88 Sonnets: Poems

by Clark Coolidge

"Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde."—Peter Gizzi

Clark Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation—as many as ten sonnets in a single day—marries the stunning variety of his intellect on the mountaintop of formal inquiry.

"LIBRARY OF HAY"

So slow death oft the onyx dolls
each in its own lab colors rollicking encores
who's there? do you want your museum
room infiltrated? only the singing parts
terrible loss of air raid powder
entanglements poled on kapok
the last to be heard? this ploy of dolls
irradiated heads and curls of coffin wood
death is always plural here? stolid
anyway someway still enters the frontway
through the water door to Manikin Lake
the throttles held down there you went to
hair school against my wisdom thus the
remnants spelled out there then coded there

Clark Coolidge was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Though associated with the Language Poets, his work predates the movement and despite close contact with many of them he remains distinct from any movement, literary or political. The author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, he is also the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations.

Genres: Poetry

96 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

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kick me in the nuts I don’t give a fuck, I like poetry that doesn’t make what many people call “sense”. This for example:

Where’s My Honey

A thermal city plumb
center of Magic Middle
I saw the flash ---- there’s a hole
in the Volcano’s fur apron only visible at night
and even then ---- Tesla had a hold on the world
just a brief time ---- he heated everything
usually his first move ---- a result still with us
Doctor Day is here ---- coils of dope ---- gathers of wither
received a tiny postcard of a playing card
held all the royal secrets in those pastilles
get right down on the floor of the machine to see for yourself
and who did I find sitting in my chambers? ---- Lord
Coldmouth ---- Allardyce to you ducks
I live in the place of infinite cats and hats

Why do I like it? Because it makes sense! It is a series of verbal punches of thought, not perhaps adding up to a whole and complete thought, but still like a sequence of snapshots, often overlaid, of a mind working at what it does best – crafting poetry out of sensible mind matter.

Like many of the poems in this collection there is a sense of disaster and destruction in it (volcanoes feature prominently), and death (Coolidge is now 73 and these are recent poems). But there’s also an application of attention, a staring at details, that briefly redeems and gives a meaning to live, to really live, and so spontaneous singing/sonneteering is Coolidge’s answer to the age old woes of the world. Old age? No problem! Drop your carking cares and sing, attack the raw matter, make shapes, make songs, get loopy! And the strange thing is... this "carelessness" and youthful spontaneity give these poems a mythical depth almost as a by-product.

Coolidge’s aesthetic in this book is an improvisational aesthetic, and like all master improvisers a lifetime of practice and studied improvisation and the numerous mind routes and patterns it creates lie behind it, and there is an entirely appropriate (and exhilarating) randomness, of off-the-cuffness, in the poems that only enhance the themes expressed within them: a merging of style and substance.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorry for this again Clark, but the perpetual jazz comparison makes some sense. All those metaphors it shares with writing—phrasing, line, breath, idea—fit here too, where the semantic unit is closer to tootle than statement, and even in the venerable box of the sonnet the poems feel like records of improvisatory blowing. I know you’re a Konitz guy, but the group I thought of reading these was more Fat Albert’s junkyard band, tuning the cultural detritus of bedsprings and oil drums and radiator bars to a music of perpetual delight and surprise. You might remember how the cartoons cut to the same animation loops whenever the gang played, and there’s some of that here, too—a repetition of tricks which, however inventive and various, wear just a little after 88 takes. But who says you have to read 1 through 88 at a go? Just a few sets at a time, 2 drink minimum, and it’s “substance tootie sort of thoughtless durable” like nobody’s business but yours.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I didn’t know whether to jerk off or kill someone,” “To know death is to fuck life” and other lines like that float in the surreal soup of Clark Coolidge’s poetry—and if that wasn’t cool enough, he’s also a jazz drummer.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm lying a little by marking this book as "read", because I'm only halfway or maybe two-thirds of the way through it. However, I have honestly gone as far as I'm going to go. I really, really wanted to like this book. I love sonnets! (I write sonnets!) But I think I'm too much of a traditionalist to fully appreciate this collection, in that I like my sonnets to rhyme (or at least have some kind of consistent musicality) and have at least the skeleton of an argument or narrative to hang their hats on. This is not to say that the sonnets in this book do not have any musicality or narrative. I suspect my lack of appreciation for their experimental pleasures is due to my failing as a reader. I have not been in a very focused, poetry-honed frame of mind lately and so maybe it's a matter of unfortunate timing. I will admit that the more I read these poems, the more they taught me how to read them. I think they are well-crafted poems overall, and the 2-star rating is totally based on personal taste. A different reader might really enjoy this collection.

[Louis Cabri]

Oh, these are terrific -- they're on it, the sonnet. Unlike CC's other sonnets I've seen, for instance those collected in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed Jeff Hilson) from the Bond series, in 88, the language is dialogic, plural, situated, something CC hasn't tried too often. He uses spacing as a grammatical conjunction, and it's delightful to leap from one phrase to another over the spacings and the line-turns. And you get a movement to an end each time, to a resolution, on account of the closed form chamber (the sonnet room). Edging toward Greenwaldian pump-phrase pragmatics.

[Ash Ponders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ugh. Hard poetry. Is anything more exhausting? Is anything more able to rob you of a sense of accomplishment after you've worked through it? Finishing A Salvage after 87 other sonnets, I feel nothing like victory, just the lingering feelings and ephemeral mouth feel Coolidge deigned to share.

Anyway. I think this was good. I'm not sure. Probably. I get that feeling.