Alien Tatters

by Clark Coolidge

Prose. Poetry. ALIEN TATTERS is a series of prose poem meditations in response to (someone's) sightings of UFOs and encounters with aliens. The writer has been/is being abducted. The writings are the situation's tatters, its tatterings. Inevitably funny (except perhaps to the true believer), the work is also sad and scary. Lights came. My god, blobs. A sneaky little rill. Bought them a box of shoes made of chocolate. Small silver wire, challenge kit. The Frenchman walks off into the noise with his girl. From the bottom of the craft, enough darkness to fill, replace all our missing nights?

Genres: Poetry

202 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

About the author

Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father taught in the music department. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. 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. Coolidge grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alien Tatters struts a lot of what I like and what I don’t about Clark Coolidge’s poetry. On the upside: phrasal purr as prime prosodic driver; goofy humor (“Then Zsa Zsa landed. Her message was for all mankind.”); a loose, unprecious feel for words as stuff to make sounds with; and an ear wide open to the oddball beauties of American vernacular, this time around via UFO abduction narratives, warped and tweaked to fit Coolidge’s home approach to language as friendly alien Other.

Over the course of 200 pages though, these same virtues tend to go slack. “Late” Coolidge especially can eat up a lot of runway getting its poetic planes into motion, and too often here the ascent doesn’t get much higher than a level skim. The tone flatlines, the jokes turn merely jokey, and the spacey conceit starts to seem like an excuse to overproduce, generating more or less interchangeable phrases long after the abduction idea’s been exhausted.

Still, in a way even this contributes to the overall effect: on every page a line pops out and shines from the mass, a lot like a poem does from everyday ambient language, or an earthling who’s been chosen for the mothership. I left the book thinking how the Abducted always come back to Earth in the end, take up their old jobs, and have nothing to tell their story with except the terrestrial language we all use already, their messages from the aliens’ world forced to meet the tropes and conventions of ours. And isn’t that, finally, the problem of poetry? Who else but Coolidge could find it here, in the “cool vile expanses” of American alien abduction fantasies?

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a UFO and abduction enthusiast and a fan of Coolidge's work I was bound to enjoy this one. I could hear echoes of first-hand abductee accounts, so I assume Coolidge used many of these as source material. Sometimes with him I think his poetry benefits from this interleaving of other sources, and I know he's done it before, but in this one it all just clicked. It added a layer of conventionanl verbiage, which combined with Coolidge's strange idiolect, created a text that really does sound at times like a transmission from elsewhere, or as he himself said, an attempt to speak the necessarily foreign language of any being who might be out there listening.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do make mind blowing music with non-lineated poetry. Quirky. Surreal. Playful. And so on . . .

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clark Coolidge in Alien Tatters argues that most of what we call "talent" is really just a ridiculous amount of boring repetition. I felt like it was half-baked in a few places, since some of the research gets stretched further than it should. But the chapter about the kid who practiced the same three chords for a year got me thinking about everything I quit the second it got hard. You won't buy every claim, but it definitely forces you to rethink the whole "naturally gifted" idea.

[Yousseif Abdellatif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look, Alien Tatters is loud, silly, and a little smarter than it looks. Clark Coolidge drops a washed-up magician, a runaway llama, and a very serious insurance adjuster into one chaotic road trip, and the scene where they try to talk their way out of a county fair security check made me spit out my drink. The humor wears thin in the last stretch. For readers who want a goofy, high-energy escape. Pass if you roll your eyes at absurdity.

[Tom Kenis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just added this book as 'finished' to my library.
Safe to say it's a lie. You can't actually 'finish' a Coolidge.
I'll probably just continue reading. And reading.
I attended 'The Burroughs Zone' at the Naropa Summer Writing Program this summer.
Clark read and talked Burroughs. Exuded him. There was the time when they were drinking together for the first time and This is my chance to ask him. Ask Burroughs. "What do you think of aliens? Is there something to it?" "Of course, what do you think Christianity is?" he is alleged to have said.
'Best of luck in Roswell!' he wrote in my copy of Alien Tatters. Never did see an alien. Plenty of people who behaved strangely though. And folks who've seen things they couldn't account for. Just like Coolidge. And just like me. By that I mean the book. I'm looking and looking, can't really account for it. There is rather more to this world than most people think.
Thanks Clark!
Tom

[Rupert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, rolling in the sweet arms of a master.