Paul Goodman described himself as a man of letters but foremost a poet. He published several poetry collections in his life, including The Lordly Hudson (1962), Hawkweed (1967), North Percy (1968), and Homespun of Oatmeal Gray (1970). His Collected Poems (1973) were published posthumously. [1]
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) referred to himself, based on his various literary interests, as a man of letters. [2] While prolific across many literary forms and topical categories, [4] [5] as a humanist, Goodman thought of his writing as serving one common subject—"the organism and the environment"—and one common, pragmatic aim: that the writing should effect a change. [6] [3] Indeed, Goodman's poetry, fiction, drama, literary criticism, urban planning, psychological, cultural, and educational theory addressed the theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, especially the responsibility to exercise free action and creativity. [3] While his fiction and poetry was noted in his time, following Growing Up Absurd's success, he diverted his attention from literature and spent his final decade pursuing the social and cultural criticism that forms the basis of his legacy. [3]
Goodman prized his poems and stories above his other work, [2] and thought of himself as foremost a poet, [7] though it would not be the work for which he was known. [3]
Goodman began to write poems in his youth, before his first stories. [2] He modeled his early poems in the tradition of Greek and Latin poets, rather than the more contemporary of modernist poetry. [8]
He was known to compose his poems on paper scraps and envelopes that he carried. [2]
Goodman tends to write in traditional formats, albeit loosely, and about his very personal, direct experience, often describing "his" city and circumstances in a style "closer to heightened speech than modernist ellipses". [9]
His poems were printed in little magazines and limited private editions. New Directions featured Goodman in their 1941 Five Young American Poets. Goodman released five verse poems the same year in Stop-Light, written in the style of Japanese Noh. [7]
Goodman originally printed a set of poems, The Copernican Revolution, as a Christmas card with his friend's small 5x8 Press in 1946. With demand, a 1947 edition doubled its content. [10]
Between 1954 and 1960, Goodman's spouse, Sally Goodman, compiled and printed three pamphlets of his poetry: Day and Other Poems (1954), Red Jacket (Christmas 1955), and The Well of Bethlehem (1957 or 1958). [11] Some of these poems were previously published in the Quarterly Review of Literature , Poetry , Resistance , among other small publications. [12]
His poetry collections came later in his life, after he had come to prominence as a social critic with Growing Up Absurd (1960). These poetry volumes included The Lordly Hudson (1962), Hawkweed (1967), North Percy (1968), and Homespun of Oatmeal Grey (1970). [7]
Poet Harvey Shapiro wrote that the poetry in The Lordly Hudson, Goodman's first solo collection, was "the purest version of his thought ... always serviceable, sometimes awkward ... by rips and starts brilliant." [9] Richard Kostelanetz wrote that Goodman's title lyric was his most memorable line: [9]
This is our Lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! Home! Home!
The phrase "lordly Hudson" had been first penned by Washington Irving in the early 1800s. [13]
Composer Ned Rorem put Goodman's poem "The Lordly Hudson" to art song. The Music Library Association called it the best published song of 1948. [14] Soprano Janet Fairbank premiered the work. [15]
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Goodman influenced the poet Frank O'Hara, who liked Goodman's plain speech in his fiction, his act of writing poems occasionally, and his focus on New York City. [16]
Ned Miller Rorem was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. Best known for his art songs, which number over 500, Rorem was considered the leading American of his time writing in the genre. Frequently described as a neoromantic composer, he showed limited interest in the emerging modernist aesthetic of his lifetime. As a writer, he kept—and later published—numerous diaries in which he spoke candidly of his exchanges and relationships with many cultural figures of America and France.
Growing Up Absurd is a 1960 book by Paul Goodman on the relationship between American juvenile delinquency and societal opportunities to fulfill natural needs. Contrary to the then-popular view that juvenile delinquents should be led to respect societal norms, Goodman argued that young American men were justified in their disaffection because their society lacked the preconditions for growing up, such as meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance.
Five Years is an autobiographical collection of Paul Goodman's notebooks between 1955 and 1960.
The Empire City is a 1959 epic novel by Paul Goodman.
