The Ballad of Artz Carbuncle

The Ballad of Artz Carbuncle: The Public Journal of a Private Life 1969--1970 should appeal to anyone with vivid memories of America in the 1960's or has a compelling interest in the social history of the period. It is the first in a projected series of four books describing the experiences and reflections of an American poet/songwriter who took the stage name Artz Carbuncle. The Ballad's poems and songs narrate his explorations of America from Artz' hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, to Newport Rhode Island's famous folk festival, through a brief period of employment in New York city, and a winter of apartment-sitting for friends in Washington, DC. He then spends the Spring as a janitor in a Cleveland Chemical plant, before undertaking a hitchhiking trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina after being notified of his deferment from military service. His poems reflect his abiding concerns with American commercialism, popular culture, intergenerational strife, and the on-going Vietnam war. This volume also contains as a prelude to The Ballad a reissue of the first book in which Artz appeared, The Collected Poems of an Anonymous Young Poet, