Comments . . .
about the Work
Margaret Randall: His performances, combining various props with strong poetry, are events to be remembered. Larry was born and grew up in Roswell, New Mexico. He often says poetry saved him from a mundane life of small town routine. Aside from his own poetry and his important curatorial work, he has developed one of the most valuable archives—audio as well as photographic—of several generations of US American writers: our images, our work, our amazing doings, in short: our history.
Keith Wilson: He apes old clichés; his gestures with language, or on the stage, all seem so casual, easy.... And what he does on the page with the rhythms, the sudden bursts of revelry are truly amazing. He is a master poet.
Ricardo Sanchez: 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.
Jimmy Santiago Baca: Every literary red-light he runs, sandal'd foot to the gas pedal, caring little for the handkerchief muffled-over-mouth crowd opinions. He howls and luxuriates in the coyote yelp, he returns to the reader the gift of happiness and vibrancy he infuses his language with. Page after page the marvelous poetry displays both grandeur of spirit and courageous heart.
Robert Creeley: Larry Goodell talks a truth in terms that grab you by the ears and give you a good shake....No poet is more particular to the wild outside and inside vastnesses of New Mexico, where Cabeza de Vaca got truly lost and D.H. Lawrence equally found. Put bluntly, Larry Goodell has been the only alternative to the Atomic Energy Commission for years and years now, and this book is a veritable blast.
Gene Frumkin: Almost anything can get into his poems. He apparently has taken Charles Olson at his word: Don't categorize experience, just let it happen. Goodell's poems really are kinetic, they are fragments of energy; they move. The experience Goodell writes about in a particular poem does not end; it is not summed up; it is invaded by other suggestions, other experiences; it goes on.
Art Goodtimes: Here On Earth, 59 Sonnets [La Alameda Press]. More like song-nets, they pull up treasure, fish, trinkets & surprises in about equal measure. This is colloquial American English (Spicer would have loved it) rolled into a doobie, soaked in mescal, and smoking with the wisdom of one long life lived in that rocky place, where a trail/Changes into five or six colors ... He is a master reader, and you have to imagine these pieces read. No, rather performed. For Larry truly breathes shape into the words. They take on attitudes. Costumes. He is their animator, as well as originator. And the tension between spoken lyric leaps and mimicked formal structure give the collection their flavor, spiced as always with the firecracker soup of Goodell's hotpepper imagination. These are poems that insist on being heard. Where music is palpable, like the skin of yucca. Where life explodes into blossoms & thorns... Telluride Daily Planet, 5February98
Gino Sky: Praise to the Good-deli poems that was delivered from the Greatest Word & art Deli . . . . I spent the night with it snuggled in my bed as if it were the gift of ancient wisdom and playful 5 star treats of the mind, heart, soul and do-flap-ah-riff-a-chew on that smorges-never-board bungling rapture. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a book of poetry so much, and took your ride with so much heart-felt love and admiration. You are the poet of america . . . Whitman - Patchen - Ginsberg - Goodell Goodell Goodell . . . I now nominate you and confirm your appointment to be the Poet Laurel of Magical Laurel-Goodell-GodDell-Goddamn goddamn goddamn ain't that bestowed on you, for you, to you the wreath of poetry of the language (the sound, heart, dreams, disappointments, failures, hopes, dreams, sounds, whispers, shouts and hollers, double-forte and piananissimo babalululah charisma peace peace peace and more peaces of where we have never been and not to go but where L.G. has taken us into his own country, territory, galaxy, of what we have so missed and continue to miss and what poetry in america and the world have missed over and over again. But here is it . . . broken garden & the unsaid sings . . . before us laid down, layed down, noh-lie, lain laid on us, he who has laid it down with songs and tunes and cobbled words of ancient words of wisdom . . . I hereby award you the Truth Poet Of America with no runners-up or second place or no followers could ever be but Larry Goodell my beloved brother of song. Along with the art work that floats the book over the rainbow . . .