A renewed interest

Tom Orange

Clark Coolidge, A Book Beginning What And Ending Away Clark Coolidge, 88 Sonnets Clark Coolidge, The Act of Providence

A renewed interest in Clark Coolidge’s work has, I think, been sparked by recent publications: The Act of Providence (Combo Books, 2010), a booklength poem on his Rhode Island home town, and two titles from Fence Books — a collection of sonnets, and his mammoth prose performance work from the 1970s (never before published in its entirety and hence giving it a near-mythic status among many of his readers), A Book Beginning What And Ending Away, which the publisher calls “a missing treasure from one of the great ages of American experimental literature.”

I am currently revising a book-length study of Coolidge’s early work (1962–1978); the majority of my posts will likely come out of this material, but I’ll also be sorting and sifting through his several dozens of collections that have come out since then. Anything like a complete survey of his work will inevitably elude us, particularly since his considerable unpublished work at least equals and probably exceeds, in terms of sheer page count, the published work. I’ll be trying out a variety of reading strategies that I think propose themselves when facing such a vast and variegated body of works, particularly one that resists that standard academic work of close readings for paraphrasable content. My hope is that these commentaries will prove equally useful to those both familiar and relatively new to Coolidge’s writing.

January 30, 2014

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Clark Coolidge writes of finding in Jack Kerouac's writing "a speed of pick-up on the fly that includes so much, a poet's energies to make of every thought of the world a great ringing edifice," which aptly describes Coolidge's own work as well: an immense body of work with few precedents in modern literature save possibly the attention to the particularity of things in William Carlos Williams, the musicality of language explored by Louis Zukofsky, and the voluminous mind-and-syntax research conducted by Gertrude Stein. Because his poetry tends to defy traditional reading and interpretive strategies, and because the vast majority of his books have been published with small presses in print runs of under 1000 copies (often fewer), Coolidge’s poetry is highly regarded in some circles while remaining virtually unknown in many.

Over the next few months I'll be writing for Jacket2, with a primary focus on Coolidge’s poetry. For over fifty years unabated, Coolidge’s work continues to demonstrate the workings of a “myriad-filled and ceaselessly sending” mind (what he describes finding in Jack Kerouac's work) that reflects, refracts and riffs on the stuff of the world with a singularly sustained attention and momentum that engages and challenges even his most dedicated readers. While his poetry shares affinities with the Beat, Black Mountain and New York school poetries staked out in Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, it also explores properties of language other than denotative reference — such as sound, rhythm, texture, and relation — in ways that proved highly generative for the so-called “Language Poets” who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tom Orange

BIO: I have adjuncted, mostly part-time, in the English and Writing Programs at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, Vanderbilt University, The George Washington University and Georgetown University since 2000. Upon returning to Cleveland, Ohio during the 2008 recession, my primary creative energies have been spent in the free improv and experimental music scenes: curating and performing in shows widely and in various working contexts and friendships, and hosting the weekly freeform radio program, “The Brewing Luminous,” on WCSB 89.3FM Cleveland, where I am also Jazz Director. Additionally, since 2009 I have helped curate and co-host regular monthly visual art exhibits and poetry events at Brandt Gallery, and with other organizations (SPACES Gallery, CWRU) on a more ad hoc basis.

My most recent critical non-fiction publication, an essay contribution on the reclusive Cleveland octegenarian African American experimental poet Russell Atkins, offers an ecopoetical consideration of the social safety-net for artists in an era of rapid transformation, with suggested future directions (Pleiades Press Unsung Masters Series, 2013). I'm also revising my doctoral dissertation, that I've worked at on-and-off since 2000, into a book-length study of Clark Coolidge's early poetry (1962-1978).

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Posts

A renewed interest

Where to begin even?

Discovering Coolidge (part one)

Discovering Coolidge (part two)

A passage solution: Coolidge's 'The Lid'

Joglars and post-New American Poetry

Joglars and Coolidge's Poetics: From sound to sense

Joglars and Symbolic Capital

A great ringing edifice

A renewed interest