Extensions of Poetry
(some statements, quotes on)
larry goodell
put together for fellow poets who met January 20, 2018
at Jules Poetry Playhouse in Albuquerque –
several hours of mostly talking
about my experience
photo by Jules Nyquist
placitas, new mexico 2018
This is generously available at Dispatches!
Poetry Is Local 1
Carrying A Voice 1
Musing Backwards to Duende 2
Some Quotes 3
Be Specific (for Poets) 5
Notes for Lecture on Poetics,
Lisa Gill, Acequia Bookstore,
with Gary Jackson 6
A Poets Theater 7
Notes on Performance and Narrative Art 8
Art Notes 1
Art Notes 2
A Story
Myth Mother 10
A Duet by Jim Fish 1949-2017 10
From Educational Babble 11
Sonnets, Song-nets 12
Questions from Mark Weber 14
Questions from Donald Levering for L.G. 17
Introduction to Firecracker Soup (unused) 18
Additional Pieces 18
Poetry Cake 19
Live Audience 19
I Believe This To Be So 20
Extensions . . . 20
Free Speech Poetry 21
Photos by Jules Nyquist 22
Poetry Is Local
Commonplace Books - Journals“A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories:’ and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.” Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), from “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet .”
Poetry Readings - Organizing - Promotion by email, social media, website, radio, flyers, calendars. Facebook, Twitter etc. Billy Brown and Elaine Schwartz, Jules Poetry House.
Typing and Compiling - Chronology is a good organizer. Wordperfect, MS Word. Scanner. Abbyy Finereader 12 for OCR. Folders/binders of poetry by year. The Poet as Publisher (a course I once taught) is true for many. Be consistent. Symmetry is good but not in justification.
Website & Blogs - Wix.com (larrygoodell.com), Blogger (3 Dimensional Poetry), Wordpress (Lotsa Larry Goodell).
Photography - Adobe Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Flickr.
Audio - Audacity, Cakewalk Platinum (or Studio etc.). Bandcamp, Soundclick, Soundcloud, Reverbnation.
Publication (online) - Issuu, Scribd, online mags. Do it yourself. Createspace, Bookmobile, Lulu. Actual mags, book publishers, good luck. Distribution and selling – exchanging books and selling at readings. Amazon. Bookworks in Albuquerque, Collected Works in Santa Fe.
Video - VideoStudio x10, to YouTube.
Carrying A Voice
Who doesn’t carry the voice of the poet in his head when he reads – if you’ve heard the poet read aloud. Now with live readings the rule rather than the exception you can hear a poet without too much trouble – your locals and those passing through. Plus what the FM plays or TV shows (tho almost never). Plus tapes made available slowly more & more. The NY Poetry Project double album (Nova Convention) is a necessity in this day if not this age. And however, wherever you read (always intriguing where & when people read their books) you can & usually do hear Ginsberg or Whalen or Baca or Benson or Grahn or Randall or who it is when you read.
Thus poetry could easily be nibbling at its own roots – where it came from, in the cave the wall shaking with the spirits – or in the chanted circle with the dancers and the total pageantry of the buffalo, mixed game animals, dance. The entire place made up in wild sunny colors around the plaza to the sound of the chant-poem coming out.
The music took over at the Fillmore Auditorium but the walls were sweeping & vibrating with building-size flashes, images concatenated to the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. Struck me similar to a Native American dance outdoors.
Ron Silliman says performance is only a form. “...its ties are closer to other arts than to the tradition of poetry.” To me the “tradition of poetry” is only performance with the publishing of it increasingly a spin-off rather than the first and only powerful presence. Of course all poets are different in this and some would rather choke on their martini olive rather than read their poetry.
In Dallas Gertrude Stein says, “I always like reading to Hockaday girls. It was funny about reading. I had never read anything aloud much except all the letters of Queen Victoria to Alice Toklas at the beginning of the war and I had never thought of myself as reading and I had never read anything I had written and then when they asked me it seemed very strange to me & then somehow I came to like it, it sounds very interesting as I read it, quite so to me.” (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937.)
And so the Caedman recording (wish there was more) brings her rhythms & voicing out in an ultimate way. Now long after Lindsay, Thomas & Ginsberg the way is open to strike the environment down and erect your own – so that the voice of the poet will not go down in history illuminated by fluorescent lights. The performance of a poem includes what people look at as well as the sound. But I’m in a tiny camp with my feelings on this – I carry my backdrop, on my face sometimes an appropriate mask, with different shaped givens known as my poems – and I bring my own lamp. 1997(?)
Musing Backwards to Duende
Vancouver Poetry Festival of 1963 was a whirlwind for me, caught up in the New American Poets pantheon of Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Phillip Whalen, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson for a couple weeks and when I got back home in Placitas, New Mexico, I got a used Rex-Rotary mimeo machine that some nuns had owned and I typed stencils and cranked out a book-mag of Ron Bayes who I’d palled around with up in Vancouver.
The “pantheon” up there talked about the angel, muse and duende, Duncan specifically talking of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1930 lecture on the Theory of the Duende. And living in a largely Spanish speaking state and already drawn to the earth spirits, I took that for the name of my mimeo press. So people from Vancouver I’d met became the first duendes, Bayes’ History of the Turtle, Book 1, with his beautiful melodic ear, then A Fredric Franklyn’s Virgules and Deja Vu, a Los Angeles poet and critic, and then Richard Watson’s Cockcrossing Olson had liked. So each issue was devoted to one poet in that I firmly believed we need space to present our work rather than snippet-room. Ken Irby was living in Albuquerque then and, prompted by Creeley, I knocked on his door and was swept up in the strength of his Roadrunner Poem and published it as duende #4.
The nice thing about printing a mag for $25 and then mailing it out for another $25 was the exchanges received back. The address list I got from Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), and Paul Blackburn helped me get the 100 or so copies out to people interested. And the wonderful El Corno Emplumado received in exchange from Margaret Randall from Mexico City led to her Small Sounds from a Bass Fiddle her first book (duende #5). Bobbie Louise Hawkens (then Bobbie Creeley) was generous enough to do covers and some artwork for the mag. Heck, the Creeleys were my village neighbors.
