Description
Poetry. Foreword by Tom Orange. At over five hundred pages of sustained, exhilarating prose, this work reconciles the relentless iconoclasm of the language poets with Clark Coolidge's own deeply rooted theories of abstraction and musicality, yet remains astonishingly readable more than thirty years after Coolidge abandoned the project—planned to be more than one thousand pages—in 1980. An act of radical endurance, a resurrected classic.
"A modern-day Rosetta Stone, BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY bridges the wild conceptual experimentalism of the 1960s and the rigid, doctrine-driven personal politics of the 1970s and early 1980s Language poets, while illuminating the path toward a freeform, devastating 'point perspective lyric' that is Coolidge's operative method today."—Tom Orange
Why the same cave? It is continuous. The weight exists, a drill, and it is well. One bridge is older than the stream. Of indebtedness great ground now possess changes. Crack cavity in the sung Hallelujah Chorus. I took a drink, still older than unequivocally slabby. My sac deposit lies life size. The well we have is little more than this sheet-iron. The making system drapes the writer's contrast.
Author Bio
Clark Coolidge is the author of more than fifty books, including THE LAND OF ALL TIMES (Lithic Press, 2020), Space, Solution Passage, The Crystal Text, At Egypt, NOW IT's JAZZ: WRITINGS ON KEROUAC & THE SOUNDS (Living Batch Press, 1999), The Act of Providence, 88 SONNETS (Fence Books, 2012), A Book Beginning What And Ending Away, and most recently, Poet. Connected to both the Language movement and the New York School, his poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage, and generate, meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, "Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity." Initially a drummer, he was a member of David Meltzer's Serpent Power in 1967 and Mix group in 1993-94. More recently, Coolidge performed duos with Thurston Moore (Among The Poetry Stricken, on Fast Speaking Music) and free improv with Ouroboros (online).
Author City: Petaluma, CA USA