PAUL GOODMAN, POET:

...His last, previously unpublished poems were written under clouds: his son's death, his heart condition, his disenchantment with the young, and, as always, the condition of his beloved-ly loathed America...

...Some of his aphorisms work beautifully: I willingly work with true propositions to hack like wood, I don't like clay...

...and not knowing what else to do, at the end, he wrote more poems, in order-again, along with Picasso-to be able to write the next...

...That Paul Goodman could not, as either poet or citizen, transcend for long the stasis of Nixonian America is a terrible judgment: not on him, but on what he liked to call "my world my only one...

...In this dilemma-to exist in a sphere, of life that he must despise, and yet be fettered to this sphere, as the only one in which he could fulfill himself -in this dilemma Goethe continually found himself...

...I have not tried much for individual beautiful poems-though I think I have occasionally hit one by luck-but I am more satisfed with the whole than with the parts...

...His temperament, his energies, his whole spiritual tendency directed him toward practical life (one of Goodman's favorite words was "practical"), and the practical life that he met was miserable...

...With a Memoir by George Dennison Random House, $12.50 TODD GITLIN Paul Goodman as poet was widely condemned by poets and critics (most scurrilously by Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night), yet he thought of himself to the end as "a man of letters, primarily a poet...

...I am reminded-if this is not too extravagant-of some of En-gels' remarks on Goethe: "Even Goethe was unable to overcome the wretchedness of German life...

...Forced off the reservation, he had to-in one of his own favorite phrases-"make do" in a form that some people, at least, might read...

...A platitude is true when Goethe says it, it lies like iron on the page...

...Poetry-as-life-chronicle was his conception, and I think the sad thing is that he was forced to it-forced to too many ugly poems-in part because our culture does not approve of short, informal prose pieces...

...As epigrammatist and diarist he was in the league of Pascal, Nietzsche, and Camus...

...But the culturally approved forms have their weight, and deadweight, even for someone as rambunctious as Paul Goodman...

...I think the fact is that Goodman had a different conception of poetry from the prevailing one...

...Their monotony is depressing, their formal awkwardness less lively than the earlier gracelessness, yet for all that he still made much sense, and he could still be playful, as in "Hallowe'en 1969": O goblin with your yellow fiery eyes and jagged mouth that frightened me to carve, glaring out of our window at the street, protect us from the candidates for mayor...

...Had he been French, he might have written prose-paragraphs in the manner of Rene Char or Paul Eluard, and would not have been taken to task as a bad poet...

...Often this had the effect of cramp, a cramp the poetry was written to dispel and ended up prolonging...

...In this he had a good deal in common with Bob Dylan, though of course more eruditely and less musically...

...Goodman's political response was different from Goethe's, but he faced the same dilemma...

...He did this often enough to be remembered as a poet, and too well to be embalmed for study...

...His laments for America and his sense of exile in it helped set the tone for an entire generation of younger poets...

...To put it another way, his ideas for poems were often better than the poems themselves...

...The best thing in them," he said of his first collection, The Lordly Hudson, "is their attitude, the proof that a man can still experience his life in this way...

...and, I suppose, not knowing what else to do with them, he published them...

...Of course, he often had a great deal to say: "The Lordly Hudson," for example, is a classic (though curiously and, to me, disconcertingly revised by Goodman for this posthumous collection...

...What are we to make of this...

...George Dennison's memoir is moving, tender, and honest.is moving, tender, and honest...

...At their worst, though, their bluntness is simply crude...

...Rather than beautifying the ugly, he tended to uglify the beautiful...

...This is, of course, bad form, in today's academies and anti-academies...

...Goodman, of course, himself needed prose, and wrote over thirty extraordinary books of it...

...Goethe was too universal, too active a nature, too fleshly to seek escape from this wretchedness in a flight, like Schiller's, to the Kantian ideal...

...He believed in plain speech, and his most interesting poems have the virtue of a slightly off-center blunt-ness, the astonishment of something that can only be recognized as common sense...

...His love of the colloquial-even to the point of pig-headed pidgin-ushered in the possibility of a poetry of ballad proportions, which pays its dues to tradition and yet may be spoken in a modest everyday voice...

...Poetry for him, especially in his later years, was the art of having nothing much to say and saying it well, or at least interestingly, or at least saying it...

...he was too sharp-sighted not to see how this flight finally reduced itself to the exchange of a commonplace for a transcendental misery...

...and these lines: It must be because she was so old and soldierly, and in her way quite perfect, quite perfect, she was in her way quite perfect, and therefore she is in her way quite perfect...

...He repeated himself terribly-and feared this, as did Picasso, whom he admired-and his prosy poems are tedious indeed, especially in their self-pity...

...Yet when it came to representing his daily consciousness in an occasional form, he chose to write what he called poems, spaced and paced something like poems...

...He wrote in Growing Up Absurd: "Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others...

...Goodman respected very few conventions...

...on the contrary, it overcame him, and this victory over the greatest German is the best proof that it cannot be conquered by the individual...

...Figures of Giacometti," "Bread and Wine" and "At the San Remo Bar" are moving and successful experiments in form...

...He might have said, with Whitman, "This is no book/Who touches this, touches a man...

...If many of his choices were, I think, wrong, if he mucked around where he might have worked harder or kept silent, at least he made, once again, a book in which one could recognize a life: a book one could learn from, not simply admire...

...If this is poetry, one might ask, with Mailer, who needs prose...