[New-Poetry] Goldbarth/Moonology

[JforJames at aol.com]

David,
I count myself as a fan of his work...but I think the reservations
are valid, too. Too much, too many, too much the same. The
'library poem' that was posted is telling, because this poetry
is made from books...not from life. One of his books had the
title Pop Culture and the poetry shows that kind of surface
flitting we get as surfing past Discovery, History, TNT, SciFi,
MTV, AMC... 
 
It used be that the great poets had a handful of concerns/themes....
it was inevitable that our age would produce a major  bard afflicted
with ADD.
Finnegan 
 
 
In a message dated 8/22/2006 4:56:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
grahamd at ripon.edu writes:

Yes, I've been  on a serious Albert Goldbarth kick of late.  Wondering, among 
other  things, what others think of his work.  Wondering, also, if many 
people  beyond Albert Goldbarth have managed to read more than a fraction of his  
writings.  He seems to publish another 132 page collection of poems every  year 
or two, a dizzying Ashberyan rate.  

He's had great success,  clearly, winning major awards and publishing 
prolifically for decades with  high-profile journals and presses.  But somehow we 
seldom see his name  crop up in short lists of the most important contemporary 
poets.  

Some reviews I've seen have expressed weariness at his  overstuffed 
high-octane style and his fevered encyclopedic subject matter;  others have reveled in 
his bumptious energy, humor, and oddball perspectives.  Mostly his reviews 
have seemed remarkably positive.  Yet he still  seems somehow to lurk at the 
fringes a bit.  

Given his relentless  eccentricity, his formal genre-blurring and 
experimentalism, as well as his  frequent focus on anatomizing language itself, I'm 
curious as to why his name  doesn't more often show up in experimentalist circles.  
Is he the  mainstream's token postmodernist?  


On 8/22/06 3:00 PM, "Anny  Ballardini" <anny.ballardini at tin.it>  wrote:




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