Clark Coolidge, considered one of America’s most experimental, ‘out there’ poets, is also a man firmly ensconced in the second half of the 20th century. He uses a landline telephone, does not text or email, and relies on a trusty typewriter to type a continuous geyser of prose and poetry.

A native New Englander, he now resides in Petaluma, a small city 30 miles north of San Francisco. His influences range from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kerouac, and are informed by interests in art, geology (in his youth he was a spelunker), and jazz and classical music. Coolidge is a classically trained percussionist and played drums with composer Alvin Curran at bar mitzvah gigs. His frequent bass partner in Providence jazz clubs was Buell Neidlinger. Coolidge’s fling in the world of psychedelic rock was a San Francisco band called Serpent Power, which released their eponymous album in 1967.

I’m calling the poet to discuss his old/new book Rock Notes, a 55 year old manuscript written in collaboration with fellow poet Tom Clark. A legendary phantom text among the writers of the New York School of Poetry (Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery are the poets most associated with it), Lithic Press have published the typescript itself, complete with corrections and write-overs and topped off with a blurb from Thurston Moore.

I ask Coolidge about the genesis of this book. “I think it probably started when I first made contact with Tom Clark. He was in England at graduate school and he asked me to be in a magazine he was starting. We somehow began talking about rock music and he subsequently sent me 45s by The Cream and Jimi Hendrix Experience, both groups being unknown to me. When I moved to San Francisco to join the Serpent Power, I became part of the early San Francisco psychedelic scene and mailed Tom LPs by Big Brother And The Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, and The Great Society, with Grace Slick.”

I ask Coolidge when he and Clark (who died in 2018) decided to embark on the Rock Notes project. “Well, Tom Clark did do a mimeo’d chapbook called Neil Young, consisting entirely of repurposed Neil Young lyrics. And there was a one-shot magazine by Clark and the poet Lewis Warsh called Sugar Mountain after a Young song. And I had a work called Rock Notes, more about rocks and geology, but the form that work took – a sort of collage stye – suggested the form for our collaborative Rock Notes. I moved to Massachusetts and Clark came back to the US and our project was all done through the mail, mailing manuscripts, exchanging letters, sending each other tapes and vinyl.”

Did Coolidge and Clark have any publishing expectations for the manuscripts or was it just a writing experiment? “Tom and I had a sort of high idea that we had written a publishable commercial book,” he replies, tossing in a chuckle. “In those days there was kind of a big hippie rock audience and we thought our book would be something you’d have on your cable spool table [the hippie answer to a coffee table] and when you’d put on some records, you could open the book, read a few passages and listen to an LP.”

I wonder if he and Clark submitted the manuscript anywhere. “The small presses we approached balked at the cost of publishing such a large book – most poetry books clocked in at 80 or so, ours was 361 pages long,” he replies. “Rolling Stone magazine published a two page spread from Rock Notes, but their publishing arm, Straight Arrow Press, was uninterested in the project.” Coolidge and Clark even tried submitting the book to the major commercial press Random House. “Their first take on the book was noting that all our song quotations and pull quotes from books and magazines would need to get permissions, as well as being renumerated,” Coolidge recalls, “and that was as far as that conversation went.”

Were there any further attempts to publish the manuscript before Lithic Press stepped up? “The end of the Rock Notes project sort of ended our relationship,” Coolidge states. “No big blow up, we were just moving on with our lives. We were both married with young children and we were on opposite coasts. Clark also was trying to make a living as a writer, so he moved into books about baseball, as well as writing reviews, biographies and teaching.”

I note that both he and Clark were much older than the typical fan following the music they were writing about. I wonder if he was a rock and roll fan back in high school (Coolidge was born in 1939)? Did he grease his hair into a pompadour back then? “Oh, no,” Clark responds with a laugh. “I was really a jazz snob. My buddy in high school was the future composer, Alvin Curran. We used to get together and play early Brew Moore 10"s and Gerry Mulligan quartets. We also played a lot of gigs, mostly dances for teenagers, so we played a primitive kind of rock and roll – but it was just a job. I did secretly listen to this R&B radio station in Providence but didn’t talk about it with my fellow jazz snob friends.”

What did Coolidge find of interest in this new iteration of rock music? “Well, I wanted to find a way to keep playing drums – jazz work was drying up by the mid-60s,” he answers. “My friend, the poet David Meltzer, offered me a job in his band Serpent Power and he had just got a contract with Vanguard Records. When I moved to San Francisco, I was interested in that there were so many musical influences coming into the bands one heard in the clubs and ballrooms. Plus, a lot of the drummers I was meeting were trained as jazz drummers – like Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane.”

I ask Coolidge if he felt the audiences were experiencing this music as a leap forward from what was going on in 1965–66. “I’m sure there were people in the audience who were sensing something new was brewing and noticed all these different musical strands – jazz, blues, contemporary classical music and especially what now is called roots music – that made up this new music,” he states, then adds,” though I think a lot of the audience was too stoned to notice these sources and were mostly interested in dancing and hopping around.”

What most fascinates me about Rock Notes is the interplay of quotes by folks like Jean Luc-Godard, Max Neuhaus, Wittgenstein and Carl Andre playing against quotes by Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton and other period rock luminaries. “That’s interesting,” replies Clark, “because the structure of the book is made to be wide open. That set-up gave us permission to make those connections – you know, everything from the music to whatever else we were interested in.”

As we wrap up our conversation, he points out a big, but somewhat cloaked, inspiration for Rock Notes. “Tom and I were big fans of a kind of gonzo rock criticism, writers like Lester Bangs, R Meltzer and Paul Williams. Rock criticism itself only began a few years back. These gonzo writers were inspired by the New Journalism of the period and the freedom of the underground rock scene. I remember reading a Meltzer review of a new Cream album titled “Saucers Sighted In Virginia”, and the review was all about the professional wrestling scene! Nothing to do with rock and roll at all! It seemed all about the totally wild assed freedom that I loved!”

You can read Joel Lewis’s review of Rock Notes in The Wire 506. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the review and the entire issue online via the digital library.