Geoff Young: Style, Insight, and Durability (Terence Winch)

 

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 and provocations 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.”     

 

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  geoffrey young blessing the multitudes

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 primarily 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," says Young), the full extent of his creative brilliance is increasingly recognized.

 

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.

 

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

You might also like: this photo of geoff young

Comments

[Lallyjmf@comcast.net]

I agree wholeheartedly. And thanks for the link to the interview, brilliant.

[Howard Bass]

Thank you, Terence, for your insights that make me want to purchase a book of poetry for the first time in years (I'm assuming, of course, that I can still get yours at no cost).
hb

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Howard, but you may be able to get Geoff's at no cost as well. See this from a poem in his new chapbook: "...The white shark, fear-/Less in its field,/Outruns the current, reminding/Everyone who writes/To give it all away."

[Bill Nevins]

Ah, now I am cured of my abysmal ignorance and I know the work of Geoff Young, and treasure it. Thanks, Professor Winch, you are a godsend. Ah, the Easter Snow, it fades away too soon.
Bill Nevins