by Albert Goldbarth

from Georgia Review, Winter 2009

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems
(with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)

. . . what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood,
     that poetry, by which I lived?
                                                  —Galway Kinnell
 

Albert Goldbarth: Okay, someone . . . let’s have a good leading question. . . . Yes,
the woman in the white dress with the long row of buttons.

Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody! Who are you?
                         Are you—Nobody—Too?

AG:     . . .When they rolled me into my own
procedure (that’s the pamphlet’s word: “procedure”)
what did I have?—they’d taken away my clothes,
and the tether I use to keep my brain from floating
into anonymity. But a voice survived,
inside somewhere, a voice below
the bullying of the Demerol, and it said
“I am Albert Goldbarth, whose father signed the rent check
‘Irving Goldbarth’ with the fake gold pen he earned
for over twenty-five years of service with Metropolitan Life Insurance,
he of the genuine heart—and the salesman’s overbearing laugh
that never represented the true heart adequately;
and he gave unto me the lug nuts and the hubcaps
of the north side of Chicago at my birth, as well as the candle
that lights the menorah, and the shockingly sexual pink
of the lox at Sunday brunch, the skivvies
and the quilted winter long johns, and the prayer shawl,
and the secret naughty coin for ‘heads’ and ‘tails,’
and the American right that even an insignificant man
and his insignificant family have, to go to bed
with their honor intact, to walk the dog
as if the night were as good in their nostrils as anyone’s.”
It was small, as I said—a pipsqueak voice,
a match that burned for a moment.

*

          I do remember days—entire chains of days—
when I'd carry my friends and their distresses around in my head
like unclean water. I'd turn, I'd hear that weighted slosh.
. . . I remember a party:
a graduate student, just arrived from Lima, Peru,
asked idly, "Whot is yor mont' ob birth?" January,
I said to her, and she whapped her forehead in recognition.
''Ah! Joo are an Aquarium!"

*

          . . . wildly trying to think of pockets adequate
to everything: The ash-tree staff of the hermit
on his mountaintop for seventeen years. The latest Nintendo
epic, Callow Drooling Wombat Warriors. The doctors
cracking open Nicky's sternum like a matzoh—he was five.
The perfect wedge of brie John found one dawn on his car hood.
Gunshots. Twill weft. Owl-hoo. Storm, and calm.
The poem as fit receptacle. Sure. Right.
I'll know what to do with them.

*

          A favorite story: Skyler was having her hair done
in some au-courantish coif, and her beautician LaTeena
asked her, since a potentially special occasion was implied, what
she was doing that night. “Oh,” Skyler said, “my husband’s
giving a reading.” LaTeena stopped mid-curl, a look
of sudden comprehension washing in delight
across her face. “I didn’t know,” she said, and nearly couldn’t
continue from the excitement, and from the worlds that lavishly
     opened up
in front of her at this news, “your husband’s a psychic!”

Yes I am.

Walt Whitman: It is middling well as far as that goes . . . but is that all?

AG:     It doesn’t end: the Me Convention, always
overbooked. (HELLO, My Name is ME. / HELLO,
*MY* Name is Me. / HELLO, *!MY!* Name. . . .)

Walt Whitman: What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?

AG:     We’re the few but beautiful
units of the first day of the cosmos
densed-up over time; when the lady I love
flaps suddenly in sleep like a wire discharging, it
makes sense as much as anything—bad dreams,
zinged nerves—to simply say we’re where
the Big Bang ripples to the limits of a continuous medium,
flickers a little, kicks.

Lord Byron: You have your salary; was’t for that you wrought?

AG:     Why do I write? It’s what I do
with the portion of carbon I am, before it returns to the universe
of carbon that the trees created even before there were people.

Robert Penn Warren: . . . what
                               Is man but his passion?

AG:    I once heard a blues harmonica player
insist his soul was in his spit.

Kenneth Koch:  Some have painted you, but it was only tiny squiggles.
                       How could we show much of you?

AG:      . . . in one review: “If a Goldbarth poem is a real
‘Goldbarth poem,’ you know ‘the universe’ is going to be brought
      onstage,
with the full duties of a protagonist.

Kenneth Koch:  Did you bring Jewishness here or did it bring you, or what?

