[New-Poetry] Goldbarthian

[David Graham]

A month or so ago, before I vanished to deal with a family emergency,  
there was some chat about Albert Goldbarth and his new & selected  
volume.

I've now gotten my hands on the book, which is winningly titled *The  
Kitchen Sink* & beautifully produced by Graywolf.  Best cover on a  
poetry book I've seen in ages.

It's a big selection, but if any poet deserves 350 pages to showcase  
his work, it's Goldbarth.  As it is, he omits most work before 1983,  
including just 20 "poems excavated" from his first decade of publishing.

Among the small surprises of the book is that he includes quite a  
long section of short poems.  Yes, I said "short"--all one page or  
shorter.  Just to show that he's written them, perhaps; they do tend  
to get overlooked when surrounded by the 14 page sequences he often  
publishes.

There's also about a book's worth of new poems, so even Goldbarthian  
fanatics will want this new collection.

Here's one of his longer short poems:

Vessels

  (Alexander von Humboldt)


In Caracas, Venezuala, in 1800, one can listen
to "the latest modern music"‑‑Mozart, Hayden--
over sweetened ice, and Humboldt does, but once the rainy season
ends, he's off for the obdurate forests of the Orinoco,
and all of their grim amazements: streaming lengths
of anaconda, surly crocodiles, and vampire            that hover
like nightmare hummingbirds over his hammock . . . yes,
but the greatest jawgape amazement is surely a human,
Señor del Pozo of Calabozo (a dusty
cattle‑trading station), who, with no guide
bit the treatise on electricity in Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs,
"built an electrical apparatus, almost as good as the most
advanced design in the laboratories of Europe." Marvels
so often select unlikely vessels. Any alive enough

soirée should offer the example of a troll‑like shnook on the arm
of a luscious hotchahotcha beauty, or the former diner waitress
with her petro‑sheik amour . . . and then the tsking disbelief
of the envious  rest of us. But shouldn't we know?
When God / His Son / His Virgin Wife decide
on a  Message of Ultimate Importance for All of Mankind,
do They relay this through a group of visited
presidents, sultans, queens, and similar potentates?
Do comets spell it out, over Rio, Tokyo, mid‑Manhattan?
You know. One day in a one‑burro scatter of ant‑swarmed shacks
in Mexico, or clutch of huts in the Urals a mute, retarded girl
looks tip from the torpor of street dogs to the sky
‑‑and speaks. Site's eloquent now with the Word, and the Way,
and the air in her wake is electric.


--Albert Goldbarth.  *The Kitchen Sink:  New & Selected Poems  
1972-2007*.  Graywolf.  [originally in *Combinations of the  
Universe*.  Ohio State UP, 2003.]


========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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