Charles Durning Carroll

Poetry Review

Budget Travel Through Space and Time

by Albert Goldbarth

The latest book by the American poet Albert Goldbarth is called Budget Travel Through Space and Time. Let’s imagine then for a moment that you are a traveler come on some cheap spaceflight to the planet earth, and you happen to have learned English on your faraway habitation. Your assignment from the poobah of your homeworld is to return with one relic that represents the state of mind on Earth. At a loss at first at the complexity of your assignment, you ultimately decide to sample the literature of English-speaking North America to understand what these aliens are thinking and feeling. Imagine further that you don’t know anything about North American literary history; you understand language well but not recent culture, and in the bookstore you’ve discreetly entered you come across Goldbarth’s book. Intrigued by the coincidence of the title you begin to read. What observations would you draw? What would your colleagues think of your choice?

Preoccupied, as you no doubt would be, with language, the first thing you would notice would be the very different levels of diction in Goldbarth’s book. When you saw words like “jiffy,” “gumption,” and “crackerjack,” you might wonder how they could easily co-exist in the same poem with other bits of more literary language. Later, when you ran into “vomit” and “upchuck” only a few lines apart you might begin to wonder who this fellow was, and whether he was choosing his words carefully or was simply throwing them at you in a random fashion, hoping one or two might stick in your memory or in your craw. And the variety of words would not be limited to their diction—there would be made up words: “telecyberfiber,” or “fooming, ” intentional misspellings such as “schpritzer,” or “dishabille,” and words from various disciplines like “leukemia,” “zero-gees,” and “REM,” all occurring in the same poem. Goldbarth, you would quickly conclude, is an intellectual omnivore. Anyone who in a poem called “Tuvalu,” could manage to insert epigraphs from the 15th century French poet François Villon and a contemporary periodical like USA Today was bound to be someone interested in how language and ideas, high culture and low culture interact. And essentially all of the other poems in Budget Travel you would discover follow a similar pattern.

The poems often have little to do with their titles, for they quickly veer off into other concerns. So a poem with a great title like “A Gesture Made in the Martian Wastes” ends up being about the history of sci-fi, the power of imagination, the difficulty of being sixteen, and a story a Vietnam veteran told Goldbarth the night before he wrote the poem, and not very much at all about Mars or gesturing or wastes. So if you thought that a poem had to be about something particular, a Goldbarth poem would leave you speechless. “What are his poems about?” the poobah might ask. “Well, er, uh, everything” you’d have to reply. And thereby perhaps also nothing. A Goldbarth poem can contain: a footnote consisting of an eighty-eight digit number, a check off list of items with permission to add to the list, a dash nearly an inch-and-a-half long, and several pages of prose on the English painter JMW Turner. Admittedly there is no mathematics or html code in Budget Travel, but if the book had been longer…

Goldbarth, you might well think to yourself, is entertaining. Where else after all, but in a poem called “Washington’s Ovens, Adames’ Letters,” might you read about “the favored dish of the emperor Vitellius,” that “combined such delicacies as pheasant brains, pike livers, peacock hearts, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt.” While such information won’t make you a million in the stock market, who knows whether the question of the Emperor’s favorite dish might not appear in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit? (Yes, that bit of North American culture has gotten to your homeworld!)

Though Goldbarth is clearly smart and has evidently spent at least as much time in a library poring over fraying leather tomes as he has watching TV, the question nagging at your consciousness might well be—“but is he moving? Does his poetry make my heart race or my pulse skip a beat?” There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but if you were me, the answer would be no. Clever? Yes. Innovative? Perhaps. Moving? Not a bit of it. Now if you were coming from far, far away you might be severely disappointed at mere cleverness. If, however, you kept wandering around the poetry section of the bookstore (assuming of course they had one) and you read other poetry books you could very well begin to hit your head in exasperation. For many other poets you would discover were neither moving nor clever. Goldbarth, at least was not one of those…Maybe the poobah would be pleased.