Far Out West

Author: Clark Coolidge

Publisher: Adventures in Poetry (2001)

"39 poems of humour and duress, written while attending to remnants of my childhood on satellite waves, realizing an inherent wackiness in these accounts of men descending from horses before buttes or saloons, speaking lines like 'This town got a sawbones?' or 'I reckon not' (see Kerouac's Old Western Movies). Some of these films notorious even respected (Johnny Guitar) but mostly workmanlike Cassidys from in the late Thirties, unexpectedly gorgeous in their black & white Lone Pine vistas and spirited inertias of 'Saddle up boys Hoppy needs ya!' They had me so dreaming that I took aim and wrote. Or wrote without hardly aiming to, one" (from the author).