b a n n e d p o e t r y
heresies, lamentations and other infidelities
John C. Goodman is a Canadian writer and Pushcart Prize nominee. He has published four collections of poetry: naked beauty (Blue & Yellow Dog Press); The Shepherd's Elegy (Knives Forks & Spoons Press); Dark Age (Grey Borders), and Twenty Moments that Changed the World (Moria/Locofo), as well as a novella, The Duck Lake Chronicles (Quattro Books). His novel, Talking to Wendigo (Turnstone Press) was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award. He is also the author of the non-fiction work Poetry: Tools & Techniques (Gneiss Press). His short fiction, poems, creative non-fiction and essays have appeared in The Fiddlehead; Otoliths; fillingStation; BlazeVOX; Urban Graffiti; e.ratio postmodern poetry; experiential-experimental literature; Queen Mob’s Tea House; Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society and numerous other magazines. Work is included in the print anthologies Gulch (Tightrope Books), Abandon (edits all over press), Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press, NY) and Road Work Ahead (Asphalt Tree Press). John is the past editor of ditch, an online poetry magazine and the current editor of Trainwreck Press.
page 2 from 2014
poems
excerpts from 'naked beauty'
Two airplanes crashing in mid-flight
Someone is searching for Claire
looking under postage stamps
and examining the dust in corners
when the nausea comes
like fields of bluebells in the spring
is the way it iswaswillbe
forever and forever all men
“,,,if I had to be stabbed with a dull knife, I would want you to do it, for you have studied
the technique so diligently,,,”
horizons unfold
like paper birds
their wings wet with rain
The beauty of a dead cat
silhouetted against the effluence of spring
wet fur matted
lips pulled back from pointed teeth
eyes eaten away by ants
dark holes ringed with dried blood
the body twisted in sensuous repose
the belly distended like a pregnant girl
the forepaws spread in amorous greeting
a welcome to eternity
(horizons are emptinesses)
Someone is searching for Claire
behind sofas
under carpets
in the backs of cupboards and the forgotten spaces between bookcases
through cracks in lives where the love leaks out
spilling down glittering gutters
the seduction of decay
Life is swimming in the middle of the ocean
far from any shore
ringed by sharks, fighting the undertow
riding the swells up and down
head above water
barely
until exhaustion overcomes
and faintly flailing
sink
“I tasted tears at the back of my throat,” Rebecca said.
and the lumbering behemoth
opens its jaws at last
Someone is looking for Claire
beneath the wheels of wrecked automobiles
interleaved with the clauses of lapsed insurance policies
in codas of sad songs
horizons bear the weight
of freedom
and failure
disappearing over this shoulder
or that
futures unseen dripping
from the bells of blue flowers
dissolution claiming everything in the end
the solution to the green emergence unfolding leaves in pale spring
“If love could solve anything, it would have done so by now.”
Someone is searching for Claire
in places she never was
norwillbe
foreverandforever
the precept of all that is known
circles and revolves
with the swiftness of silence
…Out! Out! Brief candle!
the sea is an abstraction
a muddy sketch of colour and form
what are you doing here?
“becoming a stranger to myself. –
[blue]
a mind of cinders and ash
“travelled a long road [I] [have]
from dungeon to grave
making landfall
that’s where danger dwells:
in the transition from one element to another
in the pounding of waves on insensate rocks
the rolling of breakers on dreams and shores and beaches and histories of myths and desires and legends and tales of identities and vertebrae and longing and isolation and frustration and failure and hearts broken and darkness and death and
[RED]
“sought my deliverance [I?] [have?]
in the space between here and there
(there is no space
only spaciousness)
“meaning coated my shoulders like beads of mist **
( colour/text//colour///text////colour/////texture )
) of of of of of (
there’s no controlling the waves
they come as they please and go
sometimes tickly bubbly froth
sometimes heavy as moods
tossing boats like angry words
[grreeen]
there’s no control
it’s out of control!
