Martha Silano Reviews Albert Goldbarth's To Be Read in 500 Years
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To Be Read in 500 Years by Albert Goldbarth
(St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2009).
Paper, 176 pp.: $12.00. ISBN: 978-1555975258.
I ran into Albert Goldbarth at this year’s Associated Writer’s Program conference. He was about to take the stage for Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Prize tribute, a reading I would attend, and in which Goldbarth would command the stage as if his life depended on it. However, at this particular moment, he was stooped in pain, having just booked an in-hotel massage. After a day-making hello, he flashed me a half-wince/half-smile: “Martha, whatever you do, don’t get old.”
As I dove into his newest book, To Be Read in 500 Years, I recalled Goldbarth’s pained yet humorously impossible plea. This book opens with essentially the same imploration, reminding us from the get-go that living boils down to breathing and that, with aging, it only becomes more labored. He shares how his mother’s “nostrils very obviously, / greedily inhaling her two ribbons / of air from Earth’s unlimited spool of it, / as if this simple joy will never stop,” and, in a description of Donald Hall, how he stumbled up to the podium, “confused, and frail . . . his central labor . . . breathing.” Just as he’s setting the stage for grave realities, however, he also shares what a crazy hoot it is being human. While he quickly establishes that our existence is fleeting, “all of our residency / is low residency,” this potentially maudlin trajectory does not yield panic or tears. Instead, Goldbarth revels again and again in “what /we do: attempt to make meaning.”
In typical Goldbarth fashion we’re off and running from page one, one minute considering a Tahitian ship “in danger of being pulled apart” as nails were being traded for “dalliances with the pliant and welcoming/ women,” the next hobnobbing with Ovid and Galatea. Sex (“its etiquettes and its violences / and its stink flower gravitational pull / and its ice grip and its swamp of no return”) is well-represented, but so is to how to write poetry: “I tell you, / keep a dream journal. Read of course: read wide / and deep. Revise. Be open. Be rapid / and accurate.” Woven in with his “stump speech exortation[s] . . . delivered in spittle / and neural knotways” he offers all order of excellent advice to would-be poets, asserting that poems are places where all that has been lost (“A spatula and a glove dropped by the space shuttle crew,” along with obscure words and phrases such as prie dieu and houligonusm) has the potential to be preserved.
Goldbarth’s fact-spewing magnificence is nothing short of breathtaking. We’re reminded, despite our brief time on this planet, and despite the limits of language—words that “we discover [are] only sounds: Happiness. Trust. The future”— there is great potential to make a joyful noise. Speaking of words, leave it to Goldbarth to come up with energy-can-neither-be-created-nor-destroyed-osphere, and thoughtiverse.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all follow Goldbarth’s advice on aging as easily as we can his wisdom about writing worthwhile poems? Yet, reading this book I found myself reveling in each factoid musically delivered, assured by Goldbarth’s mental acuity—at 62, he’s a poet at the very top of his game. For its brilliant juxtapositions, its reaching back and forward and everywhere in between, for its whiz-bag word play and general romping good-time, To Be Read in 500 Years must not be racked. I hereby rename this book Glug this Grog Immediately.
Bio
Martha Silano is the author of three full-length poetry collections, What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press 1999), Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books 2006) and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in early 2011. Her work has appeared in over a dozen anthologies, including Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (U. of Iowa Press 2010) and The Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribners), and in many magazines, including Paris Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and American Poetry Review. Silano has received grants from the Seattle Arts Commission, Washington State Artist Trust, and 4Culture, and she has been a fellow at the Millay Colony and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others. Silano teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. She blogs at http://bluepositive.blogspot.com.