Overview

Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form - a continuation of the project begun in On the Nameways and Alien Tatters - is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation - as many as 10 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 ARCANE HEMISPHERES Something is wrong with the literature of this blood maybe a tool baron? help must be brought to light this legend take the taxis away clear the blocks I will have all flesh riven gestural lengths of shadow and echo bulk the Armbruster is the name of the monster this time but I don't anymore take it that anything! the vestibules beyond the outer rooms will tell the tale Uncle Cecropio you may dust my broom palest crystal master what is dead must remain beyond the alternate fleshlike regions let it go Artoo will find us out heard a cry in the mirror located in the funnies but so graceless in class the whole night shines a brass hole in my tongue

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"""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"

Author Information

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. His primary literary influences are Rilke, Beckett, and Kerouac, but jazz, geology, and painting also play a large part. This poetic purist shares with many avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s the belief that art is discovery, and so creates an exploratory 'improvisational momentum' in its composition which aims to 'tell the story that has never been thought before' in a writing which is itself the primary focus, rather than its subject matter. The author of more than 20 books of verse and prose, including Own Face, At Egypt, The Crystal Text, The Maintains, Solution Passage, and Mine: One That Enters the Stories, he is also the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), 2010.

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