Last week, on this blog, I asked a question that I didn’t try to answer: “Where is the great nonsense of our time?” Might it be found in the lines of Loren Goodman? I’ve taught Famous Americans, Goodman’s 2003 debut collection (and winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition), nearly every year for the past decade. His poems seem, at times, to be anti-poems: they’re indexes, biographical timelines, bloodmobile schedules. The prevailing principle is one of uncertainty. (In “Remembering Werner Heisenberg,” Goodman writes that Heisenberg was the son of “an Italian sharecropper and a Dynamo,” “a shoemaker and an air balloon,” “a Jesuit and a cough drop.”) In his foreword to the collection, W. S. Merwin writes: “His aim is not satire itself, with its relatively definite moral position, but plain ridicule: the revelation of nonsense thinly masked in the familiarities of persuasion and self-presentation all around us.” Later in the foreword, Merwin returns to the theme of nonsense:
He clearly loves nonsense for its own sake. It appears to be the source and guide, the heart, of many of the writings in this collection, including several of the more ambitious and successful ones, so that in the course of the book it appears to be nonsense itself, as it occurs to him, that Mr. Goodman is exploring. Nonsense becomes a kind of thread of vitality running through the clichés and assumptions of the recognizable world.
Our languages, our observances, our “clichés and assumptions,” are always in need of being upended. Even our best-loved poems need the occasional shakedown. Goodman hasn’t (as best I can tell) published widely since he won the Yale Prize; instead, he’s written a doctoral dissertation on Japanese boxing and taken a teaching position in South Korea. But he did publish a poem in Poetry that caused a stir. Titled “Traveling Through the Dark (2005),” it adjusts William Stafford’s anthology piece by a single word. It’s Carrollian nonsense of the highest order; you can read it here.
(Goodman also published a couple of chapbooks—in 2008 and 2010, respectively—that are hard to find. And more recently he published a pretty great boxing poem.)
I’ve crossed paths with Goodman exactly once (at a Seattle bookstore, for about five minutes, soon after Famous Americans was published), but I’ve trumpeted his work on this blog and on The New Yorker’s blog and in assorted classrooms for what feels like a lifetime. As callings go, it’s probably a nonsensical one. But then maybe that’s the point.
Babe Ruth’s birthday is tomorrow; he turns 121. Here’s Goodman, on Ruth:
Babe Ruth . . . He was the player who set the standards for excellence in baseball—hitting 25,000 homeruns in a single season and taking the life of his only son during the world series. Now, countless believers make pilgrimages to a grotto near Lourdes to pray to the immortal Babe Ruth.
Equally at home hauling grain across America’s rolling wheat fields, bringing the family into town on Saturday night or silhouetted against the skyline of a great city, this legendary player is suspended on poles of gleaming brass, alert to every sound, every movement.
