Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of five books of poetry; Not So Fast Robespierre is now available from Menendez Publishing. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY (1993) and Daemen College, Amherst, NY (2002), and served as a U.S. Marine during the first gulf war. He lives in Kenmore, NY with his girlfriend and two cats.
http://www.geoffreygatza.com http://www.blazevox.org
Geoffrey Gatza is a young poet of the era of the so-called post-avant. Future historians of poetry will no doubt note how the post-avant is primarily characterized by the prolific number of literary Tupperware© parties its members hold in various locales around the country. At these parties, as is well known, transparent Tupperware© containers of various sizes and shapes are excitedly passed around, their slightly varied forms and sizes avidly appraised, their snap-on covers lovingly fondled, the names of the different owners of said containers uttered with breathless, “you-are-one-of-us” approbation. Historians will no doubt note, as well, that Geoffrey Gatza was never invited to these parties, and that his lack of popularity was, in the main, his own doing. For when he wasn't in the kitchen cooking (he is a chef by trade and a master one), he chose to spend his time alone someplace, designing, crafting, and forging a kind of strange (for lack of better description) rocket backpack, which in a field of poppies he one day strapped himself into and fired up with a click of his Zippo. Historians will note what a few on the ground amazingly observed (though not, of course, those “insiders” at the parties, blocked as they were by the soundproofed walls and roofs around them): A flaming dark form shooting up at tremendous speed, lifting higher and higher, getting smaller and smaller, and then, of a sudden, at a tremendous height, exploding in a giant, blinding flash, sending thousands of pieces of contrailed debris slowly spinning down out of the sky around a central, slowly falling ball of light… Oh, but no, don't be sad. For the historians will not mourn his fate. They will observe, rather, and quite matter-of-factly, that in the era under discussion, nearly all poets, whether of the School of Quietude or the post-avant, chose a safe, flat, and authorized path, while a tiny few, like Geoffrey Gatza, elected to gloriously immolate themselves far above the Gravity of Literature, and way beyond the slow, demeaning death of those who are satisfied, in their fleeting existences, to remain there. —Kent Johnson
