Coolidge's “longwork,” written between 1973 and 1981 and eventually released in 2012 as A Book Beginning What and Ending Away (Fence Books)
Editorial: "A missing treasure from one of the great ages of American experimental literature, A BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY is an epic, durational, multiform text composed from 1973 to 1981. Bridging the wild conceptual experimentalism of the 1960s with the freeform, devastating ‘point perspective lyric’ that remains Coolidge’s operative method today, A BOOK BEGINNING WHAT AND ENDING AWAY is a musical performance, an epic saga, and a rewriting of the nodes of grammar and meaning, exhibiting forceful transformation in every paragraph, every stanza, every turn."
Wendy Lotterman, at BOMB: "Twenty chapters of poetry compose Clark Coolidge’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the division between each a shoddy dam allowing themes to spill back and forth—geology, Zukofsky, Dalí. A bind that keeps its flow. Coolidge, a poet associated with movements from the New York School to Language poetry to the San Francisco Renaissance, began A Book in the ’70s, when he would perform the inchoate project during marathon readings in San Francisco. It is a mistake to be too dazzled by Coolidge’s trademark soundscapes—“rigid dirigible”—not to mine their stores. Sense might be slackened but it hasn’t disappeared; rather, it’s loosened its grip so we’re free to grip it. A discussion of all the pieces and parts that bring us along that threaten. The architecture tends to buckle when prodded or when a pattern is demanded of the scatter. This is the point. Shapes materialize from the lexical din, then disaggregate, then lend raw materials to the next shape."
"There are passing moments of downright wisdom, magnets within the miscellany that call it all back home. [...] Sometimes Coolidge comes at one single point from plentiful angles; other times everything seems uncannily distilled inside a single crooked sentence."