Monday, June 10, 2013

Clark Coolidge Symposium at Université Paris Est Créteil Thursday 26 September & Friday 27 September

On Thursday 26 and Friday 27 September, we will be hosting a 2 day symposium on Clark Coolidge’s work at Université Paris Est Créteil, salle 117, Maison des Langues. How to get there? See here.

We will be meeting in the morning of September 26 at 10 am to prepare our sessions with Clark Coolidge. Clark Coolidge will be joining us at 2 pm on the 26th. He will also be with us all day on the 27th.


So far, we’ve tried to focus on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on the first day of the P&C symposia and on broader issues of poetics and practice-based criticism with the writer on the second day. But there’s no specific preconceived program for the 2 days of the symposium: as the previous sessions of the program have shown, it seems important to let the conversation take its own course.
Photo (c) Kevin Killian


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.

Online works available :

Clark Coolidge books at Eclipse Archive online. Click on image below.






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