88 Sonnets - (Fence Modern Poets) by Clark Coolidge (Paperback)

About the Book

One of America's most idiosyncratic and quixotic poets returns to form with this collection of relentless, hilarious, and visionary sonnets.

Book Synopsis

Coolidge's embrace of the sonnet form - a continuation of the project begun in On the Nameways and Alien Tatters - is a gemlike amalgam of narrative urge, wacky name-dropping, and pure visuality. Coolidge's legendary proliferation - as many as 10 sonnets in a single day - marries the stunning variety of his intellect, on the mountaintop of formal inquiry.

Review Quotes

"Whilst reading 88 Sonnets I was reminded of Theodor Adorno's statement regarding "artists of the highest rank" for whom "the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality". Departing from the mundanity of day-to-day life, Coolidge invites his readers to traverse a landscape that has grown unfamiliar. Reality bends in "A Crystal Saw", as "rocks ... pop like bulbs". Yet despite the weirdness of this event, the possibility of these rocks popping suddenly seems as plausible as rocks plopping like raindrops."-Maya Osborn, The Quietus

"Through the music of their phrasing, Coolidge's sonnets push us to feel the intense but fleeting pleasures in those ephemeral utterances that, while apprehended, cannot always be fully understood. Like the alienated majesty of chitchat overheard from passersby coming back to you as your own best thoughts."-Tim Wood, Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing

"It would be reductive to say that Coolidge is merely "at play" in this latest collection of jazzy and frenetic sonnets-though playfulness is certainly one of the many characteristics of these poems; his dissociative leaps and cast of imaginary friends are also an argument for allowing the imagination to roam freely and be followed."-Publishers Weekly

"Clark Coolidge writes of finding in Jack Kerouac's writing "a speed of pick-up on the fly that includes so much, a poet's energies to make of every thought of the world a great ringing edifice," which aptly describes Coolidge's own work as well: an immense body of work with few precedents in modern literature save possibly the attention to the particularity of things in William Carlos Williams, the musicality of language explored by Louis Zukofsky, and the voluminous mind-and-syntax research conducted by Gertrude Stein."-Tom Orange, Jacket2

About the Author

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. His primary literary influences are Rilke, Beckett, and Kerouac, but jazz, geology, and painting also play a large part. This poetic purist shares with many avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s the belief that art is discovery, and so creates an exploratory 'improvisational momentum' in its composition which aims to 'tell the story that has never been thought before' in a writing which is itself the primary focus, rather than its subject matter. The author of more than 20 books of verse and prose, including Own Face, At Egypt, The Crystal Text, The Maintains, Solution Passage, and Mine: One That Enters the Stories, he is also the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), 2010.