This Music Has Holes in It
In her introduction to The Baseball Field at Night, Melissa Kwasny writes of Goedicke's work:
Hers is a poetry of "dis-equilibrium," in the sense that the poet Robert Duncan speaks of it, as that which all living organisims strive to maintain. Evading equilibrium, one evades death.
"This Music Has Holes in It" is full of absences. In it, we see the interplay between sound and silence, life and death. The presences and absences Goedicke presents do not exist independent of each other, but instead one initiates the other. A rock at the beginning of the poem creates ripples in a pond marking the point where the rock disappears beneath the surface. At the end of the poem, absence invites wonderous and terrible possibilities: a spaceship, a bomb, a god.
