Contributor’s Marginalia: Amit Majmudar responding to Albert Goldbarth’s “Toast Christ”

Albert Goldbarth’s “Toast Christ” is a poem about pareidolia, in which the mind sees “a specific, meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.” It is the most poignant reflex of the human mind: to read signal into noise, to deny the chance in chance and insist on predetermination. The imprint on the Shroud of Turin, like the pattern of burn on the (flesh-toned, sacramental) bread, is not really a face, or if it is, it isn’t the Messiah’s. But try telling the minds of the faithful that radiocarbon dating has debunked that piece of cloth. It doesn’t matter. Because this isn’t about matter. It’s mind.

I was surprised to see Albert Goldbarth in here. I feel like I don’t see him around much anymore in journals. Encountering his poem was like seeing an old friend, though he doesn’t know me. There was a time when my take was that he basically writes prose with linebreaks. I still think that, but I don’t mind as much anymore. There is something about how he embeds unmistakably poetic images in the profusion of chatty language—the dead wife’s face in the water stain below the spigot—and felicitously metrical, musical phrases—“From will and a frizzle of retinal fatigue”—that disarm me and charm me and make me (sometimes grudgingly) nod my head. His style collapses demotic farrago and the piquant image into the same pagespace, and I respect that—no wonder his New and Selected, 1972-2007, was titled The Kitchen Sink. As in, everything and—.

You can see patterns everywhere, if you want. If you include the poet’s name and the title, the page on which that poem appears contains exactly 32 lines of print in a journal called 32 Poems. Neat! But I do think his poem’s placement across from my own contribution—“Where to Look”—was a thought-out choice on the part of the editor, juxtaposing Goldbarth’s poem about optical delusion with mine, which posits God (perhaps the consummate example of collective pareidolia) as a vision just beyond the visual field. I love how Goldbarth’s poem and mine are on facing pages—they really are in dialogue with one another. Unless that wasn’t in the editor’s head when he sequenced the poems? I could be reading too much into this.

Goldbarth is one of our veteran poets, in his seventies now. I recall reading somewhere that he writes everything on a typewriter. I think naming one of the people in the poem Nestor—the oldest Achaian at Troy—is deliberate, a reference to his own aging, and that ending where he connects Nestor’s wrinkles to the canals on Mars is what Goldbarth is best at, his signature move. Unless that Homeric nod wasn’t deliberate? Maybe “Dorie” and “Nestor” were really just their names. I could be seeing a classical allusion where none is. Maybe this contributor’s marginalia piece I’ve written is just a run of verbal pareidolia.