of Eclipse sat down with me on July 21, 2015 for a conversation in Salt Lake City as part of the one on one podcast series.

January 5, 2016

Clark Coolidge's cave art

Rachael M. Wilson

Clark Coolidge, <a href="https://media.sas.upenn.edu/jacket2/pdf/Coolidge_Knox_Cave_Sketch_Map.jpg">“Knox Cave: Sketch-Map By Clark Coolidge (NSS 1294)” [click for larger image],</a> June 1956. Image courtesy of Clark Coolidge and 'The Northeastern Caver.' — Clark Coolidge, “Knox Cave: Sketch-Map By Clark Coolidge (NSS 1294)” [click for larger image], June 1956. Image courtesy of Clark Coolidge and 'The Northeastern Caver.'

Face an inch from the earth, fingers
ground down clenched into it.
Crawling, try to push the
earth off me so I can stand
away from it.
— Clark Coolidge and Philip Guston, Baffling Means

October 30, 2015

Whelm lessons (PoemTalk #60)

Clark Coolidge, "Blues for Alice"

PoemTalk

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Whelm lessons (PoemTalk #60)

Clark Coolidge, 'Blues for Alice'

PoemTalk

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Brian Reed (in from Seattle), Maria Damon (Minnesota), and Craig Dworkin (Utah) joined Al Filreis at the Writers House (Philadelphia) in a rare and — we think — rather fluid convergence of poetic minds prepped to figure out how to talk about an instance of verse bebop. The bop was Charlie Parker’s, as a model for languaged sound (by poet Clark Coolidge), and the template song was “Blues for Alice” (Coolidge’s poem uses the title), and among the possible Alices are Alice Coltrane, Alice Notley, and Alice in Wonderland. We speculate about Alice Coltrane and Alice in Wonderland, but as for Notley: Brian Reed finds evidence that Coolidge meant to dedicate his poem version of the standard bop dedication indeed to Notley. This leads Maria Damon to wonder about all these women dedicatees – these recipients or objects of blues syllabics — in light of such strong male performative struggles, or attempts to “get in on the try,” managed by creative men: Coolidge and Parker, or course, but perhaps Ted Berrigan too, and surely also Jack Kerouac, whose bop-inspired babble flow is very much part of the PoemTalk conversation. The key source for Coolidge’s working out of Kerouac is his important 1995 article published in American Poetry Review on Kerouac’s babble flow and his improvisation generally.

December 16, 2012

Crystal gazing

Clark Coolidge's 'Crystal Text'

Jason Morris

“That mind artifact is mutable, thank the lord” — Clark Coolidge[1]

A few facts about crystals:

Once only mined (mind), most quartz crystal now is grown.

Quartz is the most common mineral on Earth.

Many crystals are piezoelectric: they emit a (thin) electric charge under pressure.

Crystals rotate the plane of polarized light.

October 3, 2012

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

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Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza