Larry Goodell from Artspace 1976

8/2/2019 Larry Goodell from Artspace 1976

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LARRY GOODELL

from ARTSPACE Southwestern Contemporary ArtsQuarterly, Volume 1, Number 1,

Fall 1976.

from The Staff June 1972

from The Bowl October 1972


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photo: Bob Christensen

LARRY GOODELL

Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1935.He attended the University of Southern California andstudied under Robert Creeley at the University of NewMexico. In 1964 he attended the Vancouver PoetryConference to hear Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg,Whalen, Levertov and Avison. He was also present at thepoetry reading sessions in Berkeley during the summer of1965. He is editor of Duende Press and also edited

Albuquerque-Detroit Family (1967) and Oriental BlueStreak (1968). His poetry has been published in Blue

Grass, Sympton, Caliche County Rendering Works, New

Mexico Quarterly, Tolar Creek Syndicate, Criss-Cross,

Dodeca, and Fervent Valley (which he also edits). Goodellhas written a short novel, several plays and radio plays inaddition to conceiving some of the most innovative,entertaining and provocative performances ever to challengetraditional poetry reading procedures. Goodell has lived inthe mountain village of Placitas, New Mexico sine 1963.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FOR ARTSPACE

Every one of the powerful poets I have beenaround have taught me things. My notebooks arefull of them. I believe in the common-place bookthat Jonathan Swift talks about, a supplementamemory. I can write down anything I pleasewhether it pleases me or not later. Then I type outpoems, or whatever. I make my own notebooks. love the pre-Columbian codices and hate theCatholics for burning sacred books, but I loveSahagun and Fray Diego Duran.I love the Aztecsand I love my wife. This is a slightly affectedautobiography but it is a miracle for me not towrite poetry.

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few poets can raise the dead, much lessraise themselves above the written word upon the flat

plane, few artists can affect my thinking withsuch profound enjoyment, to experience a Larry Goodell

reading is to hear a shamanistic jam session at akundalini beach party, he is the skinny bridge

between two parallel worlds- a genie destroying hisbottle, unfortunately we all walk around in our

little bottles unable to leave our too-tightthought processes behind and journey into

the realms of pure imagination,fortunately for my life, my

rational mind was dissolved by Larry'sperformance at the Thunderbird Bar and

replaced with the Humour of God.

Jeff Bryan

1968 for me was a downright remarkable year.I was 33. I was in a play we called Wherever She

Blows in which Bill and Meredith Pearlman andMel Buffington and a dancer named Gandalf andI made the whole thing up. Bill and Mell and Iended the thing by each of us reading a poemwhen the spotlight would hit, and I did things tothe back of my poems. I became aware of thebacks of all my poems. I fixed them up and diddesigns on them. I would tear a poem in two whenI was reading it in the spotlight. We slowly as thespotlight went from one to the other began tomove away from page dependency and wouldmake up poems. Make up things. Jump up anddown.

Later in the Spring that year Larry Morris askedme to talk to his class at UNM. I was up all night

putting together magic box poems called MakingIt, which is the meaning of poetry. In each of theseven different boxes there was a different eventpoem, all the way from word sounds to chance,from cut-up method to semantic punning, theaudience writing the poems for two of the boxes.(I handed IBM cards out and had them writethings on them and then shuffled them and read

them.) One calledGeneral Westmoreland's Nutshad peanuts in it which I ate as I read a Burroughs

cut-up of a mixed nuts can label. One calledIdealPoemhad the first useful mask I've ever made init, a little collapsible silvery thing that fit over myeyes. Somebody would mix all the boxes aroundand I would go through them one by one.

I did this for Larry Morris's class and a week laterI went into Steve Rodefer's class after havingstayed up all night putting together a thing called

The Fool. In this event poem I read nothing atall. I handed to the audience cardboard, paperand a tube with poems on them, and I handedthem the I Ching, the World Cook Book, theEgyptian Book of the Dead, say, etc. and theywent around in a circle two people readingsimultaneously, reading the page they'd happenedto open the book up to, or the poem I'd handedthem. While this chanting went on I was busy atmy Magician's table going through the motions ofcreating the world. I'd made replicas of the Earthand the Moon and many more things. And I keptmoving around never saying a word but followingmy ritual directives step by step. At one point I hada huge Texas dollar bill sticking out of my hippocket, a huge Gordon's Gin headdress, a tie onbut no shirt on, and I'm moving a plastic replica ofthe Polaris missile through the air. I screweverything up and have to start creating the worldall over again. I scatter seeds from a pouch that'stied to the end of my world-creating whirler and sit

down, and that's the end of The Fool.Now that I look back on it I was getting as far

away as possible from a typical monologue poetryreading which I'd been to hundreds of times bythen. I do not feel that an audience has anyobligation to listen to a poet read his or her workIf it's boring just get up and leave.

I am dedicated entirely to oral poetry. Reading isa nice thing to do especially to discover secondarysources which might ignite the primary sourcewhich is yourself. For contemporary poetryhearing it from the poet is the test, no matter whatthe lit critters say. Increasingly you can give spaceto someone's voice, but your life can get jammed

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Larry Goodell stands with the poise of a rascal in aribald tremor of objects. His paraphernalia aren't just stageprops used to add realism. They are icons, landmarks reallyin what a friend calls a mythic Comic Book world. His poemsmontage words and things that eat each other. To enter hiscosmos, we must not begrudge the visual, an eye in an earHis songlike rhyme, half rhyme, no rhyme alliteration processkeeps you reevaluating what you're hearing, finding soundconnections (a truely semiotic process) until you hit theproper dimensionless, colorful character/voice. It's ComicArt! It's not a poetry reading exactly, but more like anamorous troubadour convention. Another friend sees a rituapassage process, maybe the purest ritual overabundancethe New Mexico spring could ever carry to consciousnessNo dreary drunkenness, only hermaphroditic maps.

Jim Rupper

up with the printed word. So all the more importantfor that voice to be worth hearing. [Charles] Olsontold us young poets we weren't doing things largeenough, we had little bits-and-pieces poems. That

big man told us that and struck a reverberantchord in me. I've always been interested in riskingmyself at the boundaries others impose on me.I've always wanted large forms. Novels, plays,events, creating a worldbut never just the singlepoem with somebody's explication on the oppositepage. The job of the poet is "to build us his world,"Ezra Pound said.

Now that I look back on it I was exploring to thehilt the tremendous longing for rite in me. Living allmy life in New Mexico observing people with their

own meaningful rituals, I wanted my own, and hadonly me to come up with it. The Fool allowed meto be a Magician and at the same time realize whoexactly I am, a Scotch-Irish-Cur-New Mexican,skinny and with too high a voice. And wheneverthings got too serious there I was the FOOL.Magician and Fool at once. The sacred and theprofane. The clown-priest, but not really, just me.

TheI Chingand the Tarot figure constantly in mynotebooks at this time. Taking of sorts. Pointingthe finger at a text and reading. Shuffling cards

and reading. And writing poems.In 1968 Lenore Schwartz, a New York sculptor

and I went to Mexico City and visited Coatlicue,Aztec Cosmos-Earth-Goddess, in the big museumthere. Then we married and settled down to ourhigh Placitas garden.

I did poems to the different directions andLenore did drawings to them and one evening inthe UNM Kiva we put candles everyplace and put

the drawings down on the floor and I read my

NWSE Up Down Center, each poem from itsrespective direction. These were published in

Caterpillar 13and are for the birth of our son.

In 1970 I worked on a largely unsuccessful workcalled The Great White Brother. Pages werelarge and visual as well as verbal. I ransacked mynotebooks and laid things out on pages and stuckthem on the wall. I wanted them to be like oldtexts that survived the centuries, but I was toocontemporary. I made masks, I brought imagesfrom dreams into reality, I wrote directives formoving my hands while I read, I saw a spikedaura around our garden pumpkin, I became aBabylonian Sun Priest with appropriate

ceremonial skirt carrying the sun across the roomout at Welcome Home, a coffee house inCorrales, and thusly arrayed, I addressed amiddle-class American couple I'd drawn on acanvas hung on the wall. The poem was on theback of the sun-thing I carried so I could read asI walked. I communicated with the Blue Spacemanand made his headdress which was a fiberglasslighting fixture turned inside out and painted blueI wrote a chant against Christmas to be deliveredunder a cottonwood tree. I made a tree ornament

poem. A tunnel poem that you look through andsee "delight." A poem to be unrolled from a bottleand placed on the floor. A cloth poem with seedsin it which when opened had long lines on

parchment spilling out of it. The Great WhiteBrother was a reaffirmation of my own NewMexican blood that had rejected Christianity andwanted something to fill a space and that turnedout to be our careful beautiful productive

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The Gossip from The Bowl

what will they say about him?

0 he's gone wallowing in Gondwanalandit may not be poetry but it shure is funhe found a good thing but he drove it into the ground he'salive by firelight on the 4th of JulyI found him dancing & his chanting was desperate everybodyknows what he's really looking for

Larry is the spirit and the blood. He ranges the full fire of ussentients in as rich an arc as the day's light evolving acrossthe hills and arroyos of his fervent valley. He can roar thefluid loose and at the same time stretch his arms wide intothe silent air. We need him to keep along the celebration. Heis a dancer. Ken Saville

organic-as-hell Garden, and Lenore's drawingsfrom it began to open my eyes to the visual earth.Poems for me no longer could be trapped in abook or stay too long on the page. They had to be

enacted from real life. At the same time theirsource remained a mystery. The Unknown, asJack Spicer said in his monumentally importantVancouver lecture. Poetry being dictated to menot as a Southwesterner, nobody can define thatwell enough, not as a regionalist because it couldconceivably be happening to me in Japan, but asa New Mexican, with my Goddess in Old Mexicoand yet under my feet at the same time. Theschizoid aspect of my Gemini, ambidextrous,hermaphroditic, comic-serious, oral-visual self

always returning to myself and my wife and myson.

New Mexico counterpointed by New York.Bursting through the stereotypes of currentromantic "Southwestern" poetry and art and tryingto allow space for the origin of poetry/art to beexpressed once more, as someone must alwaysbe beginning again, as Gertrude Stein was. Herlife was a continual beginning. Our radicalpredecessors can't be allowed to go unheard fortoo long. Behind every cottonwood tree there is a

surrealist. An absurdist is hiding behind thatcoyote, if he hasn't already been poisoned. Acubist is hiding behind that prickly pear. A dadaist

jumps from behind a ristra and a fauvist is behindevery New Mexican sunset. A Germanexpressionist pops out from behind an Aspen tree.

An abstract expressionist rides out of town on ahorse and a vorticist jumps out of a Ford pickup.

A constructivist does a drawing of a roadrunner

being destroyed by a buzz saw. We are all hereand must know about each other. New Mexicomust not let the artsy-craftsy insular imitativefourth-rateism swallow it up. Claes Oldenburg

more than anyone else on the face of the earthright now should come to New Mexico. This isintegral. A giant stuffedNew Mexico that wouldalso be a stuffed sopaipilla. You can not love thisstate without seeing its faults, its soft excessesTo be art-strong is the only resistance and thegreatest love.

In '72 and '73 I wrote the Ometeot

TrilogyThe Staff, The Bowl and The BookThe staff is a cottonwood staff and from that made two cottonwood poles that stick out from the

wall and I can hang the poems on. I made clothbanners to cover the backs of the poems andhave my fool-magician's table in front of me withthe red wig and fool's cap and exaggeratedSufi-Shriner fez and costume concealed underthat table. As I go through the reading I takebanner-poems off one pole and read them andhang them back on the poles. At the end ofreading The Staff of Ometeotl six poem-bannersare on one pole and six on the other.

Ometeotl is the Aztec dual god, god and

goddess in one. He and She live up there in the13th heaven. So The Staff is the male series

hopefully serialpoems, one evening dedicated tothe male in my own cosmos.

The Bowl is the female. It is the mostcomplicated visual work I've attempted although can get everything needed to put it on in a box 2by 2'. The cloth backdrop behind me is of theSandias and the bowl sits on a little stand down

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where the North side of the mountain would be. Arainbow is over the bowl and there's water in itwhich I use later on to pour over the stuffedlingam-yoni as a kind of blessing.The Bowl isassociated with the springs which are so specialto my home village, for drinking and irrigating.Peaches Malamud made that bowl for me. Lenoremade me the muscle shirt I wear for this reading.Most of the other stuff I've made. The Bowl is an

elaborate evening, I even have to be carried in atone point dressed as a fanged feminine presencecome up out of a boat from the Rio Grande. It'skind of like a threatening goddess warning us totake care of the earth we live on or we perish.SHE will destroy us. At least the poem seems tobe saying that to my ears. There are 12 poems inthis series.

The Bookwas a return to the sense of poetrybeing in a book, and not so elaboratelyperformed. I was invited to do the trilogy in itsentirety at the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC SanDiego in La Jolla. It was remarkable to have allthat white space to deal with. I was floating in timeand they were so nice to me. Allen Kaprow wasthere and said I should call my things WORDPERFORMANCES and drop the word-poetrybecause too many people think poetry's dead.Poets in the classrooms is the only answer, butnot the golden glow poets, the radical poets. Andteaching freshman English. That's the only waythey'll learn how exciting poetry is nowadays. Theycertainly won't learn from literary critics. Lit-critand art-crit by definition are secondary. Only poetsand artists who are attuned to the world as awhole, our specific place in counterpoint to theworld as a whole, our specific place incounterpoint to the spinning Earth in total, havethe primary power to warm our hearts and allowillusion to cast its spell. Our Imagination placesauras around the specifics of our daily lives. Notall the time, but some times. Hilarity is the onlyescape from a too tense evening. To be on edge

is not my cup of tea, but to dance and read to youfrom my work is.

In The Book I am an old man reading from abook by the side of a floor lamp which I adjust toseveral appropriate levels of illumination. I havelong given up depending on somebody else'slighting system. I bring my own. It's much morerelaxing. And in the course of The Book I readpoems and some poem-blessings and at one

point attempt to destroy our calendar and erect amore seasonal and fluid one, a circular one with ahole in it perhaps. The Book ends with myaddressing the Twins, the Twins in the Navajostories that I've always identified with though it'scoming in from another culture and I'm a littleleery of that. Still duality is my specialty and my

greatest love. So the duality of Staffand Bowlarein a way reestablished at the end of the trilogy.

"Poetry if anything has a sense for everything."Louis Zukofsky

"Every particular is an immediate happening ofmeaning at large." Robert Duncan

"It is impossible to write of what one has written orlived, except as the day is, out the window, nowexplicit." Ken Irby

". . .art is inevitable everybody is as their air andland is everybody is as their food and weather isand the Americans and the red Indians had thesame so how could they not be the same howcould they not, the country is large but somehowit is the same if it were not somehow the same itwould not remain our country and that would be ashame. I like it as it is." Gertrude Stein

Since the Ometeotl Trilogy I have gone totallyaway from things other than words. I wrote a ful

length prose book called Dried Apricots and putit away in a nice box I made for it. And now I have

written several short plays called Hot Art andOther Plays. Simple to produce and hopefullyentertaining. I believe in separation betweenperformer and audience except for casual banterbefore and after. I believe that the things I havemade other than the words are extensions of thewords. Things I make extend from the wordssometimes cradle them like a mouth cradles thewords you say, before they are said.

Larry Goodel

OmetotlHe is Lord and Lady of duality. He is motheand father of the gods, the old god. He is the stawhich illumines all things, and he is the Lady of theshining skirt of stars. He is our mother, our father.fromAztec Thought and Culture,Miguel Leon-Portilla

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The Shredder fromThe Staff

the Structure of Dynamics a Fool wants inHe is giving You his Strength & Madness

"I will ride you Fairy Wheel Ultimaca FormicaGrind you up in Mortal & Pester youShred you in the Giant Shredder

what I havent developedwill come laterwhen the Giant Squid float in the Sky& deposit Eggs on the Sandias

Shred you up & leave you laterall the Cans & Garbage of American Worldthe Plastic become brittle Shredded into fine choking dustwill Invade you under the Black Dawnyr Power yr Power is in Yr FamilyStick with it it's Lovely to Look at

the Dynamo of Husband & WifeChoking on their Marriage Pinnacle in Dustthey created by Joining their Thighs

Listen to the Lies Listen

the Cavern which is Opening announces the Dustof all the Plastic come to invade you DustStorm of Woody Guthrie's was Nothing

& it Allcomes down in Giant Squid Shit Eggs of Dustto Cavernous Bequeathing You the Real Imageof What's between Yr Legs & Knees & Nose &choking Children."

