Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay might just be one of the essential books that everyone needs to read this year. Regardless of how one may argue with some of Gottlieb’s depictions and their biases (like his verbatim accounts of certain conversations), once you get started the book is positively magnetic and nearly impossible to put down. The fact is that Gottlieb’s Proustian/Wordsworthian Memoir and Essay, written in brief prose pieces each inspired by an object or occasion, represents one of the only available histories of early Language writing in New York so far. Among the treasures to be discovered here are thoughtful, insightful remarks by an early member of the original Language group about what his work does, how he thought about it, and by implication where some of that group’s interests came from. Gottlieb’s remarks are most fascinating to me for three reasons: first, he portrays his comments about language as descriptive rather than proscriptive. Second, they are written in language anyone could understand immediately; there is very little jargon or academese. Third, there a persistent way of including the surrounding details of life in a way that prevents reduction to a formalism. All three things happen in Gottlieb’s description of his discovering the nascent magazines This and Oculist Witness in the Gotham Book Mart:
And there were people out there who thought just like me. There were poets, some of them seemed to be in San Francisco, some might even be in New York, who were doing amazing, wonderful, strange, breathtaking things. They were taking poems, lines, sentences, words themselves, the world itself—taking all of it apart and putting it back together again on the page in an incredible new way that was so gorgeous that I had to sit down, right there in the backroom of the Gotham, on one of the little stools that cluttered up the aisles, and catch my breath. Now I knew: I wasn’t alone.
The collective effect of such a passage, the specificity of location, and the swooning performances of reading and identification as community here, are like taking a sledgehammer to various fourth walls which one didn’t realize had been there all along. Gottlieb begins to sketch one of several possible ways we might begin to historicize language poetry so that in the process we can better appreciate its innovations and accomplishments. Please welcome Michael Gottlieb to the EOAGH Reading Series.
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