Geoffrey Young: Style, Insight, and Durability

                                                 Geoff Young blessing the multitudes
 

Let us now praise Geoff Young. In particular, the poems in Lights Out, which I think of as one of the necessary books of our time. In Geoff’s work, all kinds of pleasures abound—you get the playful silliness and verbal inventiveness of Ashbery, the sharp urbanities of O’Hara, the autotelic experimentalism of the Language school. Which is not to say that Young’s work is a collage of other writers’ talents. No, he is a unique voice. Lights Out, his most comprehensive book, is a full-service collection, in which all your poetry needs are met, whether for wit, narrative, or love and its loss:

Geoffrey Young

I am light, comfortable,

and best of all, I really work.

I’m still headquartered here

but production takes place

nearly anywhere, having come

a long way from the scissors,

tape, and drawing board

of just a decade ago

on the coast. The inspiration

remains the same, however:

To create works that provide

style, insight, and durability

for active people of all ages.

Thank you for choosing

“Geoffrey Young.”

###

I sometimes think that those writers who become publishers, editors, or anthologists take a risk with their own reputations as artists. In a universe of very needy and ambitious writers, these brave souls will be seen only in their role as servants to the needy. As publisher of The Figures, a press that put out more than a hundred titles by central players in the Language movement and others (including me), Geoff was probably known more as a publisher than writer. But, with the press now dormant (defunct, Young says), the full extent of his creative brilliance is increasingly evident.

The Cover Letter

Enclosed please find

my distinctively postmodern

bourgeois notions, within which

I trace the negative dialectic

to its resting place (herein radicalized)

in domestic phenomenology,

positing itself at the center of identity,

exclusionary and logocentric

effects which defy narrativity

even as they elaborate systems

of domination from beginning to end

in a rather bizarre defiance

of reading itself. Interventions

impose their ambiguities,

to truncate irony, to pique your

interest. I could get you going,

a paean to Adorno’s adage, or just

the opposite truth. Fragmentation thus

is coherence, like the pitch of a flat

roof, yielding to genius and pluck. I beg

you to consider my length.

###

22. Remains Concerning Brooklyn

Like a black hole

I discovered more about you

when I stopped seeing you at all.

You were a star

whose collapsing core

had become a point of infinite density

known as a singularity,

your singularity newly re-defined

by the info that you were involved

with someone else.

You’d slipped over the event

horizon, passed the gravitational point

of no return. I can’t call

you anything now, not even a

liar. Because you don’t exist anymore.

[from The Dump]

###

The Riot Act and Fickle Sonnets: also books of rare intelligence and skill:

A Roman Stutter

There was a time

When I didn’t exist

And you didn’t exist.

And there’ll come a time

When I don’t exist

Though you do,

Or a time when

You don’t exist

And I do. What

Could be more depressing?

If not to remember

There’ll come

A time when

Neither of us does.

###

Finally: an interview with Geoff Young by Tom Fink, full of electricity and yet more style and insight.

###

This post appeared originally on the Best American Poetry blog on July 9, 2009, 17 years ago. Since that time, Geoff Young has been anything but idle. In fact, I can't think of any poet who has been more prolific than Geoff, now 82 years old. He has published an astonishing 50 or so books and chapbooks since 2009. Each one is marked by his signature wit, sharp perception, and linguistic dazzle. To add to this accomplishment, many of these titles also feature his visual work, characterized by his striking use of color.   

                                                                 some recent books by Geoff Young

Here is what I wrote for the back cover of one of these books (33), but the praise could apply to any of his works: 

These poems accept the facts, no matter what. The language is sharply contemporary in content and attitude, though the literary past shadows all that is said. Geoff Young speaks to us wisely, wittily, imperatively, and we better listen. He is “a witness not unlike/ the very light falling/ on each and every thing.” And “Fool for Love,” like many another of these sonnets culled from the past few years, belongs in the Poetry Hall of Fame, that august body located high on a cliff overlooking Bedlam.

©Terence Winch  
Permission required to use any of the contents of this post.