Star Child Eating from The Bowl

Star Figure Idiot Child. Beautiful House Dish.I eat you & eat you eat you & eat you eat you& Eat You I Eat YouStar Figure Intelligent Child Beautiful Mind DishI eat your Feeling Body Feeling mine lips teeth tongueCarving of the centuries before men's mindsI saw you walloping up Star Figure Child gofloundering in Scorpion Pussy twist & danceI saw yr lifting energy crossed suppressed

back & forth cock-eyed eyes go turning inward& on my Crystal Ball I saw you Backwards Ballingsurrounded by rainbows & little carved shellsI saw you in your Inward Wagon pulling out yr Mother'sHips Her widening & widening Stare as you came on& out I eat you on the seventh daycrawling on yr sand bed little hairy twisters& feelers & hands & arms & shoulders& mantras & songs go singing of legs & feet goslamming them on legs & hips go naveling pussyWagon Carrier Star Child Figure Inner Urge Go


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Eating Crawling & Crying I eat you StarMind Child I eat a star I eat a Star ChildMind Body Light go Eviling after Line Body Light gocrawling in the Sand from the Sun go home in the West

& Upeat you Born in Idiot Up bring out of yr Motherthe Wagon of her Earth Camp Give me Strengththe Wagon of her Earth Camp give me Childthe Man goes down on the Road to his childthe Child in the Star is the Bread in the MouthLine Body eating you Earth twist dragoneating & eating the God of the Up coming Eastthe Star of the Eating Fingers Heart EatingStar Child Eating I eat you up

(Note: Star Child Eating is on the back of a tortillawhich I take a bite of at the conclusion of the poem.

LARRY GOODELL: CO(S)MIC CLOWN BY GUS BLAISDELL

Headress of candle flames or engorgedcoxcombs; muscle-shirt rolling and bopping withbulges; and his cloth phallus thrust and wobbled byhis raunchy, hunching hips, Larry Goodell steps outupon the stage, possessing and invaded by hisown poetry and paraphernalia. In the course of hiscaperings the stage becomes a piece of this

whirling planet as he enacts, incarnates, andembodies in performance what poetry must haveonce been like before it was expurgatedcategorically into epic, which was tribal and gave tothe bard shaman-like powers; into lyric, in which asingle voice, sometimes masked, sometimesnaked, hymned his friends, mourned them too, orcelebrated Olympic as well as battlefield victories;and into tragedy, where the polisgathered to seeitself confessed in the tension between the goodsense of community and the overweeningindividual desire for knowledge or personal justice.

Goodell's poetry is more ancient than these first,classic, Aristotelian resolutions. It is antediluvean,the seed and essence out of which these latercategories will grow, twistedlyso twisted that theroot and origin will be forgotten. And his poetry isalso deeply comic in a sense so attenuated as tobe nearly unremembered: it is the work of theclown of power who ridicules as he celebrates theabsurdities of being and existence, who probes

dasein, if you'll permit that lugging term, with ahardon, who stinkfingers existence, and who in hislightest and most powerful moments seduces theyoung woman, who is also being, into playingDoctor in the backrooms of bars like the nowarchaeological Thunderbird in Placitas, Goodell'shome. It was in theT-Bird that Goodell gave some

of his most memorable performances to awonderfully drugged and drunken audience willingto be gathered together by the powers of hispoetry; making cohesive and momentarily coherenta disparate, desperate bunch of discrete creaturesall tottering on the edges of every imaginablevariety of unconsciousness, bloatedly expandedconsciousness, and violence; and for an hour or somagnetizing the iron rings in them all, connectinghimself with the ironic and co(s)mic sources of hisown art, until not only the audience but the wholebar was, like the planet upon which it all spun

rocking and rolling through spaces public andprivate.

Obviously this is not the poetry of page andpodium, book and lectern. The page is thespeaking poet; the podia are quite literally thepoet's own dithyrambic feet seeking a measuredrhythm in the midst of riot; and the book hasbecome a score, the lectern tossed aside so thatthe poet, bedecked, can enter into the very medium

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in which he works: poiesis dramatized. Heredrama is a form of incarnation rather thanperformance, and it unfolds in the immediacy oftime, tribal as a rock concert, and it dilates thepresent to metaphysical proportions.Antediluvean, I said, and by that I meant some

prelapsarian time well before the Flood when abeing like Goodell could be both bird and snake,when these two powerful avatars shared a single

phylum before we separated them into specializedspecies, dividing essence as we do labor. Themetamorphosis in Goodell's works, speaking still inavatars, would be that one in which a snakesloughed his skin, shed scale for feather, andemerged surprised in radiant plumage readied forflight. In the peacock, for example, one can clearlysee the snake. But in his plumage, in the hushedfanning out of his tail one sees far beyond thepeacock. As his eerie screams enter theimagination what one is seeing is transformed into

the metaphysical: peacock becomes phoenix.Beyond the phoenix is the demi-god, Quetzalcoatl,the plumed serpent. Beyond the demi-god? Onlythe Sun itself.

