A few years back poet Albert Goldbarth heard that Wichita State University was scrapping its card catalog. He pleaded with the librarian to save it. “I said, ‘Look, 200 years from now you’re going to have some kind of exhibit here about the library 200 years ago, and you’re going to pay somebody to make a mock-up of a card catalog,’” he says. “But it was already on the books to go to the state dump, and nothing would change his mind. I even suggested he sell it to some preppy couples to keep the thing intact, and he wouldn’t budge.”
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Goldbarth is the author of some 30 books of poetry, prose, and essays–and the only poet to have received the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He remains obscure to the mainstream–his books rarely sell more than a few thousand copies each–but he’s well regarded in that small circle of people who read serious poetry.
“Goldbarth’s amazing for the way he can bring absolutely anything into a poem and make it seem organic and necessary,” says Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine.
Goldbarth’s love of language came early. “On the way to school I was robbed of my milk money by kids of all different kinds of dialects,” he says. His parents had trouble figuring out what to do with their son’s literary promise. “My father was always trying to hook me up with a rabbi who used to write a column for a little neighborhood newspaper,” he says.
