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 cha
