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The Crystal Text

The Crystal Text

by Clark Coolidge

Preface by Peter Gizzi

Afterword by Jason Morris and Garrett Caples

Published by: City Lights Publishers

Imprint: City Lights Publishers

192 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback
9780872869042
Published: November 2023

$18.95

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Praise
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Clark Coolidge’s book-length meditation on a crystal—long considered a masterpiece of American avant-garde poetry—returns in a new edition.
“For [Coolidge], the crystal becomes a magic mirror that transforms the questioner’s own visage into an oracular mask, mouthing riddles and giving back the questions themselves as mirrorreversed answers.”—Andrew Joron, author of Trance 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 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? What is the source of the spontaneously arising words the poet records? Is it dictation or improvision? 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.

Originally from Providence, Rhode Island, Clark Coolidge is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, including Space, Solution Passage, The Crystal Text, At Egypt, Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds, The Act of Providence, 88 Sonnets, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away, Selected Poems, 1962-1985, Life Forms Here, and Poet. In 2011 he edited Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations for University of California Press. Initially a drummer, he was a member of David Meltzer’s Serpent Power in 1967 and Mix group in 1993–1994. More recently, Coolidge has performed duos with Thurston Moore (Among the Poetry Stricken, on Fast Speaking Music) and free improv with Ouroboros. His most recent publications include The Land of All Time and To the Cold Heart. He now lives in Petaluma, California.
Peter Gizzi is the author of many books of poetry, including In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011. 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.
Peter Gizzi is the author of many books of poetry, including In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011. 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.
Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He is also the co-editor of the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, editor of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose by Philip Lamantia, and author of the poetry collection Lovers of Today (2021). He lives in San Francisco, CA.

“Clark Coolidge is a one-man avant-garde.”—Peter Gizzi, author of Archeophonics
“A long-time master of the jazzy long work.”—Bernadette Mayer, author of Works 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 of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
“In poem after poem he produces lines of abstract, bright, musical phrasing”—Michael Leddy, World Literature Today
“An inexhaustible writer capable of taking a subject, any subject, and improvising endless bebop glissandos around it.”—Eliot Weinberger, author of Karmic 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 Coolidge’s 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 Coolidge’s work, but they will not adequately equip you for the heady mixture of intellectual pleasure, semantic frustration, and visceral musicality that Coolidge’s 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

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