Goodell is pre-choric, a single manic creaturewrestling with making sense out of being, a poet'stongue untwisting the commonplaces that tie it sothat he may speak out clearly the poem envelopinghim, and as he speaks it out, dissolving themembrane, it becomes an action best representedby a breathless flame unravelling upwards,climbing higher for more air, more light, until the airthins and, subsiding, the consuming flame isextinguished. The priapic clown shoving it up theworld, exploring and inventing existence with hootsand a virile member. Locally this clown would be amudhead, a creature still confused with the earthand blood into which he was thrown from betweenthe piss and shit of his birthanciently obscene,secular, profane as dirt, autochthonouslike thosewonderfully androgynous beings in Aristophanes'contribution to The Symposium, creatures whosought each other, One always in need of the

complement of the Other, and who seemed to thinkthey might put back together the sundered halvesof the world by fucking each othercrazilyrestoring the anciently divided essence,whether of snake or bird, man or woman, being ornonbeing. Silenus Goodell! A creature who justcan't get enuf of it!

Poet as dancer, as chanter or singer whocompels assent and prayer; one who steps out of

the poetic swamp, or slithers out, who rises abovehis own storming and confusion, as high as he canget on his oddly jointed limbshe rests brieflyabove his work, his head coiled in the feathers (oratop rustling cool coils of scales), atop the locked

joint of a single leg, the other tucked up below. Ouof the nesting feathers of the body lifts the headthe eyes beady with concentration, serpentine thecraning neck. Then the uplifted leg descends into

the waters of the slough, the neck slides over anddown, and as the talonful of rich muck is raisedfrom the bottom, this creature either minutelyinspects its contents, listing the details and makinga poem, or else, dissatisfied with the results of hisanalysis, hurls this mud rich in restorative virtuesinto the roaring faces of his tipsy, toppling, soaringaudience.

Truly to laugh with Goodell, to understand his oldcomedy, is to see revealed the weakeningprehensile underpinnings of common sense; to see

laid bare our uncommon prejudices and thecontingency of what we commingle. On whirls theworld, on the poet's fingertip or, transformed by hisrhythms, upon the nose of a seal, that seal of beingHart Crane evoked once and for all, writing beyondhimself: "Bequeath to us to earthly shore until / Isanswered in the vortex of our grave / The seal'swide spindrift gaze toward paradize." This fleetingglance beyond is also the clown's roaring, raptuousdisillusionment with being.

I have used extended figures to explain the workof a man who is essentially a mixed metaphor. Mypurpose has been to evoke in the reader a feelingof Goodell. Yet the point implied throughout thepreceding, and the point most worth making, is thatLarry Goodell is a natural, a category thatacademe either explicitly denies, activelydiscourages, or has forgotten. Goodell is the poetfully gripped by song, the man who must dance justas a goat must leap or make himself attractive toother goats by pissing down his throat. The naturais today treated as the abberant, the freak, theperverted, and the consequence is that poetry

which is muttered up and printed upon the pageYet there is in art, as there is in sport andmathematics and chess, a prodigiouscategoryfull and exuberant and youthful, and it is thenaturalswimmer, shortstop, painter, poet, or

jazzman. Local examples are Goodell, BilPearlman, and Kell Robertson. They are notshamans because they are unsponsored by agroup and because they are not representative of

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a collective mind. They span only themselves. Freein their creations, which come from the isolatepowers of their singular imaginations, they are theirown centers, single points eccentric to academiccircles. The sources and wellsprings and powersthey display are not held in common. They are theirtalents themselves, all alone out there, dangerouslyventured in their own originality. Without thiscategory art of any kind is impossible. Because?

Because against what academe teaches theoryonly succeedsart, in a quiet, active meditation onwork done by oneself and others; and art, if it isgenuine, is a response of the whole individual tobeing-in-the-world and not, not primarily anyway,the dramatic solution to an anteriorily posed criticalproblem. Having chosen not to deal with thenatural, not to groom or train or nurture it, academeis left with its own accomplishments, achievementssomehow against the grain: the brilliant but gelidgenres of the modernist novel and poem, and that

turgid confusion of filched formica laurels, anarbitrary criticism that seeks to usurp and absorbits object and thereby, by digestion, to gainautonomy.

Food digested, though it nourishes, turns to shit.Well, but doesn't everything; ultimately, I mean.If you don't know the answer to that one you betterkeep on reading. (The proper question is not whatsurvives but rather what does not turn to shit.)

