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Thank you, Laynie, for inviting
me to introduce Judith Goldman.

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It is my pleasure to
introduce Judith Goldman.

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But I must begin
with the catenary.

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The catenary is the
lovely hanging arc

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produced when two
ends of wire or chain

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are fastened with just
enough slack left over.

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Think of rope bridges
or the telephone wires

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hung to drag in the air
like a convex dipping.

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In her new book,
L.B.; or, Catenaries,

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Goldman writes, I
need a volunteer,

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and I recommend as you
have put on a lion skin,

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you must not be faint of heart.

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And what you set your
heart on you must have.

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And when I'm in my cups or
peradventure, blacked out,

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slip one word beneath another.

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Get wind and point
to both sides of it.

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Like Judith's poems, the tension
at either end of any moment

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produces an eerie slackening,
and points to both sides of it.

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Lovely because excessive,
excessive through precision,

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precise in assiduous care.

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Judith's work presents
us with the point

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at which the beauty
of a form is produced

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because of too much content.

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And the voices in Judith's
poems are funny and frightening,

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intimate and endangered,
mournful and playful.

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In short, they're contradictory,
propulsive, and scary.

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As Craig Dworkin
says, Judith's work

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presents quote, "Not the false
time of doctrine and tradition,

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but something more
true to its own time--

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and to linguistic time itself."

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Judith Goldman is the author
of the brand new L.B.;

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or Catenaries-- just out from
Krupskaya, DeathStar/Rico-chet,

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Vocoder, and with the
late Leslie Scalapino,

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she edited the journal War and
Peace, until Leslie's passing.

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Judith holds a
PhD from Columbia,

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has been the Holloway
poet at Berkeley,

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and I met her in Chicago.

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We discovered we were neighbors,
and lived three blocks apart

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in Andersonville, when Judith
was the Harper Schmidt Fellow

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at the University of Chicago.

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Presently, Judith is
right here with us.

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Please welcome her.

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[APPLAUSE]

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