AG:     ... the 21st Indian

Intertribal Pow-Wow moaning soulfully out of the TV is
that box's incomprehensible substance—war?
peace? rain? it's obdurate Extraterrestrial to me—and even
so, this solemn ululating, in the way it ceremonially
assumes the human heart and godly ear connect, and
wrings a little blood, a little blood with wings, for the one
to be heard by the other ... in this, it brings
completely back to me the old Jews on their New Year

in the willfully uncomfortable storefront Orthodox shul
my father favored when I was 10 or 11 and watching them
softly rock their prayer as if each slowdanced in place
with an angel, and listening as their opaque wall of Hebrew,
uttered brick by brick, rose out of the room to somewhere
I could never believe and they could never not.

*

          He was reading the great Jewish mystics

and light was a body. Then another said the body was
a form of light. It went like that, deep
into the night, and he came to see
his knuckles were ten small skulls in delicate
yarmulkes of skin: a minyan exactly. Just
to be alive at all was to pray.

Jack Gilbert:  What do you lack? A terrible
                    question to hear every day.

AG:    The graspy heart, that lobster of ours that
wants, and wants, and is evolved to lust
for one grain shat by a swallow in flight
as much as the whole packed 4-story silo.
. . . Michael tells me:
in the slammer—call it what you like, the pen,
the hoosegow, the big house, call it shit city—
you want anything from outside, and
a used-up tube of lipstick or the one-eyed spaniel's water pan
can hold the same desire a limousine does.
He's seen kneeling men lick cell bars
for the salt a visitor's palm left.
Think of the rib cage ... think of the lobster
clacking inside its trap.

*

          Kings
don't war for beds of gold-and-pearl, a king once said:
they war to keep their beds from floating into the soul-eating
emptiness between stars.

D. H. Lawrence:  Have you built your ship of death, O have you?

AG:    ... I've
been here watching a sunset tonight
—how each wave is a heartbeat of a cup
that holds this golden glow—and I've decided I want to go
complaining and resistant and requiring
of effort to get: the way the meat
leaves the leg of the crab.

Walt Whitman:  What do you think has become of the young and old men?

AG:     A small boy and a slant of morning light
both exit the last dark trees of this forest, though
the boy is gone in an instant. Not

the light: it travels its famous 186,000 miles per second
to be this still gold bar
on the floor of the darkness. I suppose

that from the universe's point of view
we do the same: a small boy and an old man
being one continuous substance.

D. H. Lawrence:  Do you think it is easy to change?

AG:     ... Needs change.
"Vibes" change. The zeitgeist trembles,
falls a thousand miles, and reinvents itself
on titanium wings.
......................
I wish that Time would leave me alone, immutable.

*

          ... The law of thermodynamics
doesn't care whether I'm in a booth at Tabby's Topless Lounge,
or in the family ground at Waldheim Cemetery in west Chicago.
. . . Judith Taylor calls to say the L.A. hills are turning ever
dangerous in this year's rains; she's had her house protected
by construction of a temporary berm. That's lovely language
and I'd like to write a book about our sad, sweet lives
called Temporary Berm.

Walt Whitman: Who need be afraid of the merge?

AG:     ... It's 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T'ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we'd have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
... From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
—for such (in part) is the life of T'ang Yin.
He's been dreaming. And now he's going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That's all. That's his poem.
He's writing:

Rain on the river.

Walt Whitman: To be in any form, what is that?

AG:     ... We wiffle away
through a pore, we snip our tendril of attachment to the surface
of this sphere, and yet we're here. Between the solar systems:
emptiness. Between our neurons: emptiness. And yet we're here.

*

          ... The universe
wants itself (and so, its "us") to move
toward ever-greater density of associational links.
It wants the Entirety of What Is
to be one simultaneous thought. And so
it wants my mother's bones
as yet another tiny message, on the way to that conclusion;
wants her scattered,
to be signs through the unknown.

AG (now sensing the audience grow restless): But perhaps we're waxing too dolefully contemplative. Does somebody care to ... yes, Walt, you have another question?

Walt Whitman:  Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?

AG:     Some days, anything is wonderful. In its
detail, in its conception, in its chainlink leading
into the rest of the physical and conceptual cosmos, anything
is wonderful.

William Blake:  Dost thou know who made thee?

