Excerpt from

Pagan Rites/Creator Spirit Come



Creator Spirit come
    by whom
       I'll say what is real
       and so away I'll steal.

When my only son
fell down and died on Percy mountain
       I began
       to practice magic like a pagan.

Around the open grave we ate
the blueberries that he brought
       from the cloud, and then we
       buried his bag with his body.




Adrienne Rich,, reviewing Goodman's The Lordly Hudson in The New York Review of Books:
It is this that gives his poems their fascination: this inseparability of private and public experience, the person and the prophet totally intermingled, so that in his collected poems the richest contemporary themes and the oldest individual experiences stream together: celebrations of sexuality, natural beauty, and communal feeling; pain and fatigue of solitary rebellion; delight in self and body, and self disgust; private desire and passionately jealous love of country; arrogance in singularity and misery in intellectual loneliness; almost every mood of a proud, romantic, unresigned human animal born into the American urban wilderness.

Paul Goodman at the Academy of American Poets
Paul Goodman: Writing on the web -- links (some of them broken} to Goodman's work, primarily essay, available on the internet.