There followed Larry Eigner’s The Reception, a play, with his wonderful set design for the stage “drawn” on his typewriter (duende #6) and Robert Kelly’s Lectiones (#7), friend of Irby’s and our direct contemporary. I did another Irby, Movements/Sequences, with a note by Bob Creeley and another Ron Bayes, his History of the Turtle Book 4. Then came writers in Albuquerque such as the African-American Frederic Ward, Poems, 1966 (#11), William Dodd’s Se Marier (#9), a story of marriage. And since William Harris and David Franks were in Placitas, and in Albuquerque involved with the University of New Mexico and Creeley, David Franks’ updated Touch appeared from duende press (#13) and Latif William Harris’ Poems/1965 (duende #12) his first book. We became such trusted friends that Latif edited my first book which came out as duende #14, Cycles. I did a one-shot mimeo’d Oriental Blue Streak in ‘68, with work by 16 poets and a couple artists, four diverse Fervent Valleys (a couple of which I offset printed) with many contributors, and a few books like Bill Pearlman’s 60's novel Inzorbital, and Judson Crews’ The Noose, A Retrospective: 4 Decades (with John Brandi’s Tooth of Time Press) in 1980, and duende press trailed off [to pick up in 2016 with Barter Within the Bark of Trees, Latif Harris, with an Introduction by Jack Hirschman and a Note by David Meltzer; The OxBow Poems, James Burbank, a collection of poems, essays, photographs about the Rio Grande; Dancing The Snow, a guide to skiing for an Old Man, poems photographs and essays, Jim Fish;7and The Swoosh of Heron Wings by Raymond Johnson, 2017].
So a very modest duende was launched thanks to the helping hand of poets and interconnectedness of magazines like Wilddog, Desert Review , Coyote’s Journal, Weed/Flower, Matter, From a Window, Mother, Bluegrass, Island, Interim, Joglars, Open Letter, Trobar, Imago, Grande Ronde Review, Tish, Sum, Tampa Poetry Review, Kayak, Wormwood Review, Yugen, Camels Coming, Mile High Underground, Illuminations, The World, Open Space, Grist, El Corno Emplumado, Kulchur, Caterpillar and many more of the 60's. Thanks to the Yale Street Grasshopper, which became the Living Batch Bookstore where I worked off and on for many years, we had a reading place and place of encouragement, and thanks to the Davidson offset press I got from Pat Bolles, I learned to print offset and stepped out of mimeo.
But the beauty of the “mimeo revolution” for the poet-as-publisher in those days was that you could do the whole thing at the kitchen table if need be. Typing the stencils, printing from the stencils on usually absorbent paper like “Twiltone,” and then collating and stapling, then mailing and that was that. With offset printing I had to take the typed copy to a service to have plates burned, tho I could do the typing and printing myself. And then the collated copy had to go to a bindery. With Xerox I could never afford a machine or printing costs and that required trips to and trust in Kinko’s to do a photo-copy booklet. With Pearlman’s Characters of the Sacred, I sent the photo-ready copy off to a Michigan press which I believe is still the prevailing current practice these days for small-press publishers. But for me putting a book out entirely myself, that’s the ideal. Publish On Demand (POD) all at home is what I’d like, even at age 72.
(This piece of information was just published in Beatitude, Golden Anniversary 1959-2009, 580 pp. Latif Harris, San Francisco). larry goodell placitas, new mexico, 2007& updated a bit 2017
Some Quotes
A lyric has to sing. A poem has to read.-- Sammy Cohn, lyricist
"Performing is allowing your soul to dance through the instrument you're playing."
—Stevie Wonder
When I take a breath and start to move, I construct a sentence. It is what happens when I exhale. A 'sentence' is logical, it has integrity and consistency. It does something.
—Lee Connor, dancer & choreographer
These breaths, of course, can and should vary in duration, as they are not literally the length of one breath of the body at rest, but rather like a spoken sentence, with possibly a subclause or two; or, using another comparison, like a melodic line a flutist might play in one breath.
—Doris Humphrey, dancer & choreographer
Louis Zukofsky, A Test Of Poetry, 1948.
A simple order of speech is an asset in poetry.
Poetry convinces not be argument but by the form it creates to carry its content.
(Language of poet often allies itself with song, not oratory.)
Simplicity of utterance and song go together.
(14th Century height of development in fitting words to musical composition).
The complications of rhetorical ornament (similes, metaphors, conceits) in later times seem to have created a printed (and worse, a bookish) poetry written to be read silently rather than to be spoken or sung.
It is the hardest task for even great poets to limit the number of words used to maximum advantage.
Condensation is more than half of composition. The rest is proper breathing space, ease, grace.
As poetry, only objectified emotion endures.
The less poetry is concerned with the everyday existence and the rhythmic talents of a people, the less readable that poetry is likely to be.
Poetry if anything gives us a sense of everything.
---I was already a convert to the Romantic spirit, and myth in that spirit is not only a story that expresses the soul but a story that awakens the soul to the real persons of its romance, in which the actual and the spiritual are revealed, one in the other.
—Duncan, Robert, p42 The Truth & Life of Myth
Form is never more than an extension of content.
—Robert Creeley
No ideas but in things.
—Dr. William Carlos Williams
I'm not a girl
I'm a hatchet
I'm not a hole
I'm a whole mountain.
(Work 25) Judy Grahn
. . . poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.
Audre Lorde
Poetry must be as well written as prose. Ezra Pound, 1885-1972: Letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan 1915.
Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindsight-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.
The essential thing about a poet is that he build us his world.
Literature is language charged with meaning. (These from ABC of Reading, 1934.)
Literature is news that stays news. Ibid.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a
counter-punching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even
know they are champions.
—Jack Spicer in“Sporting Life” from Language (1964)
"I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book."
Kenneth Rexroth
I'll publish right or wrong:
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song. George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1788-1824
("Some Quotes" on a single sheet was a good handout.)
