Coolidge, Clark: The Crystal Text

City Lights Publishers, paperback Publication Date: November 14, 2023 Publisher Marketing: 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 cryst