A BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY by Clark Coolidge

Fence Books, 2013, First edition, 560 pp., 6 1/2" X 9", Softcover

Fine

"A modern-day Rosetta Stone, Book Beginning What and Ending Away bridges the wild conceptual experimentalism of the 1960s and the rigid, doctrine-driven personal politics of the 1970s and early 1980s Language poets, while illuminating the path toward a freeform, devastating 'point perspective lyric' that is Coolidge's operative method today."--Tom Orange

At over five hundred pages of sustained, exhilarating prose, this work reconciles the relentless iconoclasm of the language poets with Clark Coolidge's own deeply rooted theories of abstraction and musicality, yet remains astonishingly readable more than thirty years after Coolidge abandoned the project--planned to be more than one thousand pages--in 1980. An act of radical endurance, a resurrected classic.