Be Specific (for Poets)
When in doubt be specific. In fact always be specific. Ask yourself if you’re being honest. Go for energy, strength and guts. Avoid cliches, the too sweet and the cutesy: go for the tart and true. Rolling Stones. Your honesty will often be funnier than you think. "Be ruthless with yourself in your own writing." Ann Quin. Remember: That word’s garbage if you don’t need it. Don’t think you’ve got to throw a rhyme in, don’t force or overdo anything. It’s never old-fashioned to wait for inspiration and write down what’s coming to you. If you use music make it original and not canned. Beware of multi-media since it’s usually a lot of fumbling with equipment while the audience waits. Be aware if you have a tin ear and do something about it. Poetry is the music of words. Assonance is your friend. And internal rhyme. Be aware of the audience. Make sure everyone can hear you. You can project if need be. Don’t mumble like Creeley often did. Enunciate without getting dramatic. If you hear P’s & T’s popping speak to the side of the mic. NEVER shout into a mic. Never ask the audience if you have more time. They’ll say yes even if you’re boring their pants off. If in doubt, stop. Never hog the mic / the reading. Don’t spend too much time introducing, just get to the poem and don’t JUST read poems. Be aware if you’re reading in just two tones. The variety of sound in casual conversation is refreshing. Listen to Philip Whalen every once in awhile. Guard against strained dramatic "reading" that obliterates text with an ego-voice. Be bold: go to a poetry reading. That poet will be glad you’re there. And if you can, go up and talk to him or her afterward. They’re too excited from performing to want to go home yet. Choose a press name and publish your own book: or get a couple friends together to do it like Judy Grahn did. Don’t wait for the East and West Coast University and Publication Empire to shit on you. Notes for Lecture on Poetics, Lisa Gill, Acequia Bookstore,with Gary Jackson
Sets, collection of objects, a poem is a constellation of phrases, sentences.
A phrase/breath means more than itself, the top of a pyramid.
For Love/Hotel Wentley Poems/ Judy Grahn’s early poems.
You get a sense of allowing the language to have the power that it has.
Leave cliches behind and have an open mind in front.
Watch out for adjectives. Let nouns resound. No ideas but in things, WCW.
Ernest Fenellosa in the Chinese Written Character As A medium for Poetry says: "The cherry tree is all that it is."
For instance I think poetry is by nature inclusive, not exclusive.
Beware of qualifying nouns like slam, academic, lyric, Chicano, Native-American, Afro-American, women’s, gay, language – because in every case by qualifying you are excluding.
Is poetry 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional? On the page it’s 2, but as soon as you read it, it’s 3 dimensional.
Native American dance, a panorama with poetry in the center. Lots to look at not just hear.
Language poets almost killed me, and language punditry. Slam almost killed me, the exclusiveness of it – Don McIver helped pull me out of my shell inviting me to read at the Blue Dragon in Albuquerque. Help other poets and just keep writing.
"The best revision is a new work." – John Cage
https://duende.bandcamp.com/track/larry-goodell-poetry-is-a-humbling-experience
Talking about poetry, organized by Lisa Gill, with Gary Jackson.
A long (tedious) poem about where it comes from "All Ears" -
Ginsberg and Sakaki talking about song, wonderful discussion – Larry Bird from Santo Domingo Pueblo, Chinese Poet Jack Shuai, from KUNM-FM Singing Wire program I recorded from the radio.
That man is peer of the gods, who
face to face sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.
It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.
Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.
Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little
of dying.
Sappho, trans. by William Carlos Williams, 1957
A Poets Theater
The language of my plays exists on the exterior of the characters. The language is sympathetically & excitedly delivered over to happen reflexively & suggestively in the heads of the listeners, and sometimes in their bodies.The characters, by being in sympathy with the language pretend to be giving birth to it as it is delivered, and in that way, it is inside them, interior to them, but the language is not necessarily connected to the slow-time that is interior self-analysis and cross-analysis as it seems to be in a David Mamet play. There the connection between the reality of possible character verges into people as you might know them, meet them in the theater. It is possible to read lots of reality in the Mamet lines – or in any other realist-dramatist lines. All that analysis of the realness of the lines – in their relation to possible real people – is totally foreign to my theater people and, as I see it, will never die out, not that it should – heavens, where would we be without plots?
But to me the realist or super-realist theater, as it may conveniently be called now is not interesting to me as an innovative art, but is rather, the Mamet approach, extremely traditional and depressing.
/20Feb at The Siren larry goodell Notes on Performance and Narrative Art
Originally published in Exquisite Corpse, Vol.3/No.11-12/Nov-Dec 1985, page 8 - 1980 Larry Goodell
Art Notes 1
Art is a return to normal, a sliding back of the scale to economy and wise decisions, decisions made in the heat of passion never remembered in tranquility.It is vinegar and soda mixed and when the froth is over the limp dry aftermath that results.
That's why performance is so interesting. There they pay the performer, you pay at the gate and you go in to be detained for an hour or so. What a relief from the tedium of life to go somewhere and have the intensification of tedium to deal with. The pretense that life is alright and that the froth at the top of the fishbowl means that the fish are having a good time.
While underneath it is murky and reptilian presidents glue jaws on each other and suck each other's last remaining death instincts out.
It is the small presidents that matter that are young these days. Those that get away with creating romance and giving us in the club something to laugh about. We can only start locally unless we're rich and here we are rubbing shoulders with art that makes no noise, pictures that rot in the gardens of the brain vacuums of the artists, noisome pretenses of "what's going on" when most of it is bad painting, sexless cowboy sculpture or decorative purses turned inside out and parading as breasts.
The only return is the strength of the instincts where the quality of remorse is pure and life gets caught in the action. Careful pure draftsmanship with the heart-head in every particle of ink. The flow of pure art is a rare line with wash of meaning connecting or filling. Over a period of time the story builds up until it takes time to "listen," which hardly any of us have. Thus the intense loneliness of the real artists and the terrifying wall-breaking going on, whether you hear it or not.
Narration is all that remains of our personal stories whether anyone listens or not. No drinking bars anymore to string yourself out on somebody else's line. Only the closed bars of a penitentiary culture with the individual raging going on. /30Oct80
Art Notes 2
Art is living spaces void of contact. Holistic Europa. You rape a rope a Naropa pope. To elucidate is pure luxury. There can never be going back over and defining except in lawyers' offices and therapy. Art therapy is going back over what you've seen. It's healthy, hilarious and holistic. All the holes are present. You are constantly beginning anew whether you like it or not. Art notes. Art notes 2. Too much raging gets boring. Ranting and raving is a cliche and raging turns into song. Curiously delirious song comes up over the walls where you turn and look out the window. Suddenly all is pure. You may define.Number 1. Performance brings contact back into art. There is the poet's living breath. There is the sense of where the body has been in dance. Your eyes follow the dancer or the movement in the gallery space. But this only happens a little, not a lot. There's always a place for curious static art to borrow the walls and take up space. The register of what is pure for centuries, but it is pure and golden that some few people have better knowing eyes than others. In a city of a quarter-million you may rub shoulders with other artists all the time but the league of the spirit that maximizes strength dissipates when there are so few sure eyes—and exact hands. Hands that are eyes, for instance. When hands are eyes.
