The Crystal Text

(Paperback)

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Clark Coolidges book-length meditation on a crystallong considered a masterpiece of American avant-garde poetryreturns in a new edition.

For [Coolidge], the crystal becomes a magic mirror that transforms the questioners own visage into an oracular mask, mouthing riddles and giving back the questions themselves as mirrorreversed answers.Andrew Joron, author ofTrance Archive: New and Selected Poems

No other poet ever has so exquisitely, and sometimes also turbulently, written sheer sonic wonder into poetry.Lyn Hejinian, author of My Life and My Life in the Nineties

In the summer of 1982, Clark Coolidge received an unexpected gift of a crystal; small, clear, entirely unexceptional, the crystal nonetheless provoked the poet into writing what has long been considered his masterpiece, The Crystal Text (1986). A durational poem composed over the course of 10 months, in daybook-like entries of varying length, The Crystal Text is multifaceted and elusive, constantly interrogating itself. Is it a meditation on its titular object like Keatss Urn or a radical investigation of the limits of language as a signifying system Is the poet channeling the crystal to access its message or is the crystal channeling the poet, drawing language from him to fill its colorless emptiness Is it dictation or improvisation Is the poem a record of its own crystalline growth or does it capture the process of consciousness itself

The Crystal Text refuses to resolve the questions it raises but rather inhabits its various possibilities simultaneously, resulting in one of the major works of late 20th century American avant-garde poetry. This new edition includes a preface by poet and scholar Peter Gizzi and an afterword in which Coolidge discusses the text with poet Jason Morris and City Lights editor Garrett Caples.

Associated with the New York School and subsequently inspiring the Language Poets, Coolidge remains one of the most singular and original American poets of our time.

Reviews

Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde.Peter Gizzi, author ofArcheophonics

A long-time master of the jazzy long work.Bernadette Mayer, author ofWorks and Days

"[I]f one merely lies open to it, Coolidge's arresting words will sink in and provide a seldom experienced refreshment. This is still true and the receding monumentality of his landscape enterprise is fuller today than ever before. We are lucky to live in the world he chooses to reflect back at us."John Ashbery, author ofSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

In poem after poem he produces lines of abstract, bright, musical phrasingMichael Leddy, World Literature Today

An inexhaustible writer capable of taking a subject, any subject, and improvising endless bebop glissandos around it.Eliot Weinberger, author ofKarmic Traces: 1993-1999

Clark Coolidge is unquestionably among the finest and most legendary American poets of our time.Caesura

Nothing can prepare you for the experience of reading Clark Coolidges poetry. You can listen to Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, and the Rova Quartet; you can read the Beats, and examine every Philip Guston painting; you can go spelunking and spend days staring at rock structures. You can even memorize every word of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett and recite it all as a soundtrack to a black-and-white cowboy movie. These may contextualize some of the elements in Coolidges work, but they will not adequately equip you for the heady mixture of intellectual pleasure, semantic frustration, and visceral musicality that Coolidges work is likely to provoke.Jake Marmer, Hyperallergic

Coolidge subjects the comforting syntax of traditional lyric to a radical torque as a means of discovering new possibilities of song.Aldon L. Neilson, Pacific Coast Philology

Author Bio

Originally from Providence, Rhode Island,Clark Coolidgeis the author of more than fifty books of poetry, includingA Book Beginning What and Ending Away, Selected Poems: 1962-1985, The Land of All TimeandTo the Cold Heart. In 2011, he editedPhilip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversationsfor University of California Press. Initially a drummer, he was a member of David Meltzers Serpent Power in 1967 and Mix group in 19931994. More recently, Coolidge has performed duos with Thurston Moore (Among the Poetry Stricken, on Fast Speaking Music) and free improv with Ouroboros. He now lives in Petaluma, California.

Peter Gizzi is the author of many books of poetry, including In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 19872011. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He lives in Melrose, Massachusetts.

Jason Morris was born and raised in Vermont. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Low Life (Bird & Beckett Books, 2021); Different Darknesses (FMSBW, 2019); Levon Helm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Presse, 2010). He lives in San Francisco, California.