Everyday People: Poems
The not-at-all-everyday new poetry collection by Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
1104154974
I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from "What We Were Like"
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth's poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who "in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation" (William Doreski, The Harvard Review).
Everyday People: Poems
The not-at-all-everyday new poetry collection by Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from "What We Were Like"
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth's poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who "in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation" (William Doreski, The Harvard Review).
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Overview
The not-at-all-everyday new poetry collection by Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from "What We Were Like"
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth's poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who "in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation" (William Doreski, The Harvard Review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555976033 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2012 |
| Pages: | 178 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Albert Goldbarth is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including To Be Read in 500 Years and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972–2007. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
Read an Excerpt
EVERYDAY PEOPLE
By Albert Goldbarth
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2012 Albert GoldbarthAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-603-3
Chapter One
Everyday PeopleThe oceans are dying. They require a hero,
or a generation of heroes. The oceans are curdling
in on themselves, and on their constituent lives,
they're rising here, and lowering there,
I swear I've heard them gasping. And my friends ...?
Are brooding over who their kids are playing with
on the streets. Are coming home after a day where some
midlevel management weasel sucked
their souls out like a yolk from an egg—right through
a tiny puncture-hole in the dome of the skull. The cat
has worms. The price of gas is nearly what
their grandparents' wedding rings cost. The oceans
sorely need a paladin, but my friends are exhausted
disputing how many angels can trample the truth
from a twelve-dollar overcharge on a cell-phone bill.
Our privacy is disappearing, cameras sip it up
like thirsty beasts surrounding a shrinking pool of water, my friends
are worried, oh yes certainly they're worried, but also the tumor
and the marriage and the alcoholic uncle. The war
that's this war but is any war and all war is requesting
a little attention in the cause-part, maybe only
a little more in the effect-part, but my friends know
how impossible it is to attend to even a single other
person sufficiently, plus the dentist, plus the eye exam,
and can't they spend some time renewing their sense
of making beauty in this wreckage, Edie
her hummingbird feeders, Sean his libretto, Omar
his amazing organic noodles: something like Balenciaga
the haute couture designer whose life I'm reading compulsively
while the ice caps and the red tide and the polar bears,
Balenciaga for whom "the business of making beautiful things
absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life
for anything else," he did a piece of sewing "every day
of his adult life: from the age of three," in 1913 (age eighteen)
"he was learning the women's-wear trade" as the guns
of the World War cleared their throats and aimed, and through
the world depression, "a fishnet cloak
of knotted white velvet, and swathes of parachute silk
to make pink-and-white flowers," and through
the Spanish Civil War, "regarded making dresses
as a vocation, like the priesthood, and an act of worship,"
through (he bargained with Franco) World War II,
chantilly, chenille, mohair, tulle,
"he took the sample of intractable material
into his sanctum and returned in only moments
with a superbly accomplished buttonhole: it
would have been a half-hour's labor for anyone else,"
a buttonhole while Israel was forged in 1948,
a buttonhole for Sputnik, yes a buttonhole,
a perfect—consummate—buttonhole, is this
a condemnation of my friends (and so myself)
or an exoneration? I truly don't know: any more
than I can tell if the boy in Rembrandt's etching
Christ Preaching (circa 1652) is celebrated
or ridiculed (or possibly, with a complicated fondness,
both) for yielding to his innocent daydreams, lost
in drawing figures in the dust on the floor, as only a few
feet overhead, on an impromptu stage in inkily velvet blacks
and the dramatically empty spaces that signify sun,
the Master holds forth with his parables
while a crowd of the commonplace—beggars and burghers—
listen, enrapt. Two-hundred-and-twenty years later,
Adolph von Menzel paints Departure
of King Wilhelm I to His Army on 31 July 1870; here
we see the fashionable (and patriotically worked-up) throng,
waistcoated men and richly bustled women by the hundreds
as they line that famous avenue of lime trees, gas lamps,
wind-snapped flags, the Unter den Linden, to witness
their king in his cavalcade, off to join the troops
—at age seventy-three!—in defending their nation
against the French ... they look at him, these members
of a time and place, as if they form a single compound eye.
