Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Larry Goodell

A Congress Unbuttoned

Senator Stallwort should we filibuster?

We could duck under and run for cover.

Representative Pile-Dirt, shall we take off our shirts

and ask the Democrats to suckle our nipples?

Representative Stemfelt & Representative Cockeyes

have decided to block all progress until

their immediate needs are met.

We want money, we want pussy, we want perks.

Filibuster till the cows come home with the moolah.

We want what we need & need what we want.

The President is a Wetback or a foreign spy.

We are Elephantiasis who love to fuck other Elephantiasees

under the desks of propriety.

Representative Stuck in Perpetuity of Dung

has commended the others of his Faith

members of the Donuts Under Crystal Chandeliers

We love sty in the eye progress namely

the more backward we go the more forward we are.

Representative Pissgrunt despises health care

because dying is natural for the lower classes

and the middle classes are already dead.

Representative Doughface & Senator Bathwater say

Lying is good for you and will get you what you want.

The same message heard over and over & repeated verbatim

the constitution of our morning prayer breakfast talking points:

Government sucks. The President sucks.

The Commons is a lie. We don’t need anyone

to take care of anybody because we can

shoot our way out of any situation.

Senator Fuck Everybody But Me agrees.

So does Representative Tea Potty who

was never housebroken and pees in his pants

to show his appreciation of the total stagnation

of government and the election of hate maniacs

to the governorship of some lucky states.

Senator Stallwort, should we filibuster?

Of course, thumb our noses at everybody

suck on our thumbs

and sit on the pile of dung we’ve created

which is unrepresentative government.

larry goodell / placitas, new mexico

(read at Poetry At the Range 9Apr2014)

_______

Active as a poet in Albuquerque area from 1957 on, Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico, learned from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studied with Robert Creeley in New Mexico, went to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 to study with Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Mr Creeley, went to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and married photographer/artist Lenore Goodell in 1968.

Goodell founded Duende Press in 1964 and published one poet per issue followed by poetry and art magazines Fervent Valley and Oriental Blue Streak. At the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, he staged his poetry and fabricated his first event poems. In 1972, he toured the country doing poetry performances with Stephen Rodefer. He organized readings for Downtown Saturday Night, the Rio Grande Writers Association, the Central Torta Series, Albuquerque United Artists, and for many years the Living Batch Bookstore and, more recently, at Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo and the notable Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.

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Peace and Love

by Larry Goodell

Peace and Love –
evolve backwards into the above.
When everything was perfect.
When was that? 
Do you have a balloon under your hat?
Even the super wealthy live in fear of being
deposed.
In fact I am their fear.
“Those poets, why doesn’t someone shut them up?”
Nobody has it easy and it takes guts to get old.
But if you’ve got to have a goal
Peace is pretty good.
Stick those drones up your ass, Mr. Military Fart-face.
Stop warring against your own people, Everybody.
Go against your petty self-serving nature
Mr. Human and stop putting down women &
       screwing over your neighbor.
You don’t need Viagra, you need
Love by the Acre!
Real love that is blushing with compassion.
The ability to touch and hug yourself
            out of this mess.
You need a benevolent group that can
            calm down your ego.
You got your dharma, your teachings, your Wikipedia,
      your books, your intenet, libraries
     of the world – 
You got your Buddhas, your Jesus, your Moses,
     your Black Elks, your swamis
     your gods galore, your teachers –
But you need your Sangha, like Thich Nhat Hanh says
     you need a community, a community of positive 
                                  interests
     to build up the commons, what’s good for everybody
     everybody gives some for the good of all –
Don’t laugh, it’s possible, it’s inevitable, it’s
filling in the blanks, connecting the dots, seeing the vision
     that exists in love, a talking circle of direction
from the drums of the original land, the indigenous
thoughts and prayers, the cycle of the seasons,
the locality of love, and produce, and
cooperation, a locality of friends not
to gouge each other’s eyes out, or
work each other to death for gain
but to get together to build a platform for song,
for music, for performers, and for the art
of governing ourselves.


10/26/2013 for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Albuquerque Reading Performance
larry goodell / placitas, new mexico

photograph by Carl Michener-Rodin. l to r: Joe Bottone, Olivia, Steve Rodefer, Bill Pearlman, Beverly Buffington, Mel Buffington, Laura Linsley at the door, Gene Frumkin, Kell and Betsy Robertson with baby Amy, Charlie Vermont, and me (1968, Albuquerque, North 4th Street across from the present El Patio)

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A Reading From the Book Called February 2013

by Rudolfo Carrillo

That number above this text is difficult to look at, mostly because I never really reckoned it would get that high up on the scale.

You know the one I am jawing about, right? It is the one measured in how many times the earth has gotten around the sun since Christ passed into the other world.

Some say he came back again to demonstrate such a thing, after death, was possible — if only one had the proper inclination toward life. Here a proper inclination is defined by the dude's own transcendent passage through the grimly accurate and tightly wound clock that you and I call home for just a little while.

But I ain't going to be writing on metaphysics today, anyhow, it will be more like a sort of metacriticism. You'll see, you'll viddy that.

First though, I am going to lay a dicho on you that my abuela used to intone whenever something controversial came up.

When I'm done telling you all about that phrase, when I've transcribed it below, I will likely move on to the action part of the post where I do some writing about people from Burque who are from the past, from the now, from the future. Maybe I will also mention the beautiful galactic starlight that is beaming down on our city as I type.

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

***

First off, it has been about a year since David Craven, a gifted teacher, writer, historian, and athlete, died. Craven made his home here in Burque and we were damn lucky to have a man of his caliber working over at the University of New Mexico. I live in the same neighborhood as the professor did and I sure as hell miss seeing him drive his BMW around, usually headed for the classroom or lecture hall.

Craven published extensively and eloquently, was an impeccable researcher and authority on Latin American art; I would need to use the Krell manifestation machine, then clone myself a thousand times and program those replicants to write twenty-four seven to approach his depth and output. 

If you would like an introduction to the man's work, check this out. I think it is damn formidable, and it is about the nature of criticism and tragedy, but you give it a try and come up with your own ideas on it.

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

***
Since I'm kinda leaning toward the subject of the nature of criticism, due to the influence of Craven's writings on my thinking as I note the anniversary of his transformative flight away from this stormy orb, this section of the post could likely provide a great opportunity to write about criticism as it relates to the local arts and literary scene.

Last week, an ulta-chido literary magazine that happens to publish my work came out with a new issue that had all sorts of stuff about Albuquerque and New Mexico floating shimmeringly though it. That ought to serve as a disclosure.

Anywho, besides a bad-ass transcript of poeticized extraterrestrial encounters by Larry Goodell and some indecipherable text strings generated by the robot I play in real life, the new issue of Unlikely Stories includes a narrative that is critical of local slam poet Hakim Bellamy.

I gotta tell you that I wholeheartedly believe that criticism is necessary for art and music and poetry to maintain its edge.

Now listen, before you get on my arse or defriend me or whatever the hell, I want to get this part out first: I have spent most of my life in Albuquerque, New Mexico (except for a portion of the nineties, when I was traipsing around the world like a skylarking sailor on liberty) working, teaching, making art, and writing all sorts of stuff for all sorts of folks, sometimes playing music too. I've done this mostly in obscurity and relished that.

That doesn't mean I have not been paying attention. One of the things I've noticed is that many people within the arts community are loath to criticize each other's work in any sort of substantive or incisive way.

So, practically everyone gets touted as a high-falooting genius with an ancient connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Any other model is considered anathema and dissent is discouraged. In case you want to know, that is a phenomenon called groupthink and I've seen it. The damn thing usually comes out in collusion with a Dionysian and insular disregard for anything that might even be vaguely construed as critical. You can see that happy and congratulatory monster too, I believe. 

