Alexandre Gallery presents an Online Viewing Room of Clark Coolidge works

Edith Schloss: The Clark Coolidge Poems

Among the luminaries that Edith befriended during her creative life was the poet Clark Coolidge. Edith met Coolidge in the late 1960s through her lover at the time, the experimental composer Alvin Curran. Curran dates his self-discovery as an artist at the age of 13 while “in an apple tree at the house of his lifelong friend, poet Clark Coolidge.” 

Known as an experimental poet and jazz musician, Coolidge’s poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage and generate meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.”

Detail of Clark Coolidge Series (July 14), 1971, watercolor on paper, 24 x 19 1/2 inches