Except for the paper boy, with the day's news
over an arm. He has eyes solely for
a friendly dog on the pavement. Someone has to
sell the Berlinsche Nachrichten (maybe it's
the Berlinsche Zeitung). Someone needs to carve this
personal moment out of that heavy communal block
of pomp, accomplishment, and (soon, at the battle front)
butchery. This crowd ... do they disperse,
go home, and that night dream
my dream of my friends? It comes to me so often these days.
My friends who are busily sorting the glass from the plastic
for the recycling cart. My friends the oil change and tune-up,
the interview, the team to cheer, the argument
and the apology—and some of them the intricate and cheesy
psychological architecture (like the windmill-strewn
and dragon-populated Putt-Putt golf course) of denial
of the need for an apology. My friends the e-mail list
on carbon footprints. And a tad of porn. With guilt,
with beer, with in-laws, with the lawn, with the tuition.
With their lo-cal, and their hi-tech, and deluxe.
I see them gathered, and then falling
down a long and floating drop, not
through an astronomer's darling black hole, not
through Alice's Wonderland rabbit hole, but
falling through a buttonhole,
into the lives of everyday people.
Natural State
I'm sitting at Nathan's, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle
"no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)":
he'll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported
by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up "daddy chair":
those philosophical poems of William Bronk's. What's
most delightful is that Tristan, 11, and Aidan, 10,
are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novel
that squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyes
in its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins.
Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous book
and its battle of shadow and radiance was over.
Each of us: his individual book; and yet
the silence is communal. This is a natural state
at Nathan's. Rebecca, however, is reading the Sunday paper
and so serves, without saying a word, to remind us
how natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, 7,
to fall while running and burn out his eye
on the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, 9,
to have come home from school and excitedly been
the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parents
peddled as "young fun" over the internet. This
was what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered it
as comfortably as Tristan does his opened world
of sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since use
x frequency = familiarity. That's the strict, imperious math
of everybody's insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me what
this thing "vermouth" was (she pronounced it "mouth") and ordered
quiche as if it were the brother of "touché"; but then
she needed to explain to me why C-C was the "bottom bitch"
and what a "T-girl" is and how to put down money
on Ice's book at "the county," by which
she meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsed
the slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the species
where "the female has no anus" and the one with "tiny parasitic
males [that were] embedded in one female's flesh like blackheads"),
"squinty ... laborious," were among the final decades of hundreds of years
when a woman in China would suffer ritual footbinding,
at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toes
were bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet)
and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable
"shrunken plums" and "three-inch golden lilies" sought
by marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-law
would check below the hem, and reject any feet
over four inches long. Entire generations of women could only
mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the air
and the light and "the-way-of-things-forever" that
you woke up into every day ... as natural as the implicit laws
in Aidan's book, by which a bear converses
with a girl in growly mutualspeak, and a boy
of sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascend
their sky with the unremarkable grace of birds
in ours. That's ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidan
subjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship,
and the code of those of innocent spirit
about to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, and
the governing instruction of gods with the heads
of wide-eyed animals ... and even now, Sherena texts
my phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINE
GOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE, as if
these two reports were equally weighted. There's
that famous and charming anecdote in which Darwin's
second son George is at the house of a playfriend,
looking around, and casually asks him
"Where does your father do his barnacles?"
Our Heroine Ellen, and Three Pals
Alia Sabu, 18, is "the world's youngest college professor."
Check. The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius occurred in 79 AD,
and victims left hollows that "cast in plaster, yield details
as eerily fine as the imprints of one man's eyebrows." Check.
Over in England, Guy Hawkes Day is celebrated
Whoa. Fawkes. Check. If Keats had had
a publisher's fact-checker overpresiding his own
pell-mell exquisitudes, the European discovery
of the Pacific would never have been—as it was,
and as it remains—misattributed. Ellen ticks
mechanically down the list that will lead her to lunch
(with Thelma the poetess, Short George king
of the online crypto-universe, and Dora the orphan
and amateur genealogist: her fact-checker pals), so one
two three, it's: distance of Epsilon Eridani; name
of the Japanese lunar orbiter; date of the earliest
temple so far excavated ... and all the while the "her"
of her, the irreducible I, is floatingfloating,
like a dust mote, like an astronaut untethered,
through the fancies the subconscious burbles fecundly
nonstop in us ... in her, right now, a sea-breeze beach
beyond the blot the X-ray hunted down in her shoulder,
beyond the divorce ... she floats ... there is no fiction-checker
hired by the brain, in fact the brain requires a space
in itself ungoverned by the actual ... the moon
in the waves, the scent of the lei of flowers that serves
to complement her neck and naked breasts ... 10.5 light years;
Kaguya; 10,000 BC. The joke at lunch is
they yell "check!" at the flustered waiter in unison.
