The Rova Improvisations

by Clark Coolidge

poems written to Rova Saxophone Quartet's works

Genres: Poetry

170 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

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]

I don't know that I care that Coolidge wrote the first half of this book while listening to recording of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, or that he wrote the second half as poem by poem improvisations on poems in the first half. I've never been able to actually see or hear these relations too much. But whatever he did or however he did it he managed to crank our some almost impenetrably abstract but incredibly interesting poems. There's still a "narrative"-type drive to the writing, but it's also the most purely abstractly "musical" (meaning organized by sound and rhythm and all that) of his writings. It actually reminds me more of some thorny modern composer (like Roger Sessions or Milton Babbit) than Rova.