The walls take up the space and throw it out the windows. A curiously pure day. Pure New Mexico fall space. We live so few to know. The sun bright and warm through the large windows. The cherry trees red leaves. Yellow brown cottonwoods down in the arroyos. Living here above the town and in the village. The village contours shape the mind. The mind throws out the town and becomes rural. We must be democratic if we are to have any friends. There are too few spaces that are capitalized by greatness. We feed it back into the furrow—bone meal, blood meal, manure. As if I was a plant. My mind is mated to plants. We are crossbreeds. And out of that comes a shape that gives art season. Arts grouped by season. Calendars of art. Poetry, the pushing up of song, the small painting more than the large one, the minuscule defining growing, growing, getting so big it's almost a yard long and a foot wide, her painting. His sculpture a long board with a shoe on it saying Fuck off! Wood grows. Paper grew. Paints came out of the earth on paper. Canvas a weaving you could wear if you were stiff.
A Story
Europa was made whole by Zeus who made love to her under the plane tree. He carried her off in the form of a beautiful bull over the waters to Crete. Zeus was made whole by all the holes he plugged. Beautiful holy Zeus. Beautiful Europa, holistic Europa, and all the holes are singing they are plugged. The plugged holes sing and the gods are born. Out of them they come, one by one, and sometimes two by two. Heaven and earth give birth. The straining and the lurch. Europe is named. A beautiful bull is blamed. Over the waters to Crete. The white bull's feet tripping over the crests of the waves, Europa on his back flowers falling from his horns and there under the plane tree in Crete made love, leaves bright red overhead. You can see them right now framed against the sky, the bolt blue sky that brings the crisp edge to things.The imagination pictures pictures before and after the pictures hanging on the wall. And that is narration, seeing pictures that aren't on the wall. The happening between the frames that isn't movies. Movie frames happen faster. Picture frames don't exist in narration, verbal narration. I told or retold a story. You can see it. The crisp leaves of autumn. But in a painting frame after frame telling substance of a person's life, the visualized essence, parade of essences, that is narrative visual art at its best. It is an imagined performance in a life scope caught in the drawing or painting, and you must have a group of them to get the different views of the visual life, superior eyes. Her world given in ecstatic pieces laid out in a pretense of calm color.
Best art is ecstatic, but nobody uses that term, it's stated calm. But behind the calm is the canvas or paper hanging there, perpetually. That is, the counterpoints release the color in rhythms of tension. Tense taut, tense taut. That is its subtlety, the subtlety of Lenore Goodell's painting/drawings. Tense, taut, the color rhythms out through tension, the tension within, hanging caught there, trapped to sing, which is not a raging but a singing, and the life story goes on between and through each picture hanging on the wall. This is not performance but implied performance.
Narrative art is implied performance of the artist going through life, each segment lopping over between each segment. Each "frame" lopping over between each "frame" — until a life is built, that is a vision of it. As complete as any key can be that fits and leads to something. Essence charged whole in parts that sing through tension out. That anyone can look, who likes to look and look — almost with 13 eyes, if you had them, or better yet, one good one, to see it out. /1Nov80 Larry Goodell
Myth Mother
Did you tongue weave your firetell stories out of nowhere
bringing the Myth Mother alive
and into the notions of your listeners
so they had something to forget
after the entertainment
or did some remember
because your assonance and alliteration hit home
your story into song that’s always about
the same thing
the same chord struck in different ways
as the returning hero was herself
as she beat off the men that were after
her long abandoned husband or was it
the wild women who are always out there
out there?
-lg
A Duet by Jim Fish 1949-2017
The old man loves
Apparently
To swim in a boiling sea
Of anger
Ranking
And raving
Howling
Himself a roaring storm
Addressing always
Matters that matter
Intolerance
Injustice
Impolite political insanity
Another old man
Pure and simple hedonist
Loves pure and simple pleasure
Pursues pure and simple pleasure
Spends every waking hour
In pursuit of pure and simple pleasure
Producing
Along the way
Some fine pieces of work
In wood
And in wine
Of course I refer unfairly
To Larry
And with a terrible lack of modesty
To myself
(Of course)
(I use the exaggeration of us merely for the purpose
of illustration)
My question:
Does either one of us
Really do any good?
But:
What is good?
And:
How do we take what we do
How do we crank it up a notch
How we make it
Make a difference
Somehow
Somewhere
Somewhere where it matters
Jim Fish
2010 (I believe) JF
Jim Fish built Anasazi Fields Winery in Placitas where we hosted more than 12 years of Poets –
readings, signings, performances, conferences. He was a fine poet and a naturalist par excellence.
from Educational Babble
I took a graduate seminar with Mr. Harold Taylor at the University of New Mexico: "The Radical Transformation of the University." He asked us to do a short educational autobio. Here’s part of it. lgEDUCATIONAL BABBLE THE TOWER DOESNT FALL DOWN BUT IS AN ERECTION ON ITSELF ⇦definition of FAKE Gödel’s theory (go outside the system to see the system) brings me to any COUNTERPOINT to this class I can manage
shall we saw this seminar table in two? the PARTICULARS of what we're doing in this room are lost in muzziness because the rhetoric is 'institutional' — the referents are exhausted rather than something constantly renewing – I appeal to the Earth in all her particulars & will peel back the carpet & blast thru the floor to get to her
THE UNIVERSITY — parallel erections of closed systems — NOW — fake, fake, fake.
☆
so, '62, tapes of readings, etc. I began to hear my voice & consequently others more, speech, clearly (fuzz-muzz lifting under scrutiny of whatever thing got into a specific energy)
I taught a couple years at the Academy for Boys, 8th to 10th grade, teaching me thru Paul Roberts’ English Sentences & enthusiastic kids devouring paperbacks (advantage of private schools)
.SUMMER OF '63 VANCOUVER POETRY SESSION — Charles Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov & numerous younger — this was indeed ‘a walking grove of trees` — this session compressed world energies together & I took it — hand to hand — go to the man & ask him how he does it, you do it how you do it, people will FIND the Great Man because that's where the lines of energy lead & we’ve got to, American history is the ONLY history now that significant horizontal movement came to a ST0P (the Pacific) & now goes vertical which is the HIGH ↪peyote & spaceman↩ and the return to the Earth as our only ‘local` God/dess.