Short George tells Thelma he could build an online crypto-England
in which Keats survived and married Fannie Brown, no,
Fanny Brawne, check. They all riff on this delightful possibility
a little ("Twins." Twins? "Pair o'Keats."), with Dora
all the while, all this same time, also sitting in the cellar
of her mind and in its private dark imagining
the kiosks and the poverty and the bright flags in the springtime
in those two East European countries she knows her parents
came from though she doesn't yet know which ... the woman
about to be her mother making clumsy girlish vamp-eyes
(over the suds of the backyard laundry tub) at the man,
the private in spit-shine boots and dapper mufti, about
to become her father, as these two (now
the various fantasies blend in one communal psychic weather)
parakeets coo on a swing in their gilt-work bird cage
in a parlor where the Keatses are—the phone rings,
"John would you please answer / phone? / [well, yes,
a retropostulated steampunk phone they call
a transaudion] the trans?"—"Hullo? Keats
residence." "Hello, sir, my name is Alia Sabu. I'm
an assistant professor of English engaged in researching
your sonnet on Chapman's Ovid (no) on Chapman's Homer
(check) and"—then the frying-pan noises and sputtering out
of global communications as the smutch from Vesuvius
circles the earth—"Fanny!" "John, the children!"—the plume of it
so high even Kaguya is floatingfloating like a fishing bob
riding a current—"The children are drowning ...!"—and work
resumes. Our heroine, Ellen, is back
at her task of verification ... even as, somewhere inside her
no less needed and persuasive than the place
of her employment (and its mission to confirm), she
heeds those cries, she rises immediately from her languor
on the sands, she races pell-mell to the violent waves
—her lei is lost to the evening air—and pulls the two
Keats children from their near death in those crazily
volcano-flustered waters.... Jacob Pinker-Sachs: "No matter
how coolly rational the small globe of our consciousness is,
it rides on a heated sea of childlike play;
and alternative selves and trial-and-error futures
nod and wobble on the top of this like fishing bobs." (I made
that up.) At home tonight Short George is making up,
online, the rules and shoes and musics and peninsulas
of an entire cosmos. Why not? Someone hurt him
once, and here he heals. Someone grabbed him
by the smitten-bone, grabbed him by the spigot
where the juice of infatuation enters the blood, and he was severely
pummeled, and never the same, but here he's the master
of clouds and swords and fishing fleets and mass migrations
and here he can sorcer into existence a cure for the thing
that eats its way through Ellen's shoulder and Keats's lungs,
and here Short George can manfully declare his love for Dora,
which he'd never do in the bruises and blades of the "real world,"
and Dora right now is online finally nailing down
her parents' nationalities. Hungarian. Czech.
"The Human Condition"
—of course. What else is there to write about?
Somewhere this side of the smelting-fires,
the sabers are being forged; and kingly broadswords,
in a shower of sparks; and those wicked, twisty
dagger blades the hillmen use; there is, after all,
such devil-spawn apostasy to fight against: the tents
to torch, the villages to turn to kindling.
Somewhere else, another kind—a metaphoric kind—
of conflagration fills the flesh: entire dynasties,
and courts of law, and mothers' sleep, will sunder
and snap like fat on the grill, as lust consumes
its way across the borders of two young people's lives,
the way lust will, the way that joy
in our sexual selves is zealous for completion ...
just as somewhere else, it's the sudden combustion
of godly light in a penitent's breast that carries
in it the vision of warrior seraphs
and a grace so intense that it sears....
Worlds shake. There is gnashing, there are hosannas.
Even so, if the "condition" is "human,"
it also must attend
to Neil
losing at online poker tonight. And Chandra:
totaling her acceptance and rejection slips.
