Edith Schloss: The Clark Coolidge Poems

Among the luminaries that Edith befriended during her creative life was the poet Clark Coolidge. Edith met Coolidge in the late 1960s through her lover at the time, the experimental composer Alvin Curran. Curran dates his self-discovery as an artist at the age of 13 while “in an apple tree at the house of his lifelong friend, poet Clark Coolidge.” 

Known as an experimental poet and jazz musician, Coolidge’s poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage and generate meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.”

Edith, whose own phrasing and visual sense run parallel to Coolidge’s sensibilities, liked to play with syncopation and juxtapositions most often through her still lifes in which she lines up her collection of colorful tchotchkes. In a two-page letter from Curran to Edith, September 3, 1972, Curran wrote, “Your letters are like Clark’s [Coolidge]: so full of things and more things that it’s hard to believe that life is really like that somewhere and hard to know if it’s desirable or in this case enviable.” Indeed, Edith and Coolidge became close. Among the Clark Coolidge Collection at the University of Buffalo are several drawings dedicated to Coolidge.

This selection of watercolors was set aside by Edith and earmarked as “Clark Coolidge Poems.” Each has a playful language where brush marks land on paper in a percussive fashion that could be read as both poetry and music.

— Jason Andrew