Art Goodtimes

As If the World
Really Mattered

Poems

120 pages

6 x 8 inches

ISBN: 978-1-888809-49-7

$14.00

Art Goodtimes is legendary along the Sourthern Rockies as poet, performer, ritualist, Rainbow Tribe and Green Party activist. In her introduction, “deep ecologist” Dolores LaChapelle describes him as part of the bardic tradition “which shows us how nature and human consciousness are but different aspects of one consciousness. Bards put mind and body together within the whole of nature.” In As If the World Really Mattered, we find poems which joyfully expound on the natural world and our relationship to it. Lyrical but root essential, Goodtimes speaks as one of the ancient storytellers—wise and sly. These poems could have been sung underground in the caves of Lascaux or atop a rock in a sacred grove. Political at heart, Goodtimes opposes the alienation of industrial culture from our interdependent life on earth. Much of his work has only been published in chapbooks, broadsides, “bundles,” and various ephemera, this is his first major collection.

“Poet Tree, as my friend Kush would say, with all its rich history/herstory, springs from storytelling. It is an art that allows us humans to speak, not just for ourselves but for the world around us in all its illusive facets — poor matchstick, poppycock, immortal diamond. For me, poetry’s simplicite’ is its charm. No techno gimmicks, celluloid tricks. No dazzling mechanical arrays. Just voice —expressed as language, that tantalizingly accessible chameleon whose shape runs the gamut from the mundane to the divine, from the idiotic to the elegant.” —from the author’s Preface.

If you’ve ever heard Art Goodtimes in full voice, you can bring that resounding onto these pages. If this is your first Artful moment, which I doubt since everybody knows Art, you’re in for delight. The names Blake, Hopkins, and Snyder come to mind, and the mind here is a vast outdoors of heart-intellect. I read the notes and Intro first because I couldn’t resist. I emerge from the attendant poems under the influence, my consciousness lifted to places I needed to go, big time, thanks to Goodtimes.
—Joan Logghe

Poet, shaman, artist and activist, Art Goodtimes gives us poems that are precise and generous and true. They sing and bring us new marvels of understanding. Some poets work inside the tradition, others outside. Art Goodtimes is one of those rare maker poets that help define a fresh, evolving tradition. These are songs of Earth and our human condition that lift as they illuminate. They serve a larger purpose: the encounter of the real, the sacred and the moment. In the splendid mess we call “human,” Art Goodtimes catches the heart-wood we all need. He gives voice and song and poem to the wilderness of possibility rising. He reinvents and makes it new. You are holding poems of authentic engagement. Goodtimes knows a growing thing when he feels it, and has the skill to help it grow into your ear and heart and mind.
—Jack Mueller

Huzzah! Important to have Art Goodtimes’ collected work elegantly in hand—an ecstatic basket of intricate, ambidextrous poems! His place-passionate poetry roars in on a polyphonic resonant frequency—bold harmonics, lit by fierce, tender intelligence, reverb con brio. This is audacious, plumed, lucid, and lyrical wildmind writing shaped by uplift and running strong as snowmelt. These are poems that praise and rail and shimmer; ancient & au courant, erudite and faithful; re-voicing the broken, disappeared and forgotten. All honors to Art Goodtimes, one of our great bardic rememberers, singer of the San Juan songlines, peaceforger, heroic worker bee, potato farmer, whose poetry most definitely matters.
—Judyth Hill

Some books tell us what we don’t know; this book reminds us of what we may have forgotten or come to ignore, the mystery of deep current hinted at by a slow river’s surface. Art Goodtimes’ poems “plunge their green thumbs into / the plundered soil of the interior landscape” with grace and flashing color, the lyric valuables of a pied bard piping us back into the moment so we become “the flow reinhabiting the rock.” Go ahead, delight yourself: read this book.
—Chris Ransick

Poet, journalist and third-term Green county commissioner, Art Goodtimes is a former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Wild Earth. He served as poet-in- residence for the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival for 25 years and continues as founder/director of the annual Talking Gourds poetry gatherings.He's lives near Norwood on Wright's Mesa at the western edge of the San Juans with his wife and children.