Thank you, Laynie, for inviting me to introduce Judith Goldman.
It is my pleasure to introduce Judith Goldman.
But I must begin with the catenary.
The catenary is the lovely hanging arc
produced when two ends of wire or chain
are fastened with just enough slack left over.
Think of rope bridges or the telephone wires
hung to drag in the air like a convex dipping.
In her new book, L.B.; or, Catenaries,
Goldman writes, I need a volunteer,
and I recommend as you have put on a lion skin,
you must not be faint of heart.
And what you set your heart on you must have.
And when I'm in my cups or peradventure, blacked out,
slip one word beneath another.
Get wind and point to both sides of it.
Like Judith's poems, the tension at either end of any moment
produces an eerie slackening, and points to both sides of it.
Lovely because excessive, excessive through precision,
precise in assiduous care.
Judith's work presents us with the point
at which the beauty of a form is produced
because of too much content.
And the voices in Judith's poems are funny and frightening,
intimate and endangered, mournful and playful.
In short, they're contradictory, propulsive, and scary.
As Craig Dworkin says, Judith's work
presents quote, "Not the false time of doctrine and tradition,
but something more true to its own time--
and to linguistic time itself."
Judith Goldman is the author of the brand new L.B.;
or Catenaries-- just out from Krupskaya, DeathStar/Rico-chet,
Vocoder, and with the late Leslie Scalapino,
she edited the journal War and Peace, until Leslie's passing.
Judith holds a PhD from Columbia,
has been the Holloway poet at Berkeley,
and I met her in Chicago.
We discovered we were neighbors, and lived three blocks apart
in Andersonville, when Judith was the Harper Schmidt Fellow
at the University of Chicago.
Presently, Judith is right here with us.
Please welcome her.
[APPLAUSE]