Where to begin even?

Tom Orange

Clark Coolidge, Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric When first encountering the work of a prolific author with a fifty-year career, timing is everything. The end pages of Clark Coolidge's A Book Beginning What And Ending Away, his mammoth prose performance work from the 1970s never before published in its entirety until Fence Books brought it out last year, list 41 other published books of poetry dating back to 1966's Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric, along with a jaw-dropping 29 other unpublished collections.

Where to begin even? In many ways the answer is pre-determined: many readers will start with whatever collections happen to be in print and available at any given time. For Coolidge as with any prolific author, this poses a challenge: with the exception of his early collection Space (Harper & Row 1970), virtually all of Coolidge's books have been published by small presses in print runs of under 1000 copies (often fewer). Save the occasional reprint, once such books (often quickly) go out of print they risk being eclipsed by whatever newer publications emerge.

Eclipsearchive.org In the early 2000s, Craig Dworkin's online Eclipse Project began (and continues today) a great service, making full-text PDF scans of rare and out-of-print experimental poetry titles available for reading and downloading. Before this or the emergence of an online used book vendor like abebooks.com, one would have needed access to either a university library with an extensive small-press poetry collection or, barring that, interlibrary loan.

This was my own experience coming to and discovering Coolidge's poetry in the mid-to-late 1990s, which begs another question: how did I get into Clark Coolidge's poetry in the first place? I'll tell this story in my next post.

February 4, 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.