☆
I came back to New Mexico and edited & published DUENDE. a series of books of contemporary American poetry by R. Bayes, F. Franklyn, R. Watson. K. Irby, M. Randall, L. Eigner, R. Kelly, W. Dodd, F. Ward, W. Harris, D. Franks, & a couple small anthologies of New Mexico poets, & a book of my own — CYCLES /’66/ in Placitas, caretaker of a fantastic terraced place, OJO DEL ORNO, since 1963.
☆
Berkeley Poetry Series in 1965 — again a whopper — backwash of energies felt all over the country "Words are value, instruction, action. And they've got to become political action. The radicalism lies from our words, alone. And if they're not right—and I'm not talking Mr. Williams’ republic of words, I'm talking ourselves here this week, the poets of America. And I don't mean America."/from Olson's 'reading' at Berkeley, '65... the private is public and the public is where you behave...”
☆
‘67 on — Native American Church Easter Peyote Meeting in Tesuque. Drop City Joy Festival in Trinidad. Tarot. Iching. Summer Solstice in Golden Gate Park. Fillmore Totality. Acid & Immediately A NEW LAND a 'novel'. Jack Spicer. Manera Nueva. Steve Katona. New Buffalo. Max Finstein. Calligraphy. Notebooks. Kell Robertson. New Mexico. Zingdap. My Reading of Divine Brandy at Rodey Theatre Descent into the Orchestra Pit & Resurrection in the Arms of Six Chicks. Acid as Revelation Brother. “Wherever She Blows.” Oriental Blue Streak. Event Poems. Marriage Hymns. Magic in Act. Bird Visions. Lenore. Meg Randall. Ann Quin. Daily Life of the Aztecs. Peyotl. Messages. Eater of Filth. Old Chinese Graphics. Gino Brenda Krishna Cornflake. Marriage. SHE'S BEEN THERE ALL THE TIME.
☆
This is from Educational Babble, ditto’d early 70's. All of it is here.
When Day Is Done
Sonnets are a jerk off of the mind. They are an everyday occurrence, or can be. For me they free the intellect to return to the body. They are the ritual of music, based on time: without it there’s nothing for these arts. Forever there is the possibility of concurrence, collaboration: thus music teaches poetry and intellect returns to the body. Facets of, picture windows of, stained glass windows of, a ring of circles of — say niches at Casa Rinconada around the kiva walls. Simply, each time I write it’s regulated like the reoccurrence of every day: it has 24 hours, it (the sonnet) has 14 lines. I know about when it’s going to end: I count lines and welcome rhyme but don’t place it. I enjoy the limitation: it’s like lieder, American lieder. Song. They are songs, art songs. Where everything is possible but the day must come to an end. /14Apr88 (typed May 2011 from ms.)
Sonnet 13 - Stairway to the Stars
A gale descending the stairs, psychology
descending the stairs, a pizza restaurant descending
the stairs, a star and a mantle of clouds
descending the stairs, an erect flagpole descending
the stairs, clank, clank, clank, the Gila
Cliff Dwellings descending the staircase,
the Statue of Liberty descending the staircase
3000 women in furs descending the staircase in a
Busby Berkeley miracle, chimpanzees, tattooed
Japanese wrestlers & Jimi Hendrix descending the
staircase descending the stairs, the stairway
to the stars descending the staircase, Ed Sanders nude,
Joanne Kyger with a cigaret and Drummond Hadley with
a Cowboy Hat descending the staircase.....
Sonnet 48 - "I Want to Be Famous Anyway I Can"
A pig & gray furnish a word gone bad
it doesn't matter what I mean because I'm
a lang-gosh-wedge-long get languid
grab bag long edge pun pond net
po debt I'm a he's not she's not he is
yes & he is & maybe her but certainly me
I am a languid age pod net, heck, ninny
it's just turning a gong, a lily lump, pocket
a long-gone pun-fete, yep, hep! bad, bag!
serious oh so undelerious so so-so oh
no oh, just dose 'em with a big fat, I mean
I-don't-mean-anything-just-a-big-wart-off-my-chest
o no I said something, don't listen anyway just
publish me, pod blush, print me out, book me in.
/from All of Love
/from All of Love
Sonnet 81 - Home So Soon
Love is coming home, a home without
a house is calling home a honey, sweet
without the sugar, you arrive now
unexpected take up residence, TV
turns on, orchids, the new laelia bloom
misted, airy roots turn green soaking
it up, the tropics comes in every room
and your white carnation you brought in
just adds leis to your shoulders hair
clean smelling you turn the afternoon
into a turn from the dentist novocain
well it's worth it to have you so soon—
the sun is still up and you're back the clean
air blows fire in stove starts up a warm scene.
Sonnet 22 - Writer's Wonder Worker
The Poetry Writer's Wonder Worker turns you on
When you want to be turned on, Write till you're
Blue in the face—Mrs Stewart's Bluing will have
Nothing on you, pump out Sonnets, Greeting Card
Verse, Doggerel for Readers Digest, Ditties
to please God in your Church Program, Bombard
the Mails with your 100 simultaneous submissions:
the Wonder Worker has a button, & a dial, & electrodes
for each side of the brain, Set the dial, push
the button & turn on the universe of smiles that
will greet your Poeticizing, try on anything
for size from Free Verse to Couplet, Epode to Love Song
Nothing can go wrong with the Poetry Writer's Wonder
Worker, as you blossom into verse Visa, Mastercard accepted,
no one rejected.
/these from All Of Love (155 sonnets) by Larry Goodell. Many in that collection published in
Here On Earth La Alameda Press 1996.
Uplift, forklift, tonal rising, carrying on upward of the voice
upfire uptent.
/from my Pieces of Heart
Questions from Mark Weber
Mark Weber, Poet, Jazz Critic, KUNM-FM Jazz Program Host, gave me a set of questions to answer which I did. The questions are lost but they are pretty much implied here. January 13, 1995Dear Mark Weber,
I’ll try to answer at least some of your many questions, but actually I’ll send you an article that answers the beginning ones, at least. I don’t know if that will work but I rebel against questionnaires since they always end up with asking how much money I’m worth: at least this one doesn’t EXACTLY do that.
1.
Of course I’m musical my mother taught me the piano & I was a tap dancer when young. I had a jazz combo in high-school in the early 50's, and wrote a musical CLUB PROGRESSIONS.
2.
