A Book Beginning What and Ending Away

by Clark Coolidge

"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 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. 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 of more than twenty books of poetry, Clark Coolidge has occupied a singular place in American letters since the mid-1960s. An unparalleled influence on the wider avant-garde—the Language Poets, the second and third generation New York School, and whole movements of visual artists, musicians, and linguists, Coolidge is from Providence, Rhode Island. Since 1997 he has lived in Petaluma, California.

Genres: Poetry

560 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 2012

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

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you dig Clark's work this book is another level beyond. Its a must for any Clark Coolidge nut. Get familiar with Clarks style it is not what most people can handle when sitting down to read. Most people would react to it as they would abstract expressionist art, "Where's the imagery in this stuff?" Clark is a true mad genius who is beyond image, concept, its something else and thats a lot of the fascination in reading this book, you get immersed in doing something with your mind almost nobody on the planet is doing. In a league with infinite books like Finnegans Wake, books that are so massive and dense they can never be exhausted. The book is a phenomenal treasury of one incredible sentence after another that loosely evolve and develop as the reader moves through the chapters entitled things like Dalí, Weathers, Beckette, The Caves. Each of the entitled chapters are interspersed with untitled chapters. And they are proper chapters, long chapters, not long poems. Clark's work gets classified as poetry I like to think of it as something else, its own thing in words. Interestingly the whole book kicks off with material dealing with Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, and one cave explorer and developer named Floyd Collins who became trapped and never got out of Mammoth Cave. It was a national drama to get Floyd out of the cave largely because of how radio had just started becoming a part of American life. Perhaps the whole book could be said to be a kind of Mammoth Cave. I have perhaps become like Floyd Collins, stuck in this Mammoth cave book never to re-emerge.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never finish this book. I can't even tell where I am in the book at any given time. But I will keep reading and reading.

[Ricardo]

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