Insofar as Goodell's work is not academic neitheris it part of the current, late movement ofconceptual art/performance. Performance isreactionary and self-conscious and offers its anticsas a solution to a critical problem. Performance isa dramatic response to what the performerbelieves cannotany longer be done in painting orsculpture. It is hysteria caught up and wedgedbetween the slowly contracting walls of thetwo-dimensional and the three. In Michael Fried'sterm it is theatrical, a bedecking of despair inwhich the performer simultaneously mocks himselfand his work in the hopes that his ridiculedaudience's reactions to his own display of failure

will in complicity acknowledge that to fail is really toachieve. It is as if Hemingway's hideously painfulgutshot hyena inGreen Hills were performing hisdeath in order to win his killer's approval. Theshortest version of all this is the unexamined axiomof much bad modernist thought: that a vanguardprecondition on having a subject is to declare theimpossibility of a subject matter to be your subjectmatter. Yes, if you are Mallarme, Bird or Trane,

Creeley. Otherwise the result is John Ashbery, alatterday reincarnation of Wallace Stevens"muttering king," who maunders among theshivering hinds of his verse like Elliot Gould'soverly mumurmous, throwaway Philip Marlowe in

Altman's Long Goodbye an endlessinvestigation of the erosion of imitative form bywhat it imitates.

Though natural, what is superb about Goodell's

enactments is that his is a naturalness re-achievedand against odds; his achievement of old comedyand his unabashed willingness to say what comesto mind; and while avoiding the theatrical tobecome, if needs be and the world demands it, themouthpiece of ventriloquil being by turns dappeCharlie McCarthy, bumpkin MortimerSnerdwhere a burp may become oracle, adelphic choking or gargle and a pratfall can jarloose the world. Goodell's achievement givescredence to the comic's ancient retort to, How do

you do it? I just make it up as I go along. And I amalwaysgoing along!

Certainly the priest's vestments are nothing morethan one resolution of the clown's motely just asthe arithmetical norm called meter, the justice ofthe written poem, is merely a resolution of thepoet's own heartbeat in his jarred-loose responseto an out-takilter world. A commodius vicus ofrecirculation: the poet in flight, or meditatingthinking down into the scales and pinions ofhimself, coiled to fly or strike or struggle. And once

the recirculation begins within him and then passesinto his audience, the measures of the poetkeeping it all balanced just this side of frenzy-welthen the line comes inevitably to mind, fillingsomething like a mind now held in common. Theline is a whole poem, Duncan meditating onPindar: "the light foot hears and the brightnessbegins."

I'll close my prosaic anacreontic with a reminderin the inspired words of Stanley Cavell's World

Viewed:For poetry is so out of the ordinary that it

could not appear unless the world itself wishedfor it. Not alone the poetry of poetry, but thepoetry of prose-whenever the time of saying andthe time of meaning are synchronized.

Gus Blaisdell

from ARTSPACE Southwestern Contemporary ArtsQuarterly, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1976.

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IN ADDITION 2012

Both The Staff & The Bowl were presented on a reading tour in the Fall of 1973 by Larry Goodell andStephen Rodefer at SUNY Buffalo, St. Marks Place (NY), Toronto, University of Connecticut (Storrs),Bloomington, Indiana, Northwestern University (Chicago), and Boston University.In1976 Larry presentedThe Staff & The Bowl at the Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego.

The Staff of Ometeotl was first read to an audience in Old Ortega Hall, Bandelier East, at the Universityof New Mexico May 26, 1972, but more completely premiered at the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, NewMexico on the 6 of June. The Bowl of Ometeotl was premiered at the Thunderbird on the 4 of Octoberth th

1972. The Book of Ometeotl, the last of the Ometeotl Trilogy was not completed at this time.

The original Artspace article is from pages 2 to 11. I thank Bill Peterson, Michael Reed, Jeff Bryan &Gus Blaisdell for their enthusiasm in publishing the article. Additions to the original Artspace articleinclude the 2 photographs on the title page and this material.

Schematic drawing and procedure for The Staff Of Ometeotl.

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Muscle Parlor with muscle shirt by Lenore Goodell, from The Staff

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LARRY GOODELL

from ARTSPACE Southwestern Contemporary ArtsQuarterly, Volume 1, Number 1

Fall 1976 & additional material & photographs.

Juice from The Bowl

Uprooted Valley from The Bowl

Documents

Larry Goodell from Artspace 1976