I never thot of Kell D. Robertson as a cowboy but as a songwriter and boozer of course and poet, in the tradition of the two giants Hank Williams & Woody Guthrie. Kell & I made a good contrast those years ago in the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas the few times we shared the program. He would offend and I would amend, tho that’s a simplification. Actually it was a major dose of PERFORMANCE POETRY any time I “performed” and a double dose when he did too. That was many a moon ago. Lively large cheering audiences that had nothing to do with academia tho we did a couple gigs at the College of Albuquerque on the West Mesa for classes (what was that now-dead college’s name).
There are probably a bunch of performance poets kind of like me around the country just energizing the local patch and remaining unfortunately, out of the books. But I’m not aware really of anyone else in the 60's and 70's who was doing a full-fledged “performance” thing with masks, backdrops, home-made objects a-plenty, a dosed-up ceremonial adventure with satire and singing word constructs on scrolls and placards. I did know of the beats’ poetry with jazz, and Jackson Maclow, more in music, and Drum Hadley, who’s America’s real cowboy poet and who memorized and played the guitar and sang (I can’t memorize, darn it), and Helen Adam whose songs were by heart. But really, most poets shuffled papers on a lectern under florescent lights in the acanemic tradition of Robert Lowell.
So unless I’m proved to be wrong, I was something of an innovator, tho what I did was really just bringing back the old stuff, the real old stuff.
3.
I usually title afterwards, something drawn from the poem, like a topic sentence, something to give the reader/recipient a focus, a guide to the core. This is a conscious choice and not a mad choice.
4.
I don’t drive fast: Lenore says I drive like an old man.
5.
A poem for me and all great poets (I wish I was one) begins with a line given, the germ, the seed thrown out you discover at no particular time. Don’t ask me who throws it out. Out of the blue?
6.
I’m very aware of things that were owned by someone, that is, the charge of a person on everything that is his or hers, I feel if it is in my presence. All gifts from someone have that someone with them. Does this make me superstitious or just a believer in magic.
7.
I don’t want to go to the Moon: I want Ginsberg or a young filmmaker or Judy Grahn to go and show & tell the world all about it.
8.
New Mexico has now primarily Anglo poets, the largest group, then Hispanic, then way down by number American Indian, then way further down but like all the rest growing, Afro-American, then way down, by number, Asian-American and all other groups — with lots of women poets from all these groups, of course. That “tri-cultural” thing was always a lie and an insult.
9.
I prefer dogs but I can enjoy a quiet cat.
10.
My poetry makes me feel good and excites me while writing it: and most people react to it that way. I also think there is a kind of raga-esque, slow-sexual thing about the longer poems that inevitably reaches a climax that’s supposed to leave you feeling better than when you started. And they’re almost always a positive charge, uplifting, but more in the sense of getting your hands down into the earth, being uplifted by opposites of direction: opposites containing their opposites in them: thus puns and the building wit. I don’t revise so I think I’m doing a jazz solo in silence when I write, doing that solo I could never do well when I was playing piano jazz. But unlike a jazz person I can’t perform on cue: I can only read what I wrote when the cue came.
11.
I love Phil Whalen, Gertrude Stein’s presence and words, tho not as a poet, Whitman of course, and Bob Creeley and Ed Sanders and Ken Irby and Olson remembered and early Levertov and Vachel Lindsay and Judy Grahn especially, and Joanne Kyger, and walloping Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, who’s at the head of the whole American pack: no one can touch Ginsberg as our greatest living poet. I DO NOT THINK, I KNOW. And among songwriters, which is so different from writing poetry, I like Hoagy Carmichael, Rosalie Sorrels, Bob Dylan, and Spike Jones.
12.
Of course I’d catch a ride with any of the greats, tho Monk is not one of my favorites: I prefer Lenny Tristano or Brubeck or Fats Waller or many many more. But I probably wouldn’t say a thing and just sit there terribly uncomfortable.
13.
I don’t handle rejection notices, especially grant rejections, well at all: I feel utterly shaken and feel that my work is worthless. Then later my self-confidence returns thanks to my wife and my very few good poet friends.
14.
The essence of creativity is to be dogmatic as hell about everything other than the arts. You risk doing the unexpected pleasure of it. Writing poetry is the freedom to listen to other voices.
15.
Pound was a great genius, and especially in the early poems a great satirist who read aloud better than just about anybody.
16.
I’d catch a ride with anyone as long as they were just dreaming about drinking.
17.
Explain this and remember it happens frequently: trying to remember how John Brandi and Judson Crews and I came up with the title THE NOOSE for Judson’s book, (seemed like a good title, as I recall), I thot there was a poem of that title in the book: I pulled a copy off the shelf and my thumb was stuck in the book right at that poem. The mind bends reality a little bit. Jack Spicer was right: things happen so poems can get written. (But how do they pay for insurance bills and food and car payments?) I never did Judson’s book justice by promoting it enough: duende press floundered. More poets should be printers and business people and fewer of them just plain poets. 18.
Peyote and peyote meetings were among my real 60's “teachers,” tho LSD left me puzzling over whether reality ever really has mythic content.
19.
My poems are not composed, but discovered. I’m just a poet: if they go over well in front of a group of people, great, but I don’t intend them to be anything.
20.
Line breaks are often breath pauses, or a practiced logical place where a conceivable breath and/or pause could be taken. The poem on the page is a score to help me get it across, especially when I’m reading something I haven’t seen in a long time in front of people. I may not be that familiar with it but I can trust how it’s there on the page to guide me how it should be read. Little underlines under emphasized words that help get the meaning across are really useful, as time goes by and some doctorate candidate jerk is doing a thesis on your poetry after you croak.
You don’t want too many important questions of interpretation left unanswered as you pass out of obscurity and into the question mark.
21.
If the walls had ears they’d be ugly. I’m not too paranoid.
22.
Everyone starts out having high hopes for just about everything they do. Poetry is no different. What I hadn’t realized was just how lonely a task writing poetry is (any writing for that matter) and how egotistical, petty, uncooperative, protective and competitive most poets are, scrambling for what few publishing-teaching-grant-goodies there are in the world: not having the need like actors and musicians and dancers, to WORK TOGETHER AS A GROUP FOR MUTUAL BENEFIT.
23.
I spent over two years in the Army on the Mojave desert in a tank battalion. I never heard a word about Vietnam: it was right before that. I just got drunk and got up with my hangover to play the organ for Protestant chapel services every Sunday. And I worked incessantly on horrible Dylan Thomas imitation pieces of shit poetry. Robert Creeley was later to save me from total poetry death.
24.
I spent years on and off the GI Bill trying to get a Masters. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Army and myself fucked me over. Much to my painful regret, I never got that degree.
