Clark Coolidge and Philip Whalen: May 5, 1976
"The Poetry Center is insanely pleased to present the brilliant word theoretician and poet, CLARK COOLIDGE, in concert with the honorable PHILIP WHALEN, novice monk, and major American poet.... Clark Coolidge, like a doctor, but with a hurricane for a pen knife, has hewed the common cloudy phrase into a new kind of poetry language which rocks. The poet James Schuyler says, 'Clark Coolidge is the avant-garde.' Philip Whalen, a major literary figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the '50s, has been shaping the post-American public since he came down from his sourdough mountain lookout to read at the Six Gallery in 1955." —(Lewis MacAdams, from the original press release)
Coolidge, visiting from Western Massachusetts, reads "a section from a long work that [he'd] been writing for the past two years, which as yet has no title." At times referred to as the "long prose," the entire 20-section work would be published some 35 years later as A Book Beginning What and Ending Away (Fence Books, 2012). He reads here the whole of the untitled section 6. Whalen, resident in San Francisco, reads and comments on his poems from On Bear's Head (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, effectively an early-assembled "collected poems") and from the manuscript to The Kindness of Strangers: Poems 1969–1974 (soon out from Donald Allen's Grey Fox Press, 1976), as well as a generous selection from one of his handwritten journals.
Poetry Center director Lewis MacAdams introduces the poets in the erstwhile Barbary Coast Room of the César Chavez Student Center at San Francisco State University.
- Publisher
- American Poetry Archives
- Location
- Barbary Coast Room, César Chavez Student Center, San Francisco State
- Date
- 1976-05-05
- Event Run Time
- 01:36:31
- Contributors
- Lewis MacAdams
- Rights
©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.
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