Bar None

Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo, New Mexico

(after this piece gets bubbling there's just about every bar I can remember

plus a bunch just out of the blue, back in my drinking days . . .

but Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo, New Mexico, has got to be

the greatest "museum bar" in the Southwest, bar none . . . )

Language poetry is the puttering pop-pot fiduciary fireless non-magnet.

Little Scotties fucking each other's gizzards North equals South equals a long way

Hump suck fuck. A dramatic mirror-image explosion of Jean Paul Sartre backwards,

an implosion of Jean Cocteau. We artists are common as puddle muddles

Mud puddles dried up is pottery á la langoiterage Silver Cue. Silver Dollar,

Fred's, Le Chenil Rouge, Casa Blanca, Silva's Saloon, and all the other

history of bars in Bernalillo. Actuality breeds contempt.

Absinthe fakes the hard on farther. Jack the Stripper. Casbah on

the Rio Grande. The Silver seduction in the Gold back room.

More than you bargained for, drunk, in the back of Frank & Phil's.

So many bars have come & gone so many bars have come & gone.

Dope shot up the curtains in the back room. Filling a block of four.

Filling the rental car up with unleaded before returning it at 7 AM.

American speech is an introduction to the trend of the world, which

reflects which reflects. I will create a bar. The Herbert Hoover Lounge, no

the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Suck Off Spot, the Electrolux Excitement,

the Energetic Electric Indication, Silent Madness, The Magic Johnson Wax Museum,

the Hen's Come Back Bar, the Everything I Ever Wanted Bar, the Non-Bar Bar,

The Hedy Lamar Bar, the Office Bar, Smitty's, the Thunderbird, the

House of Ivy, the House of Malnutrition, the Answering Machine Bar,

The HIV Bar, Gino & Carlo's, El Rey, the Mineshaft, the Horseshoe,

the Green Lantern, Rulon's, the Trojan Horse, the Coyote Double-Yip,

Okies, El Monte's, the Mint, the Roundabout, the Skylark, Claude's,

the Raven, the Star-Buck Pleaser, the Blue Note, Birdland, the Haig,

the Violent Tributary, Peace Bar, Jack's, Rosa's Cantina, the Quarters,

Upside Downside, Max's Kansas City, Fat Chance, the Eclectic Vomitoria.

larry goodell / 7Nov91 / placitas, new mexico / from Fugitive ABC's, poems 1991

R O S W E L L

Roswell with the Plains rolling out into the Eyes

Eyes with the Plains rolling into the Bars

Bars where the Cattle cross into the Heart

Roswell where the Heart rolls out of the Bars

Bars with no Bars but Photographers arms

back from San Francisco talking of Pool

no Table no bars no way to find Home

Home from I am Roswell with the Veins in my Arms

Arms with the Plains rolling out of all Harm

Harm where you know it alive the Baby cries

Roswell with recorders & Plains with their Arms

to be one Born here St Mary's ordinary cross

Roswell with the Music He cleaned it up

Roswell with no name He never saw his town

Roswell never saw the town named from his name

Plains arms roll never knowing where they came from

Philanthropy an old thing naming from the Bars

no Bars only Home to some

trying to name an artist

who's really good at home in his voice

reading the names as they show up in the Plains

Home & Home again a name in the Bars

of Albuquerque Algodones Placitas home

Roswell with the name nobody calls it a home

Home it was & ever will be & be & be

Roswell with the name where

the flat ness rolls out

aflame in the ears to die

Roswell old home a poet born to hear what

he hears her sitting home away in the tears

he left here to come back a dozen years of solitude

a chronicle of Paradise in trees they left to die

Artesian Roswell making making

empty clothes lines

I give you Silk Stockings for Yr Empty Bars

I give you back Roswell with its empty Death Wish

I give you back what you brot me Lines with a Stick

a Bat out of Carlsbad a Bag of loose Cotton

a reaping raping raiding woman cursing with the Dry Plains

I give you a Letter the Letter Z

Z for Zones Z for Cattle Brands unknown

Z for my Home never found never wandering

A Ghost of the Lovely Host who ate his Solid Wafer

& blessed the Town to turn it back where its Hope was found once

when you let the newly found Artesian wells spill out their

Giant wealth to give it in again & take the People Hatred

Hiding in DeBremond Stadium where the Football games

pounded it in turn it in the Spring River come back

flowing flowing in all the ways of fuck again.

larry goodell

(written on envelope at Wendell Ott’s

Sunday, 7Apr74 in Roswell, New Mexico)

the invite for the opening of Greg Tucker's show

which included me reading this and other poems and Tom Guralnick, jazz artist, performing, August 1980, Albuquerque, New Mexico . . .

GREG TUCKER: "IT'S A RIOT"

this appeared in Artspace Magazine, late 1980, in conjunction with Greg Tucker's show of post-prison riot drawings . . . a remarkable show.

Greg Tucker's show at the Meridian dares to show what it's like to be a man, the myth that we all are afraid to face. All of us men. That opening out of hate and love, that is peculiarly masculine, because it is fierce, brutal, and escapes all risks.

It is a show of tattooed men, what you do with your body in prison when there's nothing else to do. Transferred, in simple, bold thrust of minimum color, on small squares of paper. You move from paper to paper, with these images on them. A Christ "Born to Lose," "Fix," "Arbol de Juzgar," etc. And then the images of the penitentiary riot, the messages of directed violence on the walls, kill this guy or that guy, cut off that guy's prick—a show of such manageable drawings, manageable because the drawings aren't that big and the terror diminishes as you walk away, and yet it's not terror. Some drawings are of masks, or bodies without heads, or just a scrawl like a cross-out, on the square of paper, or numbers through 9, backwards.

It is the rage of being independently male, in a body trapped in prison where the puberty rite of the tough edge you only show, comes bursting out. That puberty rite of the tough edge only showing, as you walk along or do anything, the boy-man learns in Junior High.

Greg Tucker shows these images of that pushed-out toughness, the lump-in-the-throat terror that we guys have to go through, either do or duck, shit or get off the pot, kill or die—or escape. The escape of the trapped, no matter what they were or who they were, they are, there, climbing the walls to get out.

For art to show this is remarkable—and remain art. It isn't art overridden by statement. I think it is Greg Tucker's sensibility of the pen riot, tattoos, graffiti caught in the process of his own drawing. And the energy continues from them as you look at them. It isn't the stupid knife-edge painless hurt of so many contemporary popular movies, that just make you hurt if you can do that anymore, but the small squares of drawings you enter like entering a cell, to see what goes on in that prisoner's mind or body. And more than that, it is an expression of what all men have to face, suffering all the while through it, a trap door on the way to manhood that can trap you and never let you out. If you get trapped, it's the rigamarole of proving your toughness round and round, egged on by "buddies" that it's okay, until you believe the game and play it till you kill or maim or get back at, as if that would end it, and it never does.

It's a rotten game that few women know, that is at the core of the independent male, who travels through it until some kinder register of what life can be, begins to settle in. These drawings are extremes of what is as common as the human male, a stage of his development, or trapped in itself, the horror of everything gone wrong and every act can only be the further extension of wrong, wrong into wrong, a mass wipe-out.

But it's only drawing, it's only writing. Drawing, writing on the wall.

—Larry Goodell
Greg Tucker, drawings. 1980
published in Artspace Magazine, Albuquerque, New Mexico