25.
I’m not a car, I’m a sparrowhawk: just ask my wife.
26.
A couple thousand bucks I make indirectly from poetry, but that’s teaching. In America, I’m a failure.
27.
I feed the turkeys: it’s great when they’re little and gobbling up grasshoppers, which is the reason we have them, but later when they get big and are living through the winter on expensive lay pellets and you’re procrastinating about doing them in, it’s a drag. Fortunately my son chops their heads off, I do most of the rest, and we eat’em all year long.
28.
Sour cherry pie with a delicate whole-wheat & butter crust, our own sour cherries but with not too much sugar added: you want to taste the fruit more than the sweet. That’s the best tasting pie in the world. I humbly know.
Hope this helps your project, Mark. Do you need the copy of the questionnaire back? Sorry I didn’t number things the same as your questions. So best wishes to you all and maybe we can dream up an excuse to get together some time. Ever, Larry
Questions from Donald Levering for Larry Goodell
(I was 67 when I wrote this - 2002)
Why Poetry?
I love writing poetry because it gives me delight. There are no strings attached – publication, money, stance. There is only the freedom of the words singing through my soul at the time of writing. Wow, everyone should do it, experience the freshness of it and more and more people are discovering it, letting it discover themselves. Poetry is all I can write without pain. Writing a review or any prose is terribly difficult for me. Revising and reworking is not my bag but writing down something that comes to me out of the blue is. That’s enjoyment because of the surprise since I never know exactly what I/It is going to say and if my ego enters into the writing too much it ceases to be poetry and turns into essay or harangue. Poetry for me is a cooperation between the gift of intuition and me.
Who are you?
I am a 67 year old New Mexican born and nurtured in Roswell. My father’s parents came to New Mexico in a horse-drawn wagon in 1916 and settled in Grenville near Clayton. My mother’s mother came to Roswell in a rail car full of Illinois farmers in about 1902 and my grandfather came from Abilene, Texas to Roswell about the same time. I schooled at USC in Los Angeles and UNM in Albuquerque and my wife and I have been growing vegetables and fruit organically here in Placitas for 30 some odd years. I play the piano by ear and write poetry at least every other day.
Where are you?
I am now here in Placitas, completing a new book of 2002 poems called Breath.
Performance versus(?) Literary Verse?
Any poet can read his or her poetry such that you can hear their voice in your head when you read it from the page. So to me every good poem is to be uttered aloud, from Homer to now. If only we could hear those great dead poet’s voices! That could change history. The trick is to keep a natural order of speech and not “dramatize.” Just good enunciation will allow the music of the words (if there is any) presence enough. Drama kills poetry. Conversational tone slightly heightened, as the meaning and song are heightened into refreshing cadence, is the way of good poetry, at least for me.
Influences?
Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Irby, Stan Getz, Charles Olson, Dave Brubeck, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Williams, DeKooning, Ann Quin, Lenore Goodell, so many many others.
Best/worst moments?
My worst experiences were in the years I was writing in a vacuum thinking Dylan Thomas was my teacher when in reality I had no teacher. But then I met Robert Creeley who gave me a hand and pulled me out of the morass of closed poetry. Listening to his recordings of poets reading and meeting some of them and hearing them taught me to hear my own voice in the open forms William Carlos Williams presented us Americans.
My best experience has come with the gift of Sobriety, a way of beautiful living and Good Orderly Direction that I never truly experienced till age 60.
Poet’s responsibility In These Times?
Sing to the heart of peace always, the passion of love, the productivity and fragility of the Earth, the path compassionate humans can take when realizing we are but one of many species living cooperatively on this precious planet.
Introduction to Firecracker Soup (unused)
Writing is an act of life for a poet whose improvised airs are a page breath.
For me the words
speak through pores
Intro
Writing is an act of life for a poet. His improvised airs are page breaths. It's not for me to know what not writing is since I'm always being written with. The pauses are that: pauses, and then I write, my right place and time only once for that esteemed occasion. What a relief to surprise myself -- only the makeup of myself with all my severe limitations screens the joy.
Or perhaps makes me ordinary. A release into semi-guided fun of my own essential one and only tongue, wagging a new tune that goes till done and not to be mangled with rehashing but is the sacred text of my Goddamned condition. It's always a score a reading aloud at time of writing, a recital – no, a concert of words--hell no, sentences, scores, a going high, a take, a progression, an undulating song, with tips: they say performance. In front of an audience it repeats. And now a book.
The farther from the left margin a line or word begins the higher the pitch in delivery. The bigger the space inside a line, the slightly longer the pause. The word with a single underlined letter is emphatic of course . Line endings are a pause, however slight. And any directions, usually italicized, to the right of the poem is part of it: what needs to be done or donned, a fact arisen at the time of the poem-writing.
I am writing to get to a different place from where I began, where it feels better, some kind of musical word clarification through pun and performance of the airs laid down. Mysterious muse-ic cycle of the Earth, what little bit of it I know: think only of gifts someone might enjoy and even read aloud a time or two.
/for Firecracker Soup 2May89 (The book was published by Cinco Puntos Press in 1990)
larry goodell / placitas, new mexico
Extensions of Poetry
Additional Pieces
Poetry Cake
All this wonderful verbal poetry activity Albuquerque enjoys is the icing on the cake that came before it. In coffeehouses like the Purple Turk across from Johnson Gym, Louis Greenfield’s Bookstore & Coffeehouse downtown, The Grave near Old Town, poetry readings started to pop up here in Albuquerque following the San Francisco Renaissance late 50's. The University reading performances such as Allen Ginsberg in the Anthropology Hall packed to the ceiling energized young poets. Robert Creeley teaching at UNM was a magnet for poets as was his home in Placitas visited constantly by major poets crossing the country. Bookstores – the Yale Street Grasshopper run by Phil Mayne which turned into the Living Batch Bookstore, Salt of the Earth & Full Circle Bookstores – featured almost endless readings & gatherings.Poets in the Schools run by Stan Noyes in Santa Fe paid poets to read & teach across the state. Randall Ackley & others organized Southwest Poetry Festivals in Durango, Albuquerque, Colorado Springs & Santa Fe giving voice to some of the first Native American & Hispanic poets. The Rio Grande Writers Association with Rudy & Patricia Anaya, Keith Wilson, Bobby Byrd, Diana Huntress & many others gave us newsletters & readings state-wide & tried to distribute our books nationwide. Marge Neset organized Downtown Saturday Night festivals where the RGWA set up a coffeehouse in the old Strombergs Shoe building corner of 2nd & Central and sold beer out front so we could pay over fifty poets to read inside – a few at a time! And Albuquerque United Artists formed performance festivals and readings in the AUA gallery downtown in abandoned storefronts and at the Kimo Theater.
