Clark Coolidge


Clark Coolidge is an American poet.

Background

As a teenager, Coolidge attended Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island. Coolidge briefly attended Brown University, where his father founded and taught in the music department, before dropping out and traveling to Los Angeles.

Career

Coolidge's friendship with Michael Palmer brought the two poets west, first to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963, and then to the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1964. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. For a while, he shared an apartment with Aram Saroyan, and the two poets had a mutual influence on one another. His work was published in multiple issues of 0 to 9 magazine, a 1960s mimeographed publication which experimented with language and meaning-making. In 1967, Coolidge moved to San Francisco and joined David Meltzer's band, The Serpent Power, as a drummer. He became close with other San Francisco poets of the period as well, including Philip Whalen, who was an important influence and friend. In 1969, Coolidge produced 17 one-hour programs of experimental audio pieces by himself and others for KPFA, which establish his interest in the sonic properties and materiality of language. He would later elaborate this in a statement he provided for Paul Carroll’s anthology The Young American Poets: “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency / Opacity.”
Often associated with the Language School his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies, Coolidge often finds correspondence in his work.

Personal life

Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge, San Francisco, Rome, and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

Publications

  • Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric,.
  • Clark Coolidge,.
  • ING,.
  • To Obtain the Value of the Cake Measure From Zero: A Play in One Act,.
  • Space,.
  • The So: Poems 1966,.
  • Tonto Lavoris,.
  • Suite V,.
  • The Maintains,.
  • Polaroid,.
  • Quartz Hearts,.
  • Own Face,.
  • Smithsonian Depositions & Subject to a Film,.
  • A Geology,.
  • American Ones,.
  • Research,.
  • Mine: The One That Enters the Stories,.
  • Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981,.
  • The Crystal Text,.
  • Melencolia,.
  • At Egypt,.
  • Mesh,.
  • Sound as Thought: Poems 1982-1984,.
  • Supernatural Overtones,.
  • Odes of Roba,.
  • The Book of During,.
  • Baffling Means: Writings/Drawings,.
  • Lowell Connector: Lines & Shots from Kerouac's Town,.
  • On the Pumice of Morons,.
  • The ROVA Improvisations,.
  • Registers ,.
  • For Kurt Cobain,.
  • Keys to the Caverns,.
  • The Names,.
  • Book of Stirs,.
  • Now It's Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds,.
  • Bomb,.
  • Alien Tatters,.
  • On The Nameways, Volume 1,.
  • On The Nameways, Volume 2,.
  • Far Out West,.
  • On the Slates,.
  • Hoppy Poems,.
  • Calmer or Mer,.
  • Counting on Planet Zero,.
  • The Cave,.
  • The Act of Providence,.
  • This Time We Are Both,.
  • The Human Bond ,.
  • A Book Beginning What and Ending Away,.
  • 88 Sonnets,.
  • Life Forms Here,.
  • Selected Poems: 1962-1985,
  • Poet,.
  • The Land of All Time,.
  • To The Cold Heart,.
  • The Crystal Text, republished by City Lights Publishers. 11/14/2023.
  • Radium Out Cold,.

    As editor

  • Heart of the Breath: Poems 1979-1992 by Jim Brody. Hard Press Editions, 1996
  • Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010