Coolidge, Clark

The Crystal Text

ISBN: 9780872869042
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2023. First Edition Thus. Softcover. “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. 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 Keats’s “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? The Crystal Text refuses to resolve such questions but rather inhabits both possibilities simultaneously” (from Back Cover). “The Crystal Text” by Clark Coolidge is without doubt a Poundian masterpiece of epic proportions. It should be read more like an essay than a poem, however; as it is essentially an instructive text, as much a rumination or representation of his learning about poetics up to that point as it is a “poem” in the typically perceived sense. It of course contains all the merits one might expect of poetry in the conventional sense; whether haikuistic “direct perception of an object” (to paraphrase Pound), or the melodiousness all have come to expect from Clark’s mastery of Kerouac’s “spontaneous bop prosody.” Yet its greatest strength is its wisdom, transferrable and recyclable to poets of tomorrow and today. Softcover original: First Edition Thus, preceded by the 1986 publication from The Figures, Great Barrington, First Printing (though not explicated as such on copyright page). In very fine condition, virtually as new with only slightest shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine-edge, else pristine. Very Fine. [Item #5904]

Price: $25.00