The Now: Poems

by Albert Goldbarth

The Now describes the unique, and sometimes baffling, moment in which we live, a time defined by an immediate future of online wonderments, fake news, multiple personalities, data economy, gene modification, and the rest of the exciting-and-yet-ominous "technology culture," even as it's a time when the urge to memorialize the past—to sing elegiacally—seems more important than ever.
Between poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital/binary communication, and poems that mourn the disappearance of fellow poets and artists, this collection attempts to stand on a nano-second that looks both backward and forward in the ever-shifting "now."
 

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2019

About the author

Albert Goldbarth is an American poet born January 31, 1948 in Chicago. He is known for his prolific production, his gregarious tone, his eclectic interests and his distinctive 'talky' style. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1991 and 2001, the only poet to receive the honor two times. He also won the Mark Twain Award for Humorous Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, in 2008.

Goldbarth received his BA from the University of Illinois in 1969 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1971. He is currently distinguished professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, and he teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Converse College.

Reviews

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Poems that consider the disappearance of language in an age of digital communication,” written with erudite insight and acerbic wit.

Favorite Poems:
“A Talky Trip through Mash-up Time”
“P.L.: 1. What Is It About Our Lives”
“P.L.: 2. The Hum”
“I Never Do Read the Last Chapter”
“‘John Adams just died,’ I announce”
“I’m tired of my student Scott Galloway”
“This Bookmark”
“There Are 26 Bones in the Human Hand (or Is It 27?)”

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

When in 1973 Greg Kuzma’s The Best Cellar Press published Albert Goldbarth’s first freestanding work, the chapbook UNDER COVER, I wrote to Kuzma with the opinion that Goldbarth was “just too much.” Fortunately, I stayed with Goldbarth anyway, and by the time his JANUARY 31 appeared a year later, I was won over and corrected my earlier opinion: Goldbarth is not too much; he’s just trying, with his huge heart and preternaturally fertile mind, to be enough. His 1979 DIFFERENT FLESHES and 1990 poem-essay DELFT remain among his titles I return to and recommend the most.

Now along comes Goldbarth’s latest collection, THE NOW, and it shows that after nearly half a century of prolific work he has not by any means lost his steam.

In the middle of “A Work Week of Muchness” he gives us this:



“Information overload”:
I’ve known people who’ve drowned in these waters;
yet other kinds of people sport like dolphins in the deep.”

In that same poem, after bombarding us with snippets of history, zoology, etc., Goldbarth suddenly comes down to us with this:



“Escrow” : will somebody please the hell
tell me what escrow is.

Also from that same poem:

Fugu, the puffer fish,
in Japanese, one accidental taste of its liver
— or any part of the fish the liver touched — is fatal.
And so (we’re such irrational creatures) the meat is considered
a delicacy — “cut so thin one could read
through the flesh.”


This particular collection could at least in part be read as a more energized companion piece to Sven Birkert ’s THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES. I suppose someone could call Goldbarth a Luddite, but then it would be necessary to explain how far ahead of most of us he is in general knowledge and awareness.

Asked to explain why he wrote poetry, the late Robert Duncan responded: “In order to exercise my intelligence at large.” That same claim could be made fairly and with no trace of bravado by Albert Goldbarth.