Clark Coolidge’s book-length meditation on a crystal—long considered a masterpiece of American avant-garde poetry—returns in a new edition. “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 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? 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.

"Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde."--Peter Gizzi

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

"LIBRARY OF HAY"

"So slow death oft the onyx dolls
each in its own lab colors rollicking encores
who's there? do you want your museum
room infiltrated? only the singing parts
terrible loss of air raid powder
entanglements poled on kapok
the last to be heard? this ploy of dolls
irradiated heads and curls of coffin wood
death is always plural here? stolid
anyway someway still enters the frontway
through the water door to Manikin Lake
the throttles held down there you went to
hair school against my wisdom thus the
remnants spelled out there then coded there"

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. The author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, he is also the editor of "Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations."

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.