The way today is going to work, or this hour or so,
is that we're going to begin by just having a conversation.
I'm going to have Clark, as he just said
to me, answer for his sins.
And then we'll open it up to all of you,
to ask questions about Clark's work.
This evening, of course, Clark Coolidge
is going to be reading for the Intermezzo and POG series,
and for Poetry Center, down at the Tucson
Temple of Arts and Music.
That will be a $5 suggested donation at the door.
And of course, if you're a student, particularly
a student of mine, just tell them
and we can figure something out, if $5 is a problem,
but it shouldn't be.
In addition to a Coolidge, we will also
have Teré Fowler-Chapman, who will be reading,
and the pianist Michael Dauphinais,
who will play for us some Morton Feldman pieces,
some very short, precise Morton Felton pieces.
So bring your listening ears.
Be ready.
In addition to that, we have organized a musical evening
on Wednesday night at Charles Alexander's Chax Press,
downtown on 7th Avenue, and that will be happening at 7 o'clock.
And we've organized it with a few local musicians that
span the range from avant garde electric musicians to low fi,
improv noise musicians, and Clark will
be headlining as a drummer.
So I hope that you all are able to make some of these events.
Another event that I want to tell you
about that's coming up recently is that POG is having a--
POG, which is the poetry organizing group in town that
helped bring Clark to campus, is having a holiday celebration
on December 10th at 7 o'clock at a new--
an amazing gallery called Exploded View,
which is a great new micro cinema and video art
gallery, here in town.
So be thinking about that for the future.
I wanted to thank again, and make sure
that I thanked both POG and the organizers
for POG, including Charles Alexander, Tenney
Nathanson, Sam Ace, who are in the audience.
And I also wanted to make sure to thank Poetry Center, Tyler
Meier here, the executive director, helped
make this all possible, to bring Clark to campus.
I also, of course, want to thank the English Department
and particularly, our new esteemed head, Lee Medovoi,
who is really helping us create more of a community that
can bring in new and amazing artists
to come talk to all of you.
I think that's-- if I've missed anyone, tell me,
and I will jump up and say and apologize for my sins.
So, I wanted it to begin--
and I hope that this is acceptable for someone
who's introducing to read.
And I read this, perhaps, as a way to both
put Coolidge's words into the air.
But also to have each of you think
about the possibility of a poetics implicit in a poetry.
"On Induction of the Hand" from Solution Passage.
"Perhaps I've got to write better longer,
thinking of it as grown up out of the same singular lost.
The pattern is in or is it under the hands.
Better be in or it's gone from the brain, choking on airless.
The outside leaves stain the sands of my sleep,
even through glass and alerted in this very chair.
As I thought, I snoozed by the strings of this world.
What world?
Evening of a syntax brought full over the mounds of these.
What lives but hopes.
There is a wrench that a certain staring at while balancing
humours we call words in state pours wings of edgy fondness,
bound useless in calm of lucidity down the chute
of the sentence.
So-called duty roster activity when typing at the seeming
to be nodded at by trees.
They yearn?
Saying that I am out there.
With a lute, I hope carries me swaying back
to here by means of them there.
A tree could even be a monad to this use.
Though never is it held in my heed to be even.
I let myself off myself never.
No dope again, trembling my attic wires loose
from their packets.
Containments of such that I never think them sendable.
A poet used the word lozenge, he didn't write it.
Some other and more careless scribe
wanted me to write one of those but the hell
with what lies off him.
I remain stormy in my paradise."
And there's more.
So Clark Coolidge, to my left, was born
in Providence, Rhode Island.
He's a poet and a drummer, a geologist, and a cave explorer.
He's the author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose.
From Flag Flutter and US Electric in 1966,
to the recent 88 Sonnets and Book Beginning What
and Ending Away, both brought out by Fence,
and Flag Flutter, it was originally
brought out by Aram Saroyan's Lines Books, back in 1966.
The titles of other works by Coolidge,
which would be too long of a list to fully enumerate here,
could include, The Bond Sonnets, ING, Space, Polaroid, The
Maintains, Own Face, at Egypt, Solution Passage, This Time
We Are Both, American Ones: Noise
And Its Presentiments, Sound as Thought,
On The Nameways and The Act of Providence.
It's nice to read all those names,
they give a good sense, even from the poetry.
Coolidge has also written a book on jazz and Kerouac,
called Now It's Jazz.
And he's also edited a collection of the writings
of the painter Philip Guston.
In addition to being a prolific producer of words,
Coolidge has also collaborated as both word organizer
and drummer with a variety of fellow poets, visual artists,
and musicians.
He was in the band Serpent Power,
with fellow poet David Meltzer, in the late 1960s
in San Francisco.
He has collaborated with his close friend,
the composer, Alvin Curran.
He's produced tape experiments at Mills College
and produced a radio program called
Words, which is available online,
which you should all listen to.
17 hours of amazing interviews and programming.
And that interview, or that program
was itself, on words, tech sounds, and music.
He's worked with Bernadette Mayer,
with Michael Palmer, other poets.
In the 1970s, along with Bernadette Mayer,
he helped compose a work called "The Cave Work",
which is a collaborative attempt to write out the everything
work, everything that comes.
He has also recently collaborated
with Thurston Moore, in a series of musical and poetic projects.
If it's not clear already, Clark Coolidge is busy.
He's a busy writer, reader, and collaborator,
but most importantly, to my ear, Coolidge
is a voracious listener.
From the micro tensions between single words or even
single syllables, like ing, and word parts,
to the waves, the huge waves of language noise,
inundating us in his longer works,
like the 600 page, Book Beginning What and Ending Away.
He attends to the atmosphere of voices and noises
that surround and define our being in this world.
Words as sounds, sounds as words,
Coolidge asks us, not only to hear language again,
to listen again, in a new and strange way.
He also asks us to attune our listening in new,
not to ignore the materials that compose our lives as speakers,
communicators, and political beings.
One of Coolidge's central concerns
is to develop forms of arrangement,
crystallized layers of word pressure and organization,
that open out beyond the classic lyric poetics of expression.
Rather than a spontaneous overflow of emotion,
we have the oozing, pressurized, pulsing, lava flows
of language.
In his work, we hear collective noisy murmur,
improvisational rhythm and surprise.
In his work that challenges our conception
of what poetry and language is or could be,
and as Coolidge says himself in another poem from Solution
Passage, poetry is strong, stronger than sense,
longer than tense.
More than a habit of wrist, a blister
of finding, a throat to go.
It lands me in blind glance, it hovers my solace.
Welcome, Clark Coolidge.