The Cave

Authors: Clark Coolidge & Bernadette Mayer

Publisher: Adventures in Poetry (2009)

The Cave is a collaboration of prose, poetry, dialogue, and song alternately written by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer between 1972 and 1978. Exploring the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the nature of language, and the connections between the present and past, it constantly challenges the reader to question reality, time, and the poets themselves. The work ranges from complex and imagistic rambles through imaginary landscapes to terse, clear accounts of exploring Eldon’s Cave in western Massachusetts, the setting of several of Coolidge’s poems.

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer have been writing for over fifty years, and they have both had an unquantifiable impact on the direction of experimental poetry. In the words of Marcella Durand, who provides an introduction, “Coolidge and Mayer evidently shared a common mission in their writings to encompass consciousness, language, and the intricacy of physical/scientific/geologic structures, and to cross whatever fake borders had been set up between genres, materials, or even words themselves."