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
17 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."
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.
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.
I'll meet with you Trochee. I'm in downtown Austin myself.
- Scott
osnapper at mac dot com
Dang.
- Scott
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
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.
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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