Placitas poet publishes three books
The release of three books by Placitas poet Larry Goodell consolidates four years of explorations on topics both cosmic and common
The literary explosion you heard was the simultaneous publication of three books of Larry Goodell’s poetry.
Albuquerque’s Beatlick Press recently published Goodell’s “Pieces of Heart,” “Digital Remains,” and together in a bound volume the collections “broken garden” and “the unsaid sings.”
“The idea was to include as much from my recent work as possible,” said Goodell, a longtime Placitas resident and a wellknown and popular area performance poet.
“I wanted to give a sense of the chronological flow of the journals for the last four years.”
He gets up early most mornings to write poetry in his journals. His favorite writing tool is a French fountain pen.
Goodell’s poetry traverses many styles, moods and even more subjects.
He writes, for instance, of God, of rain, of brotherhood, of the media, of the nature of poetry, of being confused about the difference between inspiration and expiration and of his impression of the sounds chickens make when being fed.
His drawings accompany some poems.
Goodell, 80, is a Roswell native. He’s been writing poetry since he was a student at the University of Southern California.
“I thought I was going to be a composer, but I was no good at it. So I wrote poems about musicians, composers,” he said.
He credits poet Robert Creeley for “probably saving my life as a poet.”
He was interested in (Allen) Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, the New American Poets. “It allowed me to find my own voice,” Goodell said.
He met Creeley in Placitas in 1963. That same year he heard Ginsberg, Denise Levertov and Philip Whelan at a poetry festival in Vancouver.
All those people, Goodell said, were rebelling against T.S. Eliot “and the more academic writers.”
Goodell’s poetry is open, fresh, far from academic. “I write from a given first line. It just kind of appears. ... Somehow that leads to continuing on. I kind of guide what feels right and I try not to manipulate.”
He compares his approach to playing jazz where there’s improvisation on a given melody and you go from there.
Goodell, who is also a playwright and a book publisher, thanks his wife, Leonore, for enabling him to survive as a poet. A photographer, she’s been the breadwinner for quite a few years, he said.