.Leo Tolstoy’s response to one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s most beautiful poems was to ask, “Do you understand the meaning? Me, not at all. Not a period, not a comma.” Mallarmé was just the start. Much later, Roland Barthes would patiently explain that there might be two kinds of texts, readable and writable. Complain about being unable to read what was only ever meant to be writable? And yet reading was precisely the thing to do with the writable text—reading in some modified sense of the word, no doubt, but also an intensified sense. For a long time, some writers, some poets have proudly made difficulty their calling card. Saying you read them is like being a pianist casually mentioning that you love playing Liszt. Transcendental Etudes for breakfast! John Godfrey is not one of those poets who’s cultivated a reputation for trobar clus, and critics writing about his work—not as many as there should be—never speak of his poetry as difficult. Forrest Gander once described Godfrey’s writing beautifully: “His syntax, at once lightning fast and completely casual (like Patriots receiver Randy Moss), runs slant patterns across convention. He incorporates vernacular, he blows fuses on clichés, and he scalpels away bookkeeping words (as Pound called them) to jump-cut high energy, emotive phrasings.” Everyone feels energy the vernacular of Godfrey’s verse, and the incisive precision of his ear. The quotidian character of his material and the unfussy, seemingly spontaneous way he uses it seem to ward off any anxieties about meaningfulness. Notice how Gander throws in a reference, not to some highfalutin philosopher or artist, but rather to a sports figure—as if to say that, as unconventional as he may seem, Godfrey is a regular guy speaking to regular guys, albeit one (as Wordsworth said he should be) “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness…and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.” And yet for all that, Godfrey is a difficult poet. Or at least let’s agree to say so. More people might read him if they thought he was unreadable. And those who are willing to participate in this conspiracy should surely agree with me that A Torch for Orphans may be even a touch more recalcitrant than usual. Not that the poems could be any more allergic than before to any sort of obvious unity—narrative, discursive, formal, or diaristic. It’s still all paratactic all the time; the content of each poem is the content of each of its lines, joined by a free-floating attentiveness with little apparent steering or pattern: “Ambient sound never repeats.” And there’s hardly a period or comma in sight (just like that Mallarmé poem Tolstoy was complaining about). But somehow the tone is darker, less amiable, despite an abiding with “to forgive those / who do not know they are surrounded.” Tensions seem more ingrained. And losses: there are poems dedicated to Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Larry Fagin, Ted Greenwald, and others, none of which offer any consolatory memories or tributes or epiphanies. Does that make them evasive? Maybe. But then the evasion becomes part of the poem, as in the last lines of the poem to Greenwald: “Man feeling feelings / That’s when you / locate your slurve.” (It’s a baseball term, look it up.) As heart-on-sleeve as Godfrey gets is in the poem for Fagin, which ends:
You can’t choose an older brother until there is an exception misfits
Then he goes where many others likewise are more than less asleep
The poems are all brief, only a couple creeping onto a second page, until the concluding five-pager that gives the book its surprisingly ardent title. Less recalcitrant than much of the rest of the book, in fact downright gorgeous, “A Torch for Orphans” is an expansive city poem in the vein of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” with a more intuitively evident through-line than in the short poems, showing that, nearly fifty years on from first book and in the wake of his 2016 selected, Godfrey still has surprises up his sleeve.
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John Godfrey, A Torch for Orphans, is published by Cuneiform Press [Victoria, TX], 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.