The poet as publisher movement I was a part of realized if anybody was going to publish us we would have to publish each other & we did. Voices from the Rio Grande (1976) was one of several great anthologies as well as The Indian Rio Grande (1977). The much later New Mexico Poetry Renaissance (1994) also gave voice to these poets many of whom are still writing.
For pictures and comments concerning these poets please check out my Poet & Artist Friends Album 1, 2 and 3 on Facebook. In Company, an Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960, UNM Press 2004, gathers numerous poems. (published in a local paper The Alibi in April 2010)
Live Audience
(an essential extension of voice and book)
How do you perceive your audience? As large, medium, small, drunken & loud or quiet & anticipatory. A disappointingly small audience challenges me to fight despair & perform to them as well as I can. "Loud" audience is a challenge to win them over. "Anticipatory & listening" is ideal.
Good audience response obviously encourages repeating that poem at the next performance. If a poem falls flat I probably won't try it again. I like for an audience to enjoy the poem-reading, be moved, be amused, be exhilarated, and buy books.
For an American there are appropriate poems for every audience of any size or age on Earth where English is understood. The challenge is entirely mine. I must select appropriately. Selecting the best works for a particular audience is paramount, as well as trying out entirely new works to test the response. Does the audience serve as a gauge for the success or failure? Almost entirely. Otherwise the creating of the work is only very personal therapy.
Ideal audience: Relatively large. Mostly adult. Attuned to the intricacies of American English. Having access to a little booze perhaps. Willing to be transported anywhere the poetry goes. Willing to laugh loud at themselves & myself. Willing to become even more serious about giving Nature back to the Earth.
"The images may be true to an original or not; the public doesn't care. It has gone to look and listen, to laugh and cry - not to think." Henry James' statement is too wordy, as is most of his work. Gertrude Stein has far more interesting quotes on the subject of audience. Your more intelligent audience of any age still values learning something as well as enjoying it. Entertain as well as instruct, or better yet, entertain as well as reinforce everyone's urge to better the world.
I Believe This To Be So
I do performances of my poetry as I have since the 60's & 70's & continuing in bars, in universities, bookstores, outdoors, wherever, using masks, stuffed ceremonial objects, hand-made backdrops, hundreds of things I made and my wife made for me (the stuffed muscle shirt for instance). And then there are poems on scrolls, on strings and paper and wood, balloons, dildos, wall-hangings, and pulled out of in oatmeal boxes, etc., and with handsewn cloth backings, scrolls or hand-painted tortilla.
Nobody else was doing this in performance poetry events that I was aware of. All poets I knew of read their poems from text, period, except the musician poet Jackson Maclow and the ballad singer poet Helen Adam and a few poets who memorized their work, like the rancher-poet Drummond Hadley. I didn't memorize but I used the piano, singing, and tap dance as part of the poem presentation. I provided my own lighting with a floor-lamp and lampshade sewn by my wife Lenore. Everything had to be portable and still allow me to transform the space I performed in to be in harmony with the poems. I am a circus trunk and when mobile my ceremonial space becomes temenos.
6Apr2010Extensions . . .
I know my sources & the use of things extending themselves from the words, as given, such that said ritual is part of myself – costumery, stuffed ritual objects, even full ceremonial drag born in New Mexico. I do a "reading" or should I say rendering or, as they call it and me hesitantly, "performance" of my work, including a few songs IF there is a piano. If there is no piano I bring maracas. An oral elevation of the poem on page with a relationship between props and poems, if any. Since the early 60's I have been doing SOME resurrecting the performance art of poetry lost, it seems, except for a few of us so-called "performers" (like Jackson Maclow, Helen Adam, Drum Hadley). It never seemed I was doing anything "new" by using handmade masks, costumes, backdrops, satyric or ceremonial items, dance movement, voice changes, music of my own, all aspects of poetry as well as straight reading from, but damned if I knew anyone anywhere else doing this, and nobody seemed to know what to make of it, except that they enjoyed it! /1993 concerning early 70's work.
"Every particular is an immediate happening of meaning at large..."
/Robert Duncan Introduction to Bending the Bow
Free Speech Poetry
Free speech poetry burgeons in almost every locality. It’s local intention is at odds or even oblivious to traditional national or international poetry. It bypassed the throttling of bloodless "language poetry," ignorant or oblivious to it. And it remains concurrent with the formalism of MFA poet teachers poetry. It has slammed in and out of slam renewing the Ginsberg/New American Poetry Revolution which continues on. Free speech poetry is vital in its reading performances that are more in larger cities of course. Publish On Demand services such as Createspace bring books out from individuals and cooperative friends as well as established presses. Locality ignites poets because of the living availability of readings and publishing. Traveling and national competitions, ubiquitous local open readings are all free speech poetry, it seems to me, and the proliferation feverishly supports locality and lessens nationally prominent poets.The vitality of readings across most towns is spread by email and social messaging obviously. Open readings and/or featured readers attract poets, would be poets, friends and attendees. At this point almost every poet can have a book or new book to sell and trade with others.
—
"But when the Place is brought forward fully in form conceived entirely by the activation of a man who is under its spell it is a resurrection for us and the investigation even is not extractable. And it is then the only real thing."
/Ed Dorn in What I See in the Maximus Poems
All nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.
/Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne
Insight is always in sight: an action, not a report.
/Cid Corman in a review of Larry Eigner’s Another Time in Fragments
I think we have inherited the Satanic inner nature of the Protestant.
/Robert Duncan
History is a literal story, the activity of evidence.
. . .
The most insistent concern I find in Olson's writing is the intent to gain the particular experience of any possibility in life, so that no abstraction intervenes.
/Robert Creeley in the introduction to Olson/Selected Writings
"It is impossible to write of what one has written or lived, except as the day is, out the window, now, explicit."
/Ken Irby in a 'biog. sketch' for "The Roadrunner Poem"
placitas, new mexico / larrynewmex@gmail.com
Extensions of Poetry (some statements, quotes on)
put together for fellow poets who met January 20, 2018
at Jules Poetry Playhouse in Albuquerque –
several hours of mostly talking about my experience
placitas, new mexico
larry goodell
2018