Albert Goldbarth
|
***
Where are all the tribute sites
to the coolest thing to happen
to poetry since the flight
of Modernism?
|
***
| The New
|
Albert Goldbarth is doing more of what Ezra Pound told us to do than any other living poet.
| "Hair Pieces" at Gettysburg Review |
"Library" at Poetry.com (reprinted from Iowa Review) |
"Hierarchy, Lowerarchy" at Quarterly West |
"Rarefied" at Poetry |
"Stationed" at Poetry |
"Suitcase Song" at Poetry |
"C & E" at Salt Hill Journal |
"Civilized Life" at Salt Hill Journal |
"Who Do We Mourn" at Salt Hill Journal |
"Sectioned Out:" and "Instances of Faith" at Fine Madness |
"Open Torah:" at Forward |
"The Survey of A and Z" at CutBank |
"Surfaces" at CutBank |
"Dog, Fish, Shoes (or Beans)" pirated by Piscean Poet |
"Moonology" at Georgia Review |
***
Audio "Interview" at NPR |
***
Good Commentary About at Slate |
Good Commentary About at Christian Science Monitor |
***
Albert Goldbarth, simply by virtue of how he writes and not what he writes, is largely unpopular among the academics--though apparently a joy among book critics to be the first poet to win two National Book Critics awards.
Ian Hamilton writes in his The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry of Goldbarth's "almost manic prolixity," which I will have to agree with since Goldbarth can write them faster than I can read them; however, the bias of the author perspective peeks out from under him. He also uses the term "revolt" in contrasting Goldbarth's style to minimalist poetics, but Goldbarth doesn't seem to voice his poetics except through his style--not that he seems to get much opportunity to do so (see "interview").
Hamilton goes on to describe Goldbarth's "discursive...essay-poems" as "nearly pathological.... less interested in their ostensible subjects... than in their own compulsion to generate language as profusely as possible." Somehow the content of Goldbarth's poetry cannot penetrate Hamilton because of the novel medium it travels in. Far from talking to be talking, Goldbarth takes Whitman and applies dense thought and erudition. The erudition, however, Hamilton seems to have taken a shine to in his comments: "engaging in its dense and intricate texture... his ear for bizarre words from diverse vocabularies, some technical..., some colloquial..., and... his eye for... kitsch objects, outlandish news items, odd scientific or historical facts."
The tenuousness of the "central thread of earnest meditation serving to unify [Goldbarth's aforementioned ear and eye]" only occurs in his lesser poems, but who doesn't have lesser poems? Shakespeare? William Stafford? Two popular yet prolific artists who, alas, had lesser poems and debatably more.
I love Goldbarth's comments in Opticks that Hamilton attributes to "wry self-critique": a "radical style consists of never using one word when three can be substituted." In the immortal words of Foghorn Leghorn, "I say, that's a joke, son."