On the other side of a coin that is probably fashioned from depleted uranium, there are plenty of humans outside the arts community in these parts that just love to comment on what they run into while surfing the bland infinity at their fingertips. I get people writing me about how full of shit I am, all the time. Some folks get put off by my verbosity, but I don't give a good goddamn. One dude thought I sounded just like T.S. Eliot and I had to laugh an ironic aging hipster laugh because only I know how lousy my work really is.

Honestly, though, I gotta tell you all I support the opinions expressed in that essay over at Unlikely Stories. I think Hakim Bellamy is an fascinating persona, but I don't find what he  writes or reads interesting or challenging. Like a lot of what postmodernism has to offer, there is, in the frantic attempt to express everything all of the time, an amorphous quality in his work that is reflective of a culture that too often settles on what is easy, what can be reduced to efficiently consumable fragments.

More importantly, I believe that the publication of the essay represents an important opportunity to begin a discourse that is long overdue in our community.

And if anyone here in this military outpost in the desert thinks I am some sort of loon for saying that, that I am a hack from the far reaches of the Oort cloud whose only decent work was the ad copy I wrote thirteen years ago for the classified section of this or that alt-weekly, then that's just fine and dandy. That ain't too louche, is it?

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

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NM Poetry: Larry Goodell

We here at Things in Light love poetry. And New Mexico's literary landscape is steeped in the stuff. In celebration of National Poetry Month, TiL will present poetry by members of the exciting and diverse contemporary New Mexico poetry community. The fourth TiL NM Poetry entry provides a three-poem introduction to the work of poet, playwright, and performer of "gringo-loco poetics" Larry Goodell. Active in the New Mexico poetry community for 55 years, Goodell is the founder of Duende Press and the Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.

Xipe Totec

It comes in the form of a prayer but not a prayer to,
a prayer from, those Aztec gods so far south again
are offering up prayers for all the victims of their sacrifices
or is that wishful thinking and the imagination rises
to fill in the empty spaces, and oxygen fills the lungs
and going out through the voice box words are formed
so the real and the unreal are married at last
and you have to have flowers, lots of flowers,
when Aztecs are around
thank you coyotl, thank you tomatl, thank you peyotl
thank you tecolote, thank you Nahuatl -- Quetzalcoatl
Huitzilopochtli, Chalchiuhtlicue, Tlaloc and Coatlicue
and Xipe Totec, what do you have to say as you
parade around in the skin of the sacrificed, are you sorry?
"What? I'm long dead are you sorry why don't you
open up your heart for once?"

Love For Love

as my love for love explodes, and sentimentality dies
“he is drowning in the word” Frank O'Hara says
and I am coming alive in the edges of the word
as I make my way through, like swimming for dear life
through letters which say the most common statement of all
adding an I and a you, proving I’m not alone on this earth
as I breathe water and cough up air and a feeling like no other
begins to save me from myself, it is not all lost but gained
found again, resurgence, an in-love feeling in love of again
that word beaten up worn out abused resurrects itself
and throws itself full frame through my body again
and lifts me like the youngest of lovers into the paradise of hope
as the years bang and trash away and the youth spirit of the present
has been there all the time and I didn’t know it till now.

Easter Sunday 2012

someday I’ll be dead in the circle of love
but will they be singing as I sink into oblivion
or feeding like vultures
on the literary remains.

———

Active as a poet in Albuquerque area from 1957 on, Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico, learned from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studied with Robert Creeley in New Mexico, went to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 to study with Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Mr Creeley, went to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and married photographer/artist Lenore Goodell in 1968.

Goodell founded Duende Press in 1964 and published one poet per issue followed by poetry and art magazines Fervent Valley and Oriental Blue Streak. At the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, he staged his poetry and fabricated his first event poems. In 1972, he toured the country doing poetry performances with Stephen Rodefer. He organized readings for Downtown Saturday Night, the Rio Grande Writers Association, the Central Torta Series, Albuquerque United Artists, and for many years the Living Batch Bookstore and, more recently, at Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo and the notable Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.

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