Clark Coolidge & Neeli Cherkovski
Edited by Kyle Harvey
Lithic Press ($17)
by Matt Hill
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
—Samuel Beckett
This fascinating book offers a transcribed conversational collage between the poets Clark Coolidge and Neeli Cherkovski. Swapping their stories and memories, ranging across topics and poetic encounters from the 1960s to the present, “these poets recall: A lifetime’s worth of friendships, amazements, assessments, and straight up happy-to-be-there goodtimes buoyed by powers of poetry,” as Patrick James Dunagan puts it in the Introduction. The book comes rounded out with two appendices, providing some personal history and thoughts on poetics and the trajectories of the poets over the years.
The tenor of the exchanges serves as our baseline while we listen in on Coolidge and Cherkovski, absorbing their anecdotes and imagining the gesticulations of their hands cutting through the air. Readers will get a palpable sense of being seated there in Coolidge’s living room while the conversation flows along. Replete with the lore of two very disparate poets’ unique encounters throughout their lifetimes, this recorded afternoon “serves as a valuable archival document for younger generations of poets,” as Kyle Harvey says in the Preface.
“Restlessness makes me a poet,” says Cherkovski. “My ear is attuned to many influences. Federico Garcia Lorca, is, perhaps, the poet I think of more often than others when I sit down to write. . . . I’d be remiss if I did not mention Rainer Maria Rilke. Whenever I travel his work goes with me.” Cherkovski also talks some about his teaching at The New College in SF: “I ran an MFA program . . . They [the students] were in it for success. I remember telling them, I said, ‘Boy, you’ve come to the wrong place with me, because I don’t really like that altar.’” The talk veers around to minutia involving Stein, Ginsberg, Olson, Creeley, and Bukowski; Coolidge discusses his friendship with the artist Philip Guston, while Cherkovski mentions his North Beach days with Bob Kaufman, Jack Hirschman, and Philip Lamantia, as well as his time prior to that in LA. Coolidge relates a story of how Philip Whalen upstaged Olson and Duncan at the Vancouver Poetry Festival in 1963, a particularly extraordinary anecdote.
Regarding poets and their influence upon each other, Coolidge says, “Sometimes you could see a little phrase or something that you might like—I mean, we all stole from each other. Like hell, I mean, who was it? Tom Clark said, ‘Nobody owns the words.’ And of course, we don’t.” We hear about everything from Pound, Eliot, and Williams, to the lack of a poetry “scene” in LA, to movie guys like Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to staying away from the academic life. Coolidge says “I just couldn’t imagine spending all that time, really, explicating. . . . your mind is being spent in that other room. That other space, which is all about explication, not creation.”
The differences that come up between the two poets are equally fascinating. Cherkovski confesses, “I’m a narrative, linear poet—I mean, [Charles] Bukowski was my teacher. You know, it took me years to get out from under that, to develop my own thing. Coolidge, meanwhile, casts himself as a “process guy”, careening around in his recallings of the jazz scene in NYC, or what was and was not being read or talked about at Brown University in the ’50s. These exchanges permit both poets a free-flow of stories as they trigger and bounce off each other.
Perhaps what becomes most manifest listening to these seasoned poets is that they have no need to self-mythologize their writing, or even to ego-cize their life trajectories through the decades. Both are still publicly reading fresh work, and in Cherkovski’s case, posting his poems on social media. As such, and as we endure these fraught times, when temptations lurk to let the creative fires burn out, these two poets shine like beacons across the dark waters, inspiring those of us coming up to believe in our own poetic process, and to “blast the rules” so that we may move forward into the unknown.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 22 books, three of which (so far!) have become movies. His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Salon. Bohjalian is a recipient of the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating readers about the Armenian Genocide, and the Anahid Literary Award, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sheila O’Connor is the author of six novels. Her most recent book, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions, combines memoir and historical research to reconstruct the buried history of incarcerated girls, and it won the Minnesota Book Award. Her other books include Where No Gods Came, Tokens of Grace, and the novels for young readers Sparrow Road and Keeping Safe the Stars. O'Connor is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Hamline University, where she serves as fiction editor for Water~Stone Review.
Tickets to this virtual event include a signed copy of Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Each registered attendee will also receive a special “Everybody” button with their book, and be entered into a raffle to win an 18K gold-plated sterling silver necklace which celebrates Laing’s brilliant new book. Winner announced during the event!
Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of nonfiction, To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), and The Lonely City (2016), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and has been translated into seventeen languages. Her first novel, Crudo, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize. She writes for the Guardian, New York Times, and frieze, among many other publications. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather, was published in 2020. The recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in nonfiction, Laing lives in Suffolk, UK.
Kim Todd is an award-winning author of books about science and history, including Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America and Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis. Her essays and articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Salon, Sierra Magazine, and Orion. Todd’s work has also appeared in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 and has been featured on NPR's Science Friday. She teaches on the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota, and has given lectures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Yale University, the Getty Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Denver Botanical Garden, among other places. A senior fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program, Todd lives in Minneapolis with her family.
Kathryn Nuernberger is an essayist and poet who writes about the history of science and ideas, renegade women, plant medicines, and witches. Her latest book is The Witch of Eye (Sarabande Books), which is about witches and witch trials. She is also the author of the poetry collections RUE, The End of Pink, and Rag & Bone, as well as a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Her awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and notable essays in the Best American series. She teaches poetry and nonfiction for the MFA program at University of Minnesota.
Join Rain Taxi for a special lunchtime conversation on politics, prose, and pictures with graphic novel creation duo Ted Rall and Pablo Callejo. Their new book, The Stringer (NBM Publishing), is an ode to when fact-based journalism mattered, set at an important turning point a few years ago, as well as a globe-trotting, action-packed, timely statement about how a society without a vibrant independent culture of reporting can degenerate into chaos. Don’t miss this chance to hear these trans-continental collaborators talk about their work!