AG:     I'm tired of writing about the gods,
those causal winds we snap in.
Tired of reading their signs in the entrails
when the guts themselves, the fat swags
of an animal, are eloquent enough.

*

          ... We're standing there
in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour,
and it wouldn't look to anyone else like an even match,
my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness;
and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand.
I won't believe in his God. I won't believe
in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo
or rabbinical teetotum, and I'm screaming this
and screaming this and screaming this, until I see
the rain become his face, and for the only time
except his mother's funeral on a similar day
of wet and chill in a shivering mix,
my father cries in front of me.

D. H. Lawrence:  What are the gods then, what are the gods?

AG:     This friend believes in God; and the light
falls, milled by the living whirr of the boughs,
to our feet, in a pile of dazzling rags.
This other friend doesn't; and still,
all afternoon, one way or another, the light
descends with the dust of the stars
and the dander of rats' backs,
in its ever-arriving body, to our bodies,
and now what, and why do they look to me
for a resolution?

*

          sleep, little button
don't make a fuss
we make up the gods
so they can make us

*

          The universe
wants to talk to us, I'm sure of that,
it wants to and it does,
though we perceive it as the white talc
over thumb-plump purple grapes,
as the shakos of dust below the bed,
as umber fronds of rust up a bumper.
. . . The High Gods
are my theme here, or whatever
psychic monologues, or everwiffling red-shift edge
of energies we call "the Gods"—but
fallen, from such aboriginal nebulousness,
to language.

William Blake:  What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

AG: ... And Pharaoh
set the infant Moses in front of a crown and a plate of embers,
testing if this was the child it was prophesied
would steal his reign. And Moses
did reach for the crown. But the Lord set an angel to guard him,
who now did guide that hand to lift an ember, and so did
Moses thereby burn his tongue and lo would would stammer all
      his life long.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
My sweeties, my grownups who have come so far, what are we
here in midlife, but
the scars of healing from where we once burned

our tongues on the Other Language.

Denise Duhamel:  Expecting someone green?

AG:     "Pickleheads with insect eyes," a friend describes
the green men out of saucer fandom: thousands gather annually
to parse their fanatical credulousness. I don't
believe some otherplanet sapience in celadon iguana skin
exists, much less is manifest on Earth
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And yet ... who hasn't, in between our island moments
of rationality, felt ... a weightedness, a ... presence, yes,
a presence in the air, that might imply the astonishing visit
of ... something, yes, of something so beyond the language's ability
to offer us accommodating images, we might as well
say "extragalactic" and buy up the little green key chains.

*

          We're all arrived from off-planet.
I don't think that's an inaccurate description
of the amniotic sac.
It's not coincidental—aliens stranded on Earth
in countless sci-fi stories, waiting for the "mother ship"
to land and receive them back
into its opening belly. Being
alive at all, being human and being born of a human,
that commonest thing, is linked from the first
with a terrible strangeness. We're all from somewhere
farther than light.

Gregory Orr:  Can two bodies move together
                     Through time?

AG:     ... When I look
at my wife beside me in bed, it helps me
see myself. We're substance
dropped into time, to measure its flow.

Armand Schwerner: is the man bigger than a fly's wing?
is he much bigger than a fly's wing?
is his hard penis ten times a fly's wing?
is his red penis fifteen times a fly's wing?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
does his penis vibrate like a fly's wing?
is his arm four and one half times a strong penis?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
is her vulva tipped with spring color?

AG:     When I tell you that cultural ritual is an artifice
composed of simultaneous chrono-vectors,
I'm thinking of sex. I mean it.
We all are. It isn't just me. Or when I say
the war, or the god, or the list with the juice and the cereal ...
sex. What is it the psycho-experts are claiming?—every ten seconds?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
yes
sex and death—the one thing.

*

          Moon of the gnashing wolf, moon of the overtumulting tidewaters,
moon of the itch of love, of the gnash of love, of the waters of love
—we've all been there.

Gregory Orr:  Can a river flow beside itself?

AG:     ... there's a tense
that means "I would have, if I'd been my twin."

AG (hoping to provide some shape now to this event): A river and its "other self" ... a doubleness. It seems to me that many of your questions, not only Greg Orr's just now, as well as many of my answers, imply that poetry looks at—and/or is itself—a doubly charged field of consideration. To me, that's an implicit idea even in questions that think they have another agenda altogether. You must have more examples....

