She was sleeping. She saw
velvet wet nose, thicket
whiskers, wilted ears
move across her dark room.
Was there something for her
to remember him by? Had he
left her without a footnote,
a reminder of love, yarns?
Only a laced remainder: he
ate her shoes, grinding eyelets.
from GOAT lies down on Broadway. For more info see here.
Maureen and her family look up.
Goat has disturbed security
more than once; he does not
look like a dog. Pillars,
stone, design, leveling cuts
or rock, time textbooks. All
ears return to this world:
Goat has stepped on a beer can,
hoof-crushed, scrapes like a
ghost up the steps.
from GOAT lies down on Broadway. For more info see here.
He couldn’t tell her
this wasn’t the petting zoo.
Little Maureen stood
in streetlight rain
by bus stop, patting
his horny face.
Goat wants to gore a Saab.
But he lets her tie yarn
to his horn stubs, and sits
calm, dog-like, smelling rain.
Goat drove the elephants over
Special Sam the Ringmaster
over Kogie the Bagel Clown
over Zumo the Lion Whipper
through rows of bleacher faced people
and three tons of elephant shit
to the open fields
where they did tricks with small trees
and waited for the Bambino Brothers
to bring them back
Have a fragrant evening, Fat Ram
told him. He smelled like seed.
Goat gunnysack slung over back
between teeth had half a mind
and half of that told him he
should eat the moon, big & fat
in his lean eye holes. But he let
it be, instead he gave Fat Ram
a hard swift kick in the hams,
rattling laughter off clouds
The green pastures
of Harvard University
withstood sneakers
but Goat, tenured
white tick bag,
found the president
stuck in a hedge
He would please
the gods,
he thought.
Get
Out she said real
Animals always
Try too hard
Winded, Goat
rounded rock bend
eyes shale, horns
hardly hearing
night birds
following him down
Lino block by Tom Williams
Late night, December 5, 1986, halfway through my senior year of college, I started working on a sequence of 45 ten-line poems about a character named GOAT. I’d been carrying this idea in my head for about a week, and had jotted down a list of titles on a piece of paper. Six hours and four hundred and fifty lines later, right as the sun was rising over the Cascadilla Creek Gorge on the morning of December 6, I finished typing in the last line of the last poem.
It was not my first all-nighter, but it was, I knew even then, my first piece of mature verse; of something I thought would last a little longer than most undergraduate-age work. A few years later, in my small press days with a gang of college friends and an old Challenge proofing press, I published GOAT in a limited edition letterpress printed, hand-sewn format, with half a dozen lino-block illustrations by a young art student named Tom Williams. Twelve years later, when I co-founded a print-on-demand self-publishing company Greatunpublished.com, later to be called Booksurge, GOAT was the first volume off the press and through the binder and trimmer.
Hand-marbled endpaper from the Pathos Press edition of GOAT.
Every year on December 6th across these three decades I have set aside a little time to mark the anniversary of those six hours of writing that resulted in this complete sequence. It has remained a pleasant and quiet anniversary, even with the thrashing of stubby (and stubborn) horns throughout these poems, the destructive romp through MOMA with Troll, an incident with escaped zoo elephants, guest appearances by Jerry Falwell and Johnny Carson and Andy Warhol, and a singularly devastating meeting in a subway train involving Chicken Little…
Since GOAT is mostly narrative and broken up into these ten line poems, I thought this year I could share it as a kind of serial poem, with perhaps two installments a day, and see if anyone else enjoys inhabiting the strange little world captured so many moons ago in that one long night of writing. The next post on this site will be the first of forty-five. I hope a few of you come along for the ride. The hills, I hear, are full of rocks and beasts.
The first poem in GOAT, from the Pathos Press edition. The typeface is Centaur Roman.
From the 1930 edition illustrated by Rockwell Kent.
Call me crazy, but Moby Dick is my favorite novel. My favorite book. My favorite source of inspiration as a writer and a human being. It’s my Single Desert Island Book–narrative, lyrical, philosophical, funny, heart-warming and heart-breaking, one of the Biggest Tales of All Time, but with all sorts of weird almost postmodern flourishes (whole chapters in the closest thing to screenplay format a mid 19th century writer could imagine, doppleganger characters and storylines, characters who appear and then suddenly disappear … or do they?, and so on).
On November 14, 1851, the novel was published in England by Richard Bentley. Bentley was probably counting on the success of Melville’s earlier bestsellers (yep, Melville was actually a Young Celebrity Author in his time) Typee and Omoo, based loosely on his real-life adventures surviving a mutiny and jumping ship off a merchant marine vessel and living among “cannibals” for a while (the guy woulda been all over cable news channels), to generate substantial sales. Needless to say, the industry was fickle even back then. Am I saying that the author of one of the world’s best-known English language novels deserves more recognition than he already has? YES! Am I saying that pretty much all of Western literature and entertainment from Gravity’s Rainbow to “Survivor” can be traced back to this one book? YES!! I’m not saying I’d be right about these things; just enthusiastic enough that I hope it is infectious; just infectious enough that I hope you squint at that first page and read the poetry in that first paragraph, and let the great shoulders of that prose hold you up and point you to the vast waterways within your own story.
Close up of the back of the coaster. The title is in Copperplate Gothic.
Back on the rack! Some of the output of a day’s fruitful collaboration between a Chandler and Price 10×15 NS press (born in Cleveland, in 1914) and designer and printer extraordinaire Emily Hancock of St Brigid Press (born in North Carolina, much more recently).
Tomorrow, more of the same. Monday: The haiku go on the press. The entire haiku sequence can be found in the book Vanishing Tracks, available here as a free PDF or hardcover book.
I’ll have a link up in the next day or so to pre-order this limited edition series of “Night Walk on Cape Cod” printed in letterpress on durable drink coasters.
All photos courtesy of St Brigid Press
Translations from the English 