Clark Coolidge – A Book Beginning What and Ending Away

A missing masterpiece in 20th century experimental literature, Clark Coolidge’s legendary ‘Longprose’ was written at a frenetic pace between 1973-1980.

One of poetry’s greatest acts of radical endurance and a major departure in style for Coolidge, this work, even without publication had a deep influence on the Language Poetry and New York Schools of Poetry, improvisational jazz, even painting. At over 500 pages of sustained, exhilarating prose, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away reconciles the relentless iconoclasm of the language poets with Coolidge’s own, deeply rooted theories of abstraction and musicality, yet remains astonishingly readable more than thirty years after Coolidge abandoned the project – originally planned to be more than 1,000 pages – in 1980. A resurrected classic.