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Henry Gould, Poet, Critic, Editor-Publisher
Pronunciation: "goold";
email address: Henry_Gould@brown.edu
Affiliations: Founding member, The Poetry Mission (1989-)
Co-Editor, Nedge.
Henry Gould was born May 29, 1952 in Minneapolis, and grew up in the "Mendelssohn" neighborhood of Hopkins, MN. Cornfields, lakes, swamps, pinewoods, summer, midwestern 50s Middle America, all formative influences. He began writing seriously around 1967. Vladimir Nabokov and the big anthologies of NY School poets were important antithetical presences. He was accepted at Brown University, he believes, on the strength of an imitation of Ted Berrigan's "Tambourine Life" and "Bean Spasms", and finished his B.A. there in 1977, after dropping out for three years. This hiatus was impelled by a spiritual crisis/breakdown described
partially in the anthology he co-edited for poet Edwin Honig (A Glass of Green Tea - with Honig) and involved a break with poetry and writing for several years. When he came back to poetry in the early 1980s it was as a "Russian" poet--heavily influenced by the poetry and criticism of Osip Mandelstam. Gould now likes to call himself a "byt" poet (pronounced "beet": means "everyday life" in Russian).
Gould also holds an MA from Beacon College in Community Organization; he spent a number of years working with food coops and neighborhood organizations in Providence. He is currently employed at Brown University Library, and is at work on a long poem entitled Stubborn Grew the Rose.
Pub credits:
Print mags: alea, apex of the M, Famous Reporter, Fine Madness, Happy Genius,
LVNG (forthcoming), Clerestory, Hellcoal Annual, Misc. Proj., Negations,
Newport Review, Providence Journal, Poetry New York,
Plains Poetry Journal, Planet on the Table, Providence Review, Nedge,
House Organ, Situation, Poetic Briefs and Talisman.
Web mags: Electronic Poetry Review, Free Cuisenart, Mudlark, non (forthc.),
Rif/t (forthc.)
Works: Where the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day; Hellcoal Press, 1971 (chapbk)
Poets of Yesteryear important: Osip Mandelstam, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Ted Berrigan, Anna Akhmatova,
Joseph Brodsky, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, MANY OTHERS.
Contemporary poets important: Edwin Honig, Stuart Blazer, Karen Donovan,
Kristen Prevallet, Janet Sullivan, Elena Shvarts, Ivan Zhdanov, John Tagliabue, OTHERS.
Critics important: Osip Mandelstam, many many others.
Tastes, techniques, etc.: Beauty and form include the ugly but without
beauty & form there is no art, no poetry. Form (the organization of the
parts of a whole) always implies a wholeness of some kind even if it is
a "denied" or destroyed whole. Synecdoche is the doorway to the macrocosm.
Sound, image, feeling, meaning - those four in a dynamic fusion -
that is poetry. DENSITY and AUTHENTICITY and a feel for tradition and
critical truth perception all at the same time.
For a sample of one of Gould's poems, click here.
For a sample of a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Gould particularly cherishes (and translated), click here.
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