Albert Goldbarth's Bad Hair Decade
"Maybe if I sit here long enough, someone will mistake me for 'The Thinker.'"
You know what to do, fearless snarkophiles--what was Albert Goldbarth pondering when this photo was taken?
posted by Snark @ 1:54 PM
24 Comments:
"I'll never have hair as good as Jorie Graham's (sigh) . . . ."
"Motor oil makes a nice hair gel"
"Todd Swift, eat your heart out."
wow.. that is great hair. way better than the afro he would sport later on, the the afro with receding hair line
He probably wasn't thinking about writing a strong letter of protest (complete with poem) to Poetry magazine.
If I remember correctly he was probably thinking about promenading on La Vaca if that is the street in Austin I mean.
"I look like Jesus . . . good enough to be crucified"
I want my hair back, Goldbarth, goddamnit.
Lon, you may be right. Perhaps he was going to Charlie's, Austin's oldest gay bar, or the Lavaca Street Bar, an Austin hotspot. I prefer the Red River strip myself though I sometimes find myself on Lavaca. C'mon down sometime, we can make fun of each other in person.
Afterwards...
We can go together to Waco and smoke a joint in the Robert Browning Memorial Library at Baylor and then go out to gaze at the Baptists.
Man do I love putting my chin in my forearm vagina.
I'll meet with you Trochee. I'm in downtown Austin myself.
- Scott
osnapper at mac dot com
Sorry Scott...We can never meet. I am a ghost.
Dang.
- Scott
Sorry, Snark, but "Bad Hair Decade?" Come on, you have to admit that his grimy post-beatnik look is kinda hot. Sure, some shampoo would do a good job washing some of that oiliness out, and his rat's nest of a beard could use a clippers. But hell, if I had run across him back then I would have been all about jumping his bones.
I don't know what he's thinking in the photo, but I'd like to believe it's "Ginger Pennebaker I want to tear off your skimpy negligee and make sweet sweet sex to you all night and morning and all through the humid afternoon."
I prefer it to the Napolean Dynamite look of dome of out current post avants.
http://jacketmagazine.com/28/gordon-r-kunin.html
So this is what it has come to, Poetry Snark? Taking pot-shots at a man's hairstyle? Occassionaly I've found this site to be on-target and interesting-- Occassionaly-- but this is so...lame. Perhaps you've run out of contemporary poetry to "critique" because the poetry is GOOD. And you, Snark, are nothing but a hack poet suffering somewhere in a dungeon MFA program wondering aloud to the Georgia Poetry Prize Gods-- Why not me, Bin Ramke?! Why not me?!
I suggest you take a look at what a real poet is doing these days and give up your childish blog-- I, for one, will probably never come back-- I'm too busy reading and thinking through the beautiful new poems just published by Tessa Rumsey-- a REAL writer and thinker.
Anyway-- just a piece of a reader's mind.
good day, Snark
fuck it, maybe i'll make a snark site in 30 or 40 years . . .
ORNAMENT AND CRIME
A horse with a golden horn glued to its head; a centaur stuck between.
Surrealism and uselessness; a pack pony strapped to a jewel-encrusted.
Tent; oh how these years without you have fashioned me into a parody.
Of ornamentation and its discontents! The future as you remember it.
Does not include a version of my body covered in scrims of decoration.
Or silver-studded clouds hanging over my expertly lacquered head—
Maybe you were expecting a shivering, transparent girl instead? Layer.
Upon layer of meretricious exteriors are required to uncover The Real.
Distorted by smoother surfaces that invite consumption. So stick it.
Where the sun don’t shine. Perhaps you’ll find the pulchritude of such.
Mutations kind of just sneaks up on you, as a mirage of candied colors.
And floating palm trees leads to the desert’s deep dysfunctions. Huh?
Honesty is always the best policy. I am so "not over it." The future I.
Once chose has become more real than the future I was given: thus.
My beloved artifice falls beneath a critique of purest reason. Can’t.
You see what you have done? Time to put my utopic, equestrian skin.
Back on. A dying field of fennel rolls and bucks as I walk through it.
Sparrows flit from limb to limb in chaotic diagrams of how we come.
To lose a home. My braided mane stuck with flowers; a golden rope.
Tied to my neck. Visit me like a ruin. Demolish me with tenderness.
Oh, the humanity of it. Give me Goldbarth!
Dear Tessa Rumsey fan:
What we've been snarking here is the pretentions to greatness of poets like Goldbarth, who appear in these highly pretentious, disingenuous headshots striking some sort of faux- thoughtful, "poetic" or "visionary" pose. The whole activity reaks of self-importance and ego -- the cult of celebrity in contemporary American poetry deserves to be snarked no less than the poetry itself.
Dear "Les,"
Keep up the good work. You're dope getting doper. Any more of that and I'll have to have my lawyer come and look you over. And when that day comes, I hope your breath smells of fennel.
Love,
Ginger
Tessa Rumsey is a very bad poet. But hell, she does have good hair.
No one will notice my hairline receding if I comb it all over like this.
Tessa Rumsey is a fine piece of ass. Much finer than Goldbarth (sorry, Ginger! I'm a woman, but I don't see whatever it is you see in good ol' Al G). Sarah Manguso's not bad, either, and James Galvin can show me his sonnet sequence any day.
Lon Silliman has that dangerous look.
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