1) Albert Goldbarth’s Everyday People will be officially on sale tomorrow, and if you’re someone who doesn’t know Goldbarth, I’ll uneasily admit: I did not know him either, until now. Here’s a thing that can happen: one takes certain authors for granted, over and over (even if one’s writing for the blog of a literary journal that’s published dozens + dozens of someone’s poems). This most recently happened to me with Charles Wright, though there are dozens of others as well—authors whose work I end up loving, seething for like some addiction, yet I’m 100% certain I’ve seen their work in magazines for literally years before finally knuckling down and letting them through the door, amazement blowing all over the floors. Anyway, that’s just a long-winded way to say: yes, this is Goldbarth’s 26th book of poetry (if the count in the front of this book’s accurate), and yes, you should probably already know his stuff (I’m embarrassed at not having known his stuff before), but, if you don’t, pick up, post-haste, Everyday People.
1a) It’s out from Graywolf, about which the less I get into here the better (just to keep the hopeless lovey slobbering down), but if you were for some reason engaged in a bet in which, if you lost, you could only read books published by one press for the rest of your life, you really could not choose a better press than Graywolf. I’m not at all kidding. They’re—just this spring—publishing the next DA Powell, and the first book of nonfiction from Kevin Young, and this amazing novel called Spring by a guy named Szalay (trust me: thing’s obliteratively good)…just phenomenal. Anyway.
2) Here’s one example of why Albert Goldbarth’s so great, just by the by—here’s “The Lamps” from Everyday People, and apologies in advance for the irony that yr reading it online:
The Lamps
What the TV says, and the Web Page says, and the fifteen-member Committee
on Reimaging the Product…But I’m thinking
of the story in which the Rabbi is done with the long day’s draining
nineteenth-century labor and drops insensible to his sleeping-straw
still wearing the dung-flecked clothes of the field, then suddenly
looks down at himself from the air, the way the bright release
of oil-light must look down at the smudged and heavy glass
for a minute: and then, the Rabbi ascends for the night
through the level of Cloud, and past the sword-bearing Guardians
with their riddles, and finally unto the gates of Eternity itself,
wherein he wanders until his earthly body reels him back
along a thread of kasha-steam, which we’d call being
downloaded into hard copy, for this is our language
here, the language of buying and selling the lamps,
and not of releasing the genie.
3) Look, let’s be clear: yes, Goldbarth’s published in literally every major venue, is the only author to have one two National Book Awards, yes, all of it. You should have read him by now. I certainly should have. But don’t we all have these folks? Writers we just…skip? I’m sure we’ve all got our list—not of famous books we haven’t read, but of present authors whose work we just take casually for granted, believing it to be as readily available and common as nitrogen or plankton. I apologize if admitting this makes me an idiot or worse; I’d love to think I’m alone, but I know I’m not. Fess up to who you’ve been skipping (Billy Collins, Simic, Kay Ryan, Tretheway, whoever), and go read. Goldbarth, too, for sure: read him if you haven’t already.
2) Look at that poem, “The Lamps.” Goldbarth’s stuff’s marked largely by two traits evident here: a casual genius, a sort that finds and draws connection between any number of disparate things, and also this mobility, a physicality that prevents overnoodle-ization in the poem. These two aspects, together, end up coming together to provide, again and again, the weirdest sensation regarding Goldbarth’s stuff: it reads fast despite being (“The Lamps” notwithstanding) generally long. Some majority of the poems are more than a page long, yet you move through them with astonishing speed. They’re shatteringly interesting to read and experience, these poems, and if you’re not already on Goldbarth’s trail, let this be your don’t-be-as-dumb-as-I invite: get moving. Get reading.