And Juddie Q: his regular connection,
who he trusted, delivered a bag of product
obviously cut with inferior goods from someone else's
dead-end hustle. And Della: rosining
her bow; and thinking soon her chin
will be cupped—we might say intimately
cupped—and the strings will take her away
on their boulevard into another world. And Dan:
a week of committee meetings. Little things;
little things. My grandparents
came here
from Russia and Poland over a century back now.
Orthodox Jews are supposed to avoid all secular labor
over the Sabbath—cooking, for instance, or even simply
striking a light. And so one burner on the stove
might be left on, at a minimum level, the way
that earlier an ember might be saved
for as long as possible through the night
—kept low, and patient
in case a greater flame was called for.
The Poem of the Little House at the Corner of Misapprehension and Marvel
"... during Napoleon III's coup d'etat when one of his officers, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, 'Ma sacree toux! (My damned cough).' But his lieutenant, understanding him to say 'Massacrez tous! (massacre them all!),' gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly."
–Guy Murchie
"He was mortared to death."
A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.
—Or "martyred"? Not that /coin-flip/ either
makes a difference to the increasingly cooler
downtick of a corpse's cells. "We heard the crazy mating joy
of the loon across the water." Yes, but what
do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.
It might have been dying, announcing
its pain in those trilling pennants. It might
have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week
and never found by the volunteer searchers,
it might have been her ghost
with an admonishment. The truth is,
even among ourselves we often can't distinguish pain
from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone
of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because
we know the urgency of some utterance;
and the intended goodwill of our listening; and
the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,
of lung: 300 million alveoli that, "if spread out flat,"
as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, "would come to
750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,"
and she added that tired magic about how atoms
of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did
their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation
of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think
that the atoms of Cleopatra's body—my Cleopatra,
inflating her see-through empresswear
with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also
realized in my own dim way it wasn't only Einstein,
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EVERYDAY PEOPLE by Albert Goldbarth Copyright © 2012 by Albert Goldbarth. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Most of Us....................3Everyday People....................7
Natural State....................10
Our Heroine Ellen, and Three Pals....................13
"The Human Condition"....................16
The Poem of the Little House at the Corner of Misapprehension and Marvel....................18
Miles....................21
How Did They Live?....................29
A Story....................31
The Winds....................33
STD....................35
Ws....................37
Minnows, Darters, Sturgeon....................38
Bone....................40
October....................41
Coming Back....................43
An Explanation....................45
Emma (Mrs. Charles) Darwin....................49
The Asparagus Tongs....................50
With Quotes from William Irvine's Account of the 19th Century Scientist-Explorer Thomas Huxley's Life....................52
Goth Boy: An Instruction....................55
The Storm....................58
Dynamics....................59
The Poem of the Dance of the Real....................60
"A great volume....................62
Charles's Compliment....................66
Zones....................71
Struck Together....................72
Honeycomb, Calling....................74
Whatever Surrogate....................75
Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators' Houses....................76
A Few of the Ways to Say It....................79
Our Argument, Like the Thunderstorm,....................81
That Re- (What We Are)....................82
The Nose in Feet....................85
Altered....................88
Over Miles of Iowa Fields: Snorkel, Karaoke, Leaf....................91
Round, Polished Stones....................95
The Lamps....................99
Perception Poem....................100
Crazy Way....................102
Smallish....................104
Off from Shore....................105
The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan....................107
A Typo for "Paths of Gravel" on Page 17 of Jack Williamson's Demon Moon (Tor Books)....................108
A Weather....................110
Before Refrigeration....................112
"A Toast!"....................113
A Partial List of Unacknowledged Musics (Feel Free to Add Your Own)....................115
Countries....................118
The Versions....................125
Return Suite: The Little Click....................127
That Was the Year....................135
Unseen....................137
The Story of Wax and Wane....................142
Linear....................147
Bright Motes in the Corner of Your Eye....................154
Prophecy Song....................157
"The slips for G....................159
A Word of Warning....................160
The Whole of the Law of Our Human Vision....................162
The Bivalves Proof....................163
Disproportionate....................165
Toward It....................168
Practice Journey....................171
"He held out his hand. 'Zarth has told me that this was the gesture of greeting in your time.'"....................183
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