Clark Coolidge

Clark Coolidge, a poet often associated with both the New York School and the Language Poets, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 26, 1939, to Sylvia Coolidge (née Clark) and Arlan R. Coolidge, a classical violinist and professor of music who later chaired the music department at Brown University and helped found the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra. Coolidge briefly attended Brown between 1956 and 1958, where he majored in geology. He left the university in the summer of 1958 and spent the remainder of the decade living in Los Angeles and in Greenwich Village in New York. In the early 1960s, he began to attend poetry seminars, conferences, and readings where he formed associations with various poets, some of whom he would later collaborate with, including Ted Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Philip Whalen, and Louis Zukofsky. 

Coolidge published his first book, Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric, in 1966 with Lines, a small publisher led by fellow poet Aram Saroyan. During his writing career, Coolidge has published more than fifty books of poetry and prose. His other works include The Land of All Time (Lithic Press, 2020); Selected Poems 1962–1985 (Station Hill Press, 2017), edited by Larry Fagin; 88 Sonnets (Fence Books, 2012); the two-volume On the Nameways (The Figures), published in 2000 and 2001, respectively; Bomb (Granary Books, 2000), a collaboration with Keith Waldrop; For Kurt Cobain (The Figures, 1995); Supernatural Overtones (The Figures, 1990), a collaboration with Ron Padgett; The Crystal Text (The Figures, 1986), which was rereleased by City Lights Books in 2023; and A Geology (Poets & Poets Press, 1981).

Coolidge’s other works include Not-So Stories (Smoke Specs, 2022), a collection of short stories that resulted from a forty-year prose collaboration with Larry Fagin; The Cave (Adventures in Poetry, 2008), a collaboration of prose, poetry, dialogue, and song with Bernadette Mayer, composed by both writers during the 1970s; and Lowell Connector: Lines & Shots from Kerouac’s Town (Hard Press, Inc., 1993), a collaboration with poets Michael Gizzi and John Yau. Coolidge has also edited Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (University of California Press, 2010) and Heart of the Breath: Poems, 1979–1992 (Hard Press Editions, 1996), a collection of Jim Brodey’s poems.

Coolidge began playing drums during childhood, later playing in various genres and with numerous bands, including David Meltzer’s San Francisco-based 1960s band Serpent Power. More recently, Coolidge performed with Thurston Moore in Paris in 2013. Between 1964 and 1966, Coolidge worked with Michael Palmer on the journal Joglars. Between 1969 and 1970, Coolidge served as the producer of Words, a weekly hour of new poetry, at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. In the mid-1980s, he taught at Naropa Institute and was a writer in residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California.