Geoffrey Young : issue three : preface

You’re taking a shower, a heavy winter wind blowing outside, soap’s everywhere, and all of a sudden the lights go out, the water stops, and you are there in the dark, wondering what to do, how long you’ll have to wait, and will the power come back on?

          By the time it does, you’re fully dressed.  You’ve found a flashlight and you’re reading the latest issue of GUEST in the dark, enjoying the veteran voices, the satirical probes, the conceptual humor, the sustained concisions, the idiomatic bumps, the inspissate grinds, the attention to syllabic detail and image clarity.

          One thing follows another.  Another follows thing one. Time in, time out.  Different voices, different runes.  The second reading different than the first.  The text on the page, the sound in your ear.  Poems aspire to a life-time, or even longer. Enjoy, “enjoy.”

26 February 2019

Geoffrey Young [photo credit: Walter Robinson] has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. For the last twenty-seven years he has presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures, founded in Berkeley, CA, was in business for 30 years, ending in 2005, after publishing 135 books of contemporary poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Recent chapbooks of his poems and drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017); SAUCE (World Wide Suicide, 2018); and Sight Unseen (Giant Squid, 2018). In addition, he has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.