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
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.”
###
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
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
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 Thomas Fink, full of electricity and yet more style and insight.
You might also like: this photo of geoff young