John Keats:  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
                  ... Do I wake or sleep?

Pattiann Rogers: Which is more important, the motion of the wind
                        ... or the manipulations
                        Of the moon?

Jim Harrison:  Is it better to rake all the leaves
                     in one's life into a pile
                     or leave them scattered?

Emily Dickinson:  Which anguish was the utterest—then—
                          To perish, or to live?

AG: Yes, that's what I mean, at least in part: a vision that keeps two alternatives equally viable. (I'm thinking of what I've said in a poem, " ... that famous wedding of prayer and sex, / 'Oh God. Oh God. Oh God:") Not that some poems don't have other strengths entirely: and not that other art forms can't also use this sense of doubleness: it's not poetry's alone. But we do find it often in poetry, yes? ... a moment when the world, and our language for the world, and our complexity of vision, become two-ply. That might be one basic definition of a metaphor. Any last example, before we close for the day?

W B. Yeats:  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

AG:  I think we can all agree to the Truth of that ....

John Keats:  Beauty

AG: Yes, of course, to the Truth and Beauty of that. After all, if we're not supposed to dance ....

Gregory Orr (interrupting, out of enthusiasm): If we're not supposed to dance,
                                                                  Why all this music?

AG:     Nathan and I are discussing Keats—the late
autumnal dolor of the Odes; we're lightly
arguing, then somehow we're regluing our opinions
into a single admiration, we're reciting grand
collaborative swatches of his language
and our beer breath, and (there's this about the dead)
he's here, he's more here every minute,
almost crowing with delight now, almost dancing
between us—no, not "almost": dancing—
on these two crutches of his.

AG: Just a couple last questions now. (In the background The Georgia Review timekeeper holds up a watch as if to validate this.)

Gregory Orr:  Why don't we stop
                    Adding to the Book?

AG:     I open this book and smoke pours out, I open this book and a bad sleet slices my face, I open this book: brass knuckles, I open this book: the spiky scent of curry, I open this book and hands grab forcefully onto my hair as if in violent sex, I open this book: the wing beat of a seraph, I open this book: the edgy cat-pain wailing of the damned thrusts up in a column as sturdy around as a giant redwood, I open this book: the travel of light, I open this book and it's as damp as a wound, I open this book and I fall inside it farther than any physics, stickier than the jelly we scrape from cracked bones, cleaner than what we tell our children in the dark when they're afraid to close their eyes at night.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This book is going to save the world.

AG:  Last one. Mr. Lawrence ... ?

D. H. Lawrence:  What is the knocking?
                          What is the knocking at the door in the night?

AG:     Who knows

D. H. Lawrence:  ... it is the three strange angels.
                         Admit them, admit them.

Note
The poems quoted above are, in order of first appearance: Galway Kinnell, "The Bear"; Emily Dickinson, No. 288 "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"; Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"; (Lord) George Gordon Byron, Don Juan; Robert Penn Warren, Audubon: A Vision, "I. Was Not the Lost Dauphin"; Kenneth Koch, "To the Unknown" and "To Jewishness, Paris, Ambition, Trees, My Heart, and Destiny"; Jack Gilbert, "Voices Inside and Out"; D. H. Lawrence, "The Ship of Death" and "Change"; William Blake, "The Lamb"; Lawrence, "What are the Gods?"; Blake, "The Tyger"; Denise Duhamel, "Barbie, Her Identity as an Extra-Terrestrial Finally Suspected, Bravely Battles the Interrogation of the Pentagon Task Force Who's Captured Her"; Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved; Armand Schwerner, "Tablet V"; John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"; Pattiann Rogers, "On Your Imminent Departure: Concerning the Relative Importance of Various Motions"; Jim Harrison, "Suzanne Wilson"; Dickinson, No. 414 "'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch"; William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children"; Lawrence, "The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through."

About the Author
Albert Goldbarth's more than twenty-five books of poetry include To Be Read in 500 Years (2009) and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (2007), both from Graywolf Press. He has also published several essay collections, including Many Circles (2001), winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, and a novel, Pieces of Payne (2001). He is the only poet to have twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award; he is a recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Poetry Award, given to recognize humor in American poetry; and he has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Since 1987 he has been the Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University.

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