The Brooklyn Rail

In the spaces between words
Which have nothing to do
But make meaning
—(“Never Again”)

Jonathan Goodman carefully positions his words in tight and brilliant literary equations. These are often almost-riddles or wide open metaphors: textual circumstances in which the meaning of the word, or association of words, is fluid and flexible. Under a second or third reading another interpretation may bubble up to the surface. This is a unique attribute of Goodman’s writing (he also contributes regularly to the Brooklyn Rail’s Artseen section): wherein an initial metaphorical interpretation of a passage is really not enough. Take for example a couplet such as “the uncommon events that / make our lives uneven” which begins the poem “The Ghost of a Chance.” The poem embodies moments of whispy thought or ideas that just don’t come to fruition in the rush of daily life, but in the opening lines, the poet places the word “uncommon” against “uneven,” positioning a descriptor of events against a physical attribute, made even more complicated by the idea of an “uneven life.” These words which are strange bedfellows act as a brake on the movement of the eye, insisting we carefully examine each one. Another similarly exacting passage takes place in “No one will come to Harm (for my son Matthew)” where Goodman sets up a complicated interplay and balance between the viewer and the viewed, and then overlays this convoluted formula with a veil of sadness and loss:

As it seems being humanly visioned
Rather than impeccably discerned
In the near reaches of darkness

Here “visioned” and “discerned” are both words which have active direction from one party towards another, creating a rich but knotty grammatical footprint. Goodman is cognizant of his tempestuous relationship with words, often bemoaning the issue of vagueness and a desperation to be understood, but also acknowledging its impossibility, as when he searches for “the seven word separating decency from complete despair” (“Seven Words”).

Goodman is a traditionalist in many ways, reaching back to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and obviously Goya, in order to furnish dramatic content for a lot of the pieces in The Sleep of Reason. That being said, his most traditional sources are the most ancient and the most apropos for today: the seasons. Goodman brings up the seasons both as a means of commenting on his own aging process, but much more poignantly, on the creeping horror that climate change is instigating in his sense of the world:

The limitations built into the crevasses
Of glaciers generate an appraisal
Of the worth of visionary anger
A form of contempt for the obvious
—(“In the Eye of the Storm”)

The poet has poured so many implications and emotions into these four lines that the reader is perhaps a bit overwhelmed. The overall implication is a foolish blindness in the face of irrefutable truth, but there is a secondary theme which is highlighted frequently in Goodman’s poems: a reliance on what we think of as unchanging natural occurrences, which we are, in fact, forcing into a state of inconstancy. We see this sentiment mirrored in “A Great Impermanence”:

Nowhere is it said our agreement
With the landscape’s outline
Is more than a momentary stay
Against the great impermanence

Goodman toys with such features of the landscape as shorelines, glaciers, and marshes, as well as more fundamental patterns like the tides—seemingly trustworthy markers, which in fact are shifting and causing great distress in ourselves. The poet’s affinity for writing about the visual arts is captured in his frequent use of visual metaphors such as the constellations, marshes, and the behaviors of birds and bees, and their relations to the seasons, which are not behaving as they used to back when they acted as markers of life’s regular progress. In this morose capacity, the pairing of Goodman’s poems with images of the ceramic works of the sculptor Harold Wortsman is very effective. Wortsman’s clay plaques are sensual earthy ochres, reds, and grays, inscribed with broken grids and pock-marks, emphasizing dryness; either the loss of spring, or awaiting its return. The last of the seventy-five poems in the book, “And Yet Again,” ends with the words: “To the beehives strangely absent of bees / A sign of the times if there ever was one.”