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"Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde."—Peter Gizzi
Clark Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation—as many as ten sonnets in a single day—marries the stunning variety of his intellect on the mountaintop of formal inquiry.
"LIBRARY OF HAY"
So slow death oft the onyx dolls
each in its own lab colors rollicking encores
who's there? do you want your museum
room infiltrated? only the singing parts
terrible loss of air raid powder
entanglements poled on kapok
the last to be heard? this ploy of dolls
irradiated heads and curls of coffin wood
death is always plural here? stolid
anyway someway still enters the frontway
through the water door to Manikin Lake
the throttles held down there you went to
hair school against my wisdom thus the
remnants spelled out there then coded there
Clark Coolidge was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Though associated with the Language Poets, his work predates the movement and despite close contact with many of them he remains distinct from any movement, literary or political. The author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, he is also the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations.
"Whilst reading 88 Sonnets I was reminded of Theodor Adorno's statement regarding "artists of the highest rank" for whom "the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality". Departing from the mundanity of day-to-day life, Coolidge invites his readers to traverse a landscape that has grown unfamiliar. Reality bends in "A Crystal Saw", as "rocks ... pop like bulbs". Yet despite the weirdness of this event, the possibility of these rocks popping suddenly seems as plausible as rocks plopping like raindrops."-Maya Osborn, The Quietus
"Through the music of their phrasing, Coolidge's sonnets push us to feel the intense but fleeting pleasures in those ephemeral utterances that, while apprehended, cannot always be fully understood. Like the alienated majesty of chitchat overheard from passersby coming back to you as your own best thoughts."-Tim Wood, Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing
"It would be reductive to say that Coolidge is merely "at play" in this latest collection of jazzy and frenetic sonnets-though playfulness is certainly one of the many characteristics of these poems; his dissociative leaps and cast of imaginary friends are also an argument for allowing the imagination to roam freely and be followed."-Publishers Weekly
"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."-Tom Orange, Jacket2