Selfish by Albert Goldbarth (review)

Albert Goldbarth is a major poet: brilliant, moving, and wildly entertaining. His latest collection, Selfish, is impressive. Poems such as “Snow,” “Away,” “Try the selfish,” “Survey: Unacknowledged Sex,” and “Secondary” show why Goldbarth’s poetry has earned a certain level of acclaim (he remains the only poet to win the National Book Critics Circle Award twice). They also address—sometimes directly, other times by implication—why his work uneasily fits into scholarly assessments of contemporary American poetry.

Goldbarth first started publishing in the 1970s and over the course of his career, his exuberant, inventive explorations of pop culture inspired a number of poets to experiment with similar subjects. Denise Duhamel, for instance, has often acknowledged Goldbarth’s influence on her work. Duhamel usefully departs from the model Goldbarth offers as she reorients the “pop culture, wit, and absurdity” she enjoys in Goldbarth’s poetry, recasting them to her feminist sensibility, whether borrowing from the language of advertising (in “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina In My Maidenform Bra”) or the perverse male desires embodied in Barbie dolls (in her collection, Kinky). “More than nationality, I identify myself by gender,” Duhamel explained in an interview, “I’m very concerned with feminist poets, and that, more than anything else, puts me in a more global context.”

In contrast, Goldbarth’s humor puts his work in a more specific context; it often expresses a tribal sensibility. “Tribe” is an important word for Gold-barth. It appears fairly frequently in his poems and prose because it expresses a central notion of how he understands selfhood. Collected in The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972–2007, “Shawl” presents reading as a tribal act of identification. The poem describes a twenty-year-old reading during a cross-country bus ride: “he was discovering himself / to be among the tribe that reads.” To read is to enter a tribe, not simply enjoy a pleasurable activity.

Of course “tribe” possesses a second, slang meaning: a member of the tribe, that is, a fellow Jew. For Goldbarth, to read is to discover one’s identity. The title poem of Selfish plays a variation of this theme. It recounts the speaker’s first breaking of a “sensual taboo,” what another first-person poem set at the same age calls “my thirteen-year-old brain on fire with poetry / and girls and an upstart humanism.” “Try the selfish,” celebrates this pleasure with an irreverent, punning joke that starts in the title and runs onto the first line:

“Try the selfish,”

someone said—the host with a cigar like a Chevy’s exhaust? or his wife in the dress with enough gold trim for a room of antiquities at the Vatican.

Nearly all readers of contemporary poetry find themselves outside the joke’s target audience. For them, there is nothing “selfish” about eating a shrimp. What the poem later calls “the limiting laws of kosherkeit” remains literally foreign, a point that Goldbarth’s use of the Yiddish term underscores. For them, the pun, “selfish” / “shellfish,” arises from a different culture, a different sensibility, a different generation. The poem’s readers may enjoy the joke and even laugh at it, but, with very few exceptions, the joke is not theirs.

Goldbarth, though, identifies even with the man and woman whom the speaker’s younger self rejects. He delights in their old-fashioned bad taste. His poem borrows their style, as the descriptions linger over the couple’s garish outfits and accoutrements. Showily, it describes the oversized cigar with a nostalgic simile: “like a Chevy exhaust.” The comparison of the dress’s “gold trim” to that in “a room / of antiquities at the Vatican” is even more comically exaggerated. It is the kind of verbal flourish the depicted couple would appreciate.

When Goldbarth plays the curmudgeon, he can be extremely charming. In the final stanzas, he addresses the reader, listing the reasons he or she might dislike the poem as if daring the reader to reject it. “And you,” the poem adds:

perhaps don’t like this poem: its free verse or its narrative or...