Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer

Abstract

Chapter 4 focuses on two books: The Cave, by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (published in 2009), and Coolidge’s The Maintains (1974). Attending to the collaborations’ claims of negative ontology and the shifting nexus of particular terms reveals the intertext at the heart of the book: Carl Andre’s contemporaneous sculpture Equivalents I-VIII. Indeed, the chapter follows the implications of the collaboration’s proposals to make an argument for considering the book itself as sculpture. Following from that sculptural reading, and the book’s equation of caverns and dictionaries, the chapter turns to The Maintains, alongside its dictionary source text, in order to detail the way in which it excavates the dictionary with an understanding of the reference book’s physical, typographic and sculptural space.