Harvey Goldner and Seattle
Harvey Goldner (1942–2007) was a Seattle poet known locally as the “Bard of Belltown.” His poems were widely published, and his books included The Hotel of Lost Light, Penny Dreadful, and other collections. He also edited the magazine Roar Shock. Seattle’s literary record remembers a poet whose work moved through street life, comic excess, erotic appetite, local geography, and social observation.
Two surviving appearances gather different sides of that voice. Issue 24 records the long narrative poem “A Wild Rose Romance,” a Seattle-centered tale of Anna Marmalade and Molly Fang that mixes camp, erotic comedy, wealth, drugs, art, music, marriage, and mock-romance. The archival source preserves the complete poem. Issue 27 adds two complete shorter poems, where Goldner’s comic narrative impulse becomes tighter and more anecdotal.
Issue 27: two poems
La Belle D.C. Dame Sans Money And The Man From The State Department
for Tina and Tiffany
He met Ms. Pussy in a Georgetown bar.
She was drinking doubles, Remy Martin,
through lips painted shocking-scarlet,
which the girls called cocksuckingred.
Her speech was a stew of London,
New York, Paris, Valley Girl and
porch-talk-under-a-Georgia-moon.
She fed him chili with her spoon.
Bowie sang: Let’s Dance, and she did.
Her hair swept the floor like a broom,
and her ass was as high as a sprinter’s,
squeezed into the gold lamé of life.
He bought a room. For an hour
she was his wife. It trembled
like a flower. Time cannot
erase the sweet moan she made
while she sat upon his face.
He woke alone to find
she’d cleaned him out: cash,
cards, car keys, and coke.
His car turned up a week later,
wrecked
beside a cold hill
outside Brunswick, Georgia.
At a Montana Truckstop
“My girl friends
have all ways
been cow boys,”
said the old
trucker
adjusting
his Peter-
bilt cap.
Books and the Belltown record
A 2007 remembrance in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls Goldner the Bard of Belltown and records his role in the city’s poetry community. The Seattle City Council also preserves his books and long publishing history.