[New-Poetry] Goldbarthian

[Anny Ballardini]

Drunk with words, he could not be baroquer, I can understand him, I sometimes go through some of these seizures
  From: David Graham 
  Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 4:48 PM


  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
  ==========================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070323/20783b72/attachment.html