Homespun of Oatmeal Gray

by Paul Goodman

The ""I"" in Goodman's poems is no lyrical abstraction but the man himself, afflicted with politics but bravely scrapping, immersed in a noble but dying tradition, variously loving, suffering, celebrating, praying. He sees himself whole and has considerable esteem for the vision; but it is an egotism very like Whitman's (in this case embarrassed by a live presence and tilted off a poetic center by the urgency of his involvements) in which self is the starting point of all affirmation. Whether it makes for good poetry is largely a matter of readers' esthetics -- it's debatable whether the no-longer-shocking eroticism is kept up in self-indulgence or in pursuance of further, more durable meaning; whether all the political statements, Goodman style, are really very poetic. But the confrontations are real and often of a religious intensity (""Creator spirit come, by whom/ I say that which is real,/ nor has this way of being/ failed to save me alive"") and the intelligence is true to its difficult priorities (""I willingly work with true propositions/ to hack like wood, I don't like clay""). Poems about his dead son Matt are harrowing on any terms, and the humbling effects of that loss are evident throughout in prayers and reappraisals (""My liaison/ is lost. Now they are right to call me senile""). But there are lyrical moments that do transcend the poet's personality, and these are transcendent ""The sun for Adam/ spanned twenty degrees of arc/ a minute away,/ he stood in the gale/ of the corona without/ intermedium. . ."" -- ecstatic immersion that is the presumable goal of Goodman's politics and life.

ebook

Published January 1, 2011

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.