ABSTRACT
Coolidge's work draws on an unusual array of influences. In Samuel Beckett, Coolidge finds an exemplary dedication to the work of writing; Coolidge has often cited Beckett's dictum "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." The language investigations of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky helped shape Coolidge's interest in the materiality of language, and John Ashbery's coliaging of found texts in The Tennis Court Oath (1962) gave Coolidge early on a sense of the formal possibilities of discontinuity and fragmented syntax in poetry. Jack Kerouac is the writer of greatest importance to Coolidge's work: Coolidge has attested that the improvisatory freedom of what Kerouac called "spontaneous bop prosody" made him feel that he too could be a writer. Jazz itself, particularly bop, is a pervasive influence in Coolidge's work (he is himself a drummer): the improvising soloist surging forward in time, riding on a pulse and building momentum, becomes for Coolidge a model for the poet in the act of composition.
