The Maintains

by Clark Coolidge

Genres: Poetry

98 pages

First published January 1, 1974

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

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

When manually entering bks here a text appears after the title's been typed in that reads: "The book you are adding may already exist in our database. If it appears below, please use that edition instead of adding a new one." & then it goes on to list the possibilities. Apparently, the way it works is that the system just throws up a bunch of titles that might have one word in common w/ what one's entered. Sometimes, it's even more abstract than that. This, of course, is a great way of automatically generating found poetry. At the bottom of this review are the 1st 10 possibilities that I was given. The 4th one is, apparently, a later edition of the same bk that I've created here. I didn't notice it in the midst of the other irrelevancies until I'd already created the edition of the bk I'm reviewing here. Most of the time w/ the bks I enter, all pre-existing entries are irrelevant & drastically different from what I'm writing about.

Anyway, the funny thing to me about this is that I was thinking about what I cd write further about why I like Coolidge's writing & I was thinking about the title: "THE MAINTAINS". I realized that just the title alone has a peculiarly stimulating effect for me. It cd be read as if it means that "the" (the article or simply "the" as itself, as an object) "maintains" ("maintains" something? "maintains" a function of definitive anchoring?) &/OR "THE MAINTAINS" as in a specific, definitive "maintains" - as if "maintains" is a noun instead of a verb. By beginning the title w/ the definitive article & following it w/ a word that's not usually a noun, Coolidge both creates something that seems to be a solid reference & simultaneously evades such solidity. So having the found poetry of GoodReads database irrelevant spin-offs seems like an appropriate way of nounifying verbosity. I like it.

This was probably my favorite Coolidge bk when I read it. It's written in stanzas w/ varying numbers of lines. The words are usually (always?) only 1 to 4 syllables long & I think of words as bricks again - as I did in relation to Alan Davies' writing. Maybe they're bricks of ice - will they ever melt? Do they melt in Coolidge's mouth when he reads them aloud?

It's a somewhat idiotic subcultural commonplace to say something like "You shd see that movie when you're tripping!" but I think of that here. What might seem incomprehensible in 'normal' states of mind might very well lock into place for a profound experience when in a state of expanded consciousness.

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[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on a PDF on the web. A classic book by CC.