Goldbarth, Albert
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1948- ) US academic, collector of 1950s space toys and poet who remains outside the loose grouping of poets (see Poetry) that has dominated American sf poetry for many years; he has not, for instance, ever won a Rhysling Award, though he has received some more general recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle award twice. His one novel, Pieces of Payne (2003) is a disjunctive Fabulation. Along with Thomas M Disch and Bryan D Dietrich – though not perhaps James Merrill because The Changing Light at Sandover (omni 1982) accesses its sf content through occult means – Goldbarth may be the most important contemporary poet in America who habitually foregrounds the use of sf topoi and tropes. Even more than Disch, many of his poems are in fact sf narratives.
From the early 1970s, in various collections beginning with Under Cover (coll 1973 chap), he has published work whose long-lined loose-seeming expansiveness seems rhetorically to express a panoptic vision, a highly energetic project to grasp the whole of things. Less successful poems can be shambolic, though Original Light: New and Selected Poems 1973-1983 (coll 1983) is an astute selection from his earlier work. Much of the material assembled in Marriage, and Other Science Fiction (coll 1994), Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007 (coll 2007) and To Be Read in 500 Years: Poems (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009) more successfully matches form to grasp. Goldbarth's central technique is similar to a central characteristic of the workings of Fantastika in general: that although figures of speech may of course flower, at the heart of his work there is nothing – no Spaceship, no Time Travel – that is not meant literally. In his work, sf topoi are not metaphors of the human condition; they comprise the human condition, seen slantwise. A good example may be the title poem (Spring 1993 The Paris Review) of Marriage, and Other Science Fiction, in which a time traveller concludes his observations of twentieth-century marriage:
... he thinks this is the age
when people "worked at" marriage ...
__________________________________He
tries to remember: did they tell time by notched bones?
or by monitoring their protein-code mutation? or the cesium atom?
No, no – now he remembers this age.
A "watch", they called it: two hands held a face.
[JC]
Albert Goldbarth
born Chicago, Illinois: 31 January 1948
works (selected)
- Pieces of Payne (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2003) [pb/]
collections
- Under Cover (Crete, Nebraska: Best Cellar Press, 1973) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/nonpictorial]
- Coprolites (New York: New Rivers Press, 1974) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/]
- Curve: Overlapping Narratives (New York: New Rivers Press, 1976) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/Albert Goldbarth]
- Original Light: New and Selected Poems 1973-1983 (Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1983) [poetry: coll: hb/Joyce Carol Oates]
- Arts and Sciences (Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press/Persea Books, 1986) [poetry: coll: hb/]
- Popular Culture (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1990) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1991) [poetry: coll: hb/from William Blake]
- Marriage, and Other Science Fiction (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1994) [poetry: coll: hb/Susan Olcott]
- Adventures in Ancient Egypt: Poems (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1996) [poetry: coll: hb/]
- Combinations of the Universe, (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2002) [poetry: coll: hb/]
- Budget Travel through Space and Time (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2005) [poetry: coll: hb/]
- Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972-2007 (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007) [poetry: coll: hb/John Schoenherr]
- To Be Read in 500 Years: Poems (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009) [poetry: coll: pb/Jack Gaughan]
- The Loves and Wars of Relative Scale (Seattle,Washington: University of Washington Press, 2017) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/]
nonfiction
- Great Topics of the World: Essays (New York: Picador, 1996) [nonfiction: coll: pb/]
- Dark Waves and Light Matter: Essays (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1999) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
- Many Circles: New & Selected Essays (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009) [nonfiction: coll: pb/]
links
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