Vocoder
Judith Goldman
publisher: Roof Books, 2001
isbn: 0-937-804-89-4
price: $10.95
Philistine, florid, degenerate era,
there are no longer
any inner voices in us and
the family magazines have cut off their long tresses
[82]
writes Goldman in "[untitled]," one of several humorous, deliriously word-drunk but nonetheless angry and focused apostrophes in her first volume of poems.
Goldman is master of a lyrical collage aesthetic that takes on great sonic momentum as in poems like "rotten oasis" -- a sort of twisted soliloquy right out of Gogol's Diary of a Madman, but with lots of youthful pop and grrrl ardor -- spill down the page in extended tours-de-force of accusation and cries of betrayal:
I guess someone is a king of France & apart
from whom nobody is a king of France. Same
rockstar, different poem. I like icons
& the toxic halos of figureheads, I like
to beat people up & rehash among the swan.
I was born in captivity, having
fucked the right people, thick
in the France of it.
[26]
Demonstrating the true flare of a moral exhibitionist, her poems take "stands" while not letting the wheels stop spinning on some stable, prefab "punk" identity; every gesture of a Goldman poem, even when remaining within the range of the "lyric," shakes, shimmies or leaps away from interpretive certainty.
Like younger women poets such as Jennifer Moxley and Lisa Jarnot, Goldman often takes the tones and tropes of the patriarchal literary tradition and twists them into new shapes -- a practice the Situationists (such as Guy Debord) called detournement -- thus fracturing the certainties of the master discourses and slamming us out of our subservient pieties. But Goldman, much more prone to using language out of "theory" either linguistic or political, is distinctive in her ability to start a thread of meaning -- absurd, denunciatory, lyrical or otherwise -- and pack it with an abundance of torques and twists that skate just above rational discourse.
While some of the conceptual pieces -- such as "dicktee," a list of words beginning with "un-" -- don't make for great reading and seem misfires attributable to an over-saturated intellect, they give a sort of ballast to the romantic idealism that seems to drive some of the other poems on, such as "entropy," "the real devotion of events" or the poem of visible deletions called "procedures":
read / me
the airsickness bag of events
called for by each situation, albeit
vulgar opinions vulgar opinions
who serve in the service of
people of vulgar opinions, with
the U-turn of sarcasm
well-regulated
and untimely ripped
words that were used
at all costs, connotation devoured
transvaluation
[29]
For all the somewhat loaded language of Goldman's first book, its pleasures -- in the humor, the daring, the deft work with the line -- are immediate on first reading, hence not only supporting but mainlining her overriding argument: that social emancipation is not just the right to survive under a capitalist, globalized hegemony but the freedom to live fully.
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