Hello, everybody.
I wanted to reiterate the thank yous again
to POG to Intermezzo to the Poetry Center.
And, of course, to Clark and Susan for being here.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
I also wanted to say thank you very
much to Teré and to Michael for such a--
setting up such an amazing evening.
So thank you very much, both of you.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'm paraphrasing here, I hope correctly, Teré, I
don't quite sound like what I think.
I think that could be a way to begin describing
Clark Coolidge's work.
I don't quite sound like what I think.
The poet and drummer, Clark Coolidge,
is responsible for what is perhaps my favorite sentence,
"putting back the rusty disk to cover any strata that
might be loose."
I'll say it again, "putting back the rusty disk
to cover any strata that might be loose."
That's from Smithsonian Depositions.
Structure and chaos, figure and ground, rock and loose strata,
rhythm and noise.
Coolidge makes work that lives within and confuses the space
between these dichotomies.
From his early work, drifting through the James Bond novels
and creating montage sonnets, to his recent place based project,
The Act of Providence, to the publication this year
of his long awaited long prose work A Book Beginning What
and Ending Away, Coolidge's work has endlessly
tracked the strange magnetisms, rhythmic stutters,
and sonic surprises of the English language.
His poetry makes us aware of all those things
that words have that we don't often hear, what he
himself has called a universe of qualities other than those
of descriptive relation.
Hardness, density, sound, shape, vector force, and degrees
of transparency, opacity.
Without giving up on words, Coolidge
retrieves sound as thought, as if this eminently useful thing
we call language could be turned on itself
and heard as the music that it is.
Perhaps, Coolidge's work seems to imply,
we are all musicians, improvisers
of the everyday in language.
World makers on a bebop line like this.
"But has come over popular on the Canarsie carbon
lines, a test to string it out between finger and trestle.
The windows are dimmed, felt in mint orange.
A train line your air car, but it sticks out along.
The schoolbook is lost behind the paintings.
And the merriness gone gorge.
Summer is a pant, a cup of Za-Rex thrown
back later in the bebop line.
I've got teeth, you've got."
From American Ones: Noise In Its Presentiments.
Clark Coolidge has published over 30 books
of poetry and prose, including Space, published by Harper Row.
This Time, We Are Both by Ugly Duckling Presse, Solution
Passage with Sun and Moon, Sound as Thought with Green Integer.
And most recently, A Book Beginning What
and Ending Away and 88 Sonnets, both with Fence Books.
A collaborator with Philip Guston, Bernadette Mayer,
Anne Waldman, David Meltzer, Thurston Moore, and the list
goes on and on.
Coolidge connects many threads of
contemporary American poetry.
From the New York School to today's experimental lyricists,
Coolidge is there as a powerful presence in both
using language as a critical tool, an aesthetic machine,
and, ultimately, as a saving grace.
Please welcome Clark Coolidge.
Thank you.