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life is a 1947 book on community and city planning by Percival and Paul Goodman. Presented as an illustrated primer on how city planning affects socioeconomic order and citizens' empowerment to better their communities, the book reviews historical and modern approaches to urban planning before proposing three of the Goodmans' own provocative community paradigms.
Kafka's Prayer is a 1947 book-length analysis of the novelist Franz Kafka and his works by Paul Goodman. Using Freudian and Reichian psychoanalysis, Goodman assesses the philosophical and religious significance of Kafka's aphoristic statements and three novels. He levels an anarchist societal critique against social institutions borne from neuroticism. Goodman used the book, published by Vanguard Press, to grapple with the religious implications of psychoanalysis and transition from a career writing on Jewish concerns to a period that would culminate in his collaboration on the founding work of the gestalt therapy movement.
The May Pamphlet is a collection of six anarchist essays written and published by Paul Goodman in 1945. Goodman discusses the problems of living in a society that represses individual instinct through coercion. He suggests that individuals resist such conditions by reclaiming their natural instincts and initiative, and by "drawing the line", an ideological delineation beyond which an individual should refuse to conform or cooperate with social convention. While themes from The May Pamphlet—decentralization, peace, social psychology, youth liberation—would recur throughout his works, Goodman's later social criticism focused on practical applications rather than theoretical concerns.
This is a list of works by Paul Goodman (1911–1972), including his nonfiction, novels, short stories, poetry, and plays.
Little Prayers and Finite Experience is a book of prose and poetry by Paul Goodman.
Collected Poems is a book of Paul Goodman's collected poetry, edited by his literary executor Taylor Stoehr and introduced by George Dennison.
Making Do is a 1963 novel written by Paul Goodman and published by Macmillan.
The Structure of Literature is a 1954 book of literary criticism by Paul Goodman, the published version of his doctoral dissertation in the humanities. The book proposes a mode of formal literary analysis that digests a literary work into structural elements based on the reader's experience and recombines those parts to explain the work as a whole. Goodman analyzes several literary works as examples with close reading and genre discussion.
Paul Goodman's oeuvre spanned fiction, poetry, drama, social criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis. While he viewed himself as a man of letters, he prized his stories and poems above his other work. To Goodman, writing was "his vice" or "way of being in the world".
Taylor Stoehr (1931–2013) was an American professor and author. He edited several volumes of Paul Goodman's work as his literary executor.
Katherine Garrison Chapin, sometimes known by her married name Katherine Biddle, was an American poet, librettist, and playwright. She is best known for two collaborations with composer William Grant Still: And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and Plain-Chant for America (1941).
The Lordly Hudson is a poem and 1962 book of collected poetry by Paul Goodman.
"The Politics of Being Queer" is a 1969 essay by Paul Goodman on the connection between his bisexuality and his personal politics. It is noteworthy for its role in reclaiming the word "queer". Originally published as "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist", Goodman revised the essay, which was retitled and published posthumously.
Parents' Day is a 1951 novel by Paul Goodman. Written as autobiographical fiction based on the author's experiences teaching at the upstate New York progressive boarding school Manumit during the 1943–1944 year, the book's narrator grapples with his homosexuality and explores a series of sexual attractions and relationships that culminates in his being fired by the school. Goodman wrote the novel as part of a Reichian self-analysis begun in 1946 to better understand his own life. He struggled to find a publisher and ultimately self-published through a friend's small press. Reviewers remarked on unease in Goodman's sexual revelations, lack of self-awareness, and lack of coherence in the text. Parents' Day sold poorly and has been largely forgotten, save for some recognition as an early gay American novel.
Prior to his career in social criticism, the American writer Paul Goodman had a prolific career in avant-garde literature, including some 18 works for the stage. His plays, mostly written in the 1940s, were typically experimental. Their professional productions were either unsuccessful or flopped, including the three productions staged with The Living Theatre in the 1950s and one with The American Place Theatre in 1966. His lack of recognition as a litterateur in the 1950s helped drive him to his successful career in social criticism in the 1960s.
Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.