July 7, 1990 - El Paso Herald-Post

This poet sings with a joyous sense of language

There is a shaman grousing in the thin, reedlike body of Larry Goodell. There is a song unwinding in the nasal, reedy voice as he enunciates a poetics of madness and joy, of celebration and realization - and the words seem to dance from him.

Everything becomes a work of poetical art, very political in its sense of the power and magic of language - not at all politics or the vying for a position, bait the kind of politicizing empowerment which has no need or fear of systems and totemic idiocies.

There is a fine line between madcap poesie and chaos in Goodell, and it is a delectable and enjoyable poetics, one which speaks to language in its vastness, in its power to redefine reality, to somehow make space elastic so that the plastic cutey-pie inanity of popular media cannot devour the spirit.

It is a poetry which first moved me in the early 1970s at events which spoke to the beauty and spiritual value of language(s).

Poets would gather in such places as Santa Fe, Albuquerque, El Paso, Cd. Juarez, Phoenix, Durango (Colorado) and outposts in Sonora to concelebrate the poetry of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico.

It was the SouthWest Poets' Conferences a series of annual readings organized by Randall W. Ackley, Simon Ortiz and yours truly.

Goodell, the shaman-loco in residence, performed a poetics which dared to play with language while beguiling the atidi(!tice with his many quick transf'orniitions. Each poem he delivered had its own costume which created t new aiiibiente of nuances and symbols.

Goodell, the poet read with a joyous sense of language, while also helping people understand that poetry has a serious side to it that is not at all puffery or rigidity.

The cutting voice would intone and then become a bird in flight into a deeper and more resonant festivity of life, and the serious questions became palatable, easier to fathom.

A few weeks ago, Goodell hosted me in Albuquerque. It felt great to again be in the company of a poet who takes poetry seriously and who does not take himself so seriously that he becomes another academic RoboPoet.

There is a panache in Goodell's work, a sense of life that is organic and not programmed. There are many sides to him, and his poetry reflects the actual and not the virtual, and that is a relief.

Skilled, talented, well-read, autodidactic as well as formally educated, Goodell creates images which take one into primal settings, then he easily transports the reader into cityscapes which reek of real settings.

Truth comes easily to him, and his life reflects integrity and a devil-take-what-it-must attitude, an unbending yet gentle understanding that he need not be beholden to anyone.

"Firecracker Soup," Goodell's latest book - in a goodly number of Publications - was recently published by Bobby Byrd at Cinco Puntos Press. It is an enjoyable read, a journey into-madcap notions of life as well as controlled verses wielded by a bard who has firmly established himself as a poet of power, wit, inventiveness and gringo-loco poetics.

Far from being cute or sterile, Goodell is simply a shamanisticgava-coyote on an excursion through a New Mexico which becomes the universe of embroiling and perambulating verse. His madness is rational, just as the words are cutting or inventive, and the images traverse this part of the world easily yet pointedly and pensively.

In between the chuckles, serious questions poke at one. It is more than fun and games and more than studious reflections: It is poetry which entertains and moves one, while provoking one to ponder.