[i*t’s !o}}u^t o&f c999((()))ontr++==ol!
)*&$@000##..(!)(!)(!)[!][!][!]
falling falling falling
the freedom of g;sallpo sprw;lthos
the many who went before
epp fof yjr ffrrf yjr esrtr yp;f
just the frop lurp
(orange)
there’s no stopping it
no stopping time
it keeps coming on like a bad mood
pushing us ever further into the abstraction
of future becoming present
of what never was becoming our reality
of w%oo00 @ast)))((( $Wpol…
to colour (vt): the state of being perceived
[I am colour][we are colour][they are colour]
that’s where danger lies
in the transition of moments
bringing the unexpected
into the border between past and future
the no man’s land of our existence
“Out of nothing I came, to nothing I will return.”
[yellow]
to nothing (vt): the state of remaining a victim of circumstance.
I am nothing [he is nothing] she is nothing [we are nothing]
they are nothing [there is nothing] nothing is nothing
“Oh set my sail for distant shores [I] [have]
the sea is a wide rough moment
between coastlines of the past
and wreckage of the future
[indigo]
[violet]
where one can be a stranger to oneself
and no one the wiser
the colour of a tree is varied
some are up and some are down
the convention of a tree is erasable
the memorial of a tree has no colour
and no smell
it is bronze and copper and silver and aluminum
like a reflection of an objection
the touch of a tree is debatable
there are singular barks and leaves to be taken into account
one day someone will form a theory of a tree
in which we can live our own lives
instead of someone else’s
naked beauty
by John C. Goodman
available from Blue & Yellow Dog Press
In John C. Goodman's oscillating, never still anti-tableau of shifting visions "horizons unfold/like paper birds." Constantly observant among glints of experience and language inserted into and evolving out of the italicized "I" of these poems, it seems the transient focus of "naked beauty" exists in flux (what the poet himself calls "stream of experience") even as life proceeds on a ravishing scale "looking under postage stamps." Anywhere word glitters against word, image against image, each apt metaphor more penultimate than the last. We experience the moment and move on, dazzled, exhilarated, perpetually standing at the threshold of a glad new existence. Goodman is surpassed by none when it comes to epiphanic indulgences. He succors the pathos of the "I" of the self accusatory, the joke of the self deprecating, as though life (much like these poems) was painted in swift impasto and never forgotten.
- Raymond Farr, author of ECSTATIC/.of facts - Raymon Farr (Otoliths)
John C. Goodman navigates us though the real, the subconscious and the abstract like a seasoned ship’s Captain...pushing us overboard (“there always seems to be a further place to fall”) then fishing us back up (“in a baptism of beginning”) to continue on this disturbing yet enlightening voyage toward the “wreckage of the future”.
- Frances Ward, editor of HammeredOut and Asphalt Tree Press
Too many poetry collections fail to deliver on the promise of thematic cohesion, but John Goodman's "Naked Beauty" is a coherent sequence of poems that look every bit as beautiful as they sound. For Goodman, it seems the world of consciousness is far too small, too myopic a poetic lens; instead, he turns his lines on the pivot of experience, both in the broad and highly personal sense.
- Dr. Kane X. Faucher, Assistant Professor - Media, Information and Technoculture (MIT), Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario. Associate Editor: The Semiotic Review of Books, The Poster: Journal of Visual Rhetoric in the Public Sphere, Semiophagy: Journal of Pataphysics and Existential Semiotics, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Autopsia
John C. Goodman finds his poems in the quotidian objects, people and experiences of modern life. His poems capture the oscillating perspective of the poet's shifting italicized "I" - the transient flux of the experienced poet's identity - in which his "stream of experience" finds the extraordinary in the mundane, music amid the white noise of traffic, and beauty in the modern urban metropolis.
- Mark McCawley, Fresh Raw Cuts, Urban Graffiti, Greensleeve Editions
