Alicia Ostriker
PAUL GOODMAN
Nobody can claim that Paul Goodman's verse is "poetic."
It
resembles Wallace Stevens, say, not at all-or as a handsaw resembles por–
celain .
It
has no
persona,
merely a person. And as like as not the person is
miserably praying' 'Creator Spirit come," hoping the Holy Ghost will ac–
cept a sexual pun, so he can get on with saving the world. "Camerado, this
is no book," warned Whitman at the close of
Leaves of Grass.
"Who
touches this touches a man ." That isn't quite true for Whitman, whose
large rhetoric and sexual disguises make the man less palpable than the
prophet.
It
is quite true for Paul Goodman . There has not been a thoughtful
and passionate personal voice like this in our poetry since Robinson Jeffers,
or in England since D.H. Lawrence. If we want to touch a man, Goodman
makes himselffully available. But do we want to? And is that Art?
Paul Goodman was born on September 9, 1911 in Greenwich Village,
and died August 2, 1972, in New Hampshire. His father deserted the family
in Paul's infancy; his mother was a bohemian; his older brother Percival,
with whom he later wrote
Communitas,
left home early, and he was raised
by his sister Alice, to whom he dedicated the fIrst book of
The Empire City.
He attended Hebrew schools, and graduated from City College in the de–
pression year 1931, but also hitchhiked to courses at Harvard, and sneaked
into Columbia to hear philosophy professor Richard McKeon lecture. For a
young bud on the long vine of the Jewish-agnostic-radical intelligentsia,
Goodman chose a curious pair of masters: Aristotle, who taught him to ob–
serve human institutions, and Kant , who taught him the moral imperative.
There would also be Marx-but Paul became an Anarchist rather than a
Communist; Freud-but he fIrmly rejected the value of sublimation; Reich,
teaching the connection of libido and political life, whence Goodman
moved naturally to gestalt psychology (he became a lay therapist in the
fIfties); the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James; the
Chinese sages; Maimonides, Buber-all from whom he could derive "the
same philosophy" of' 'the concrete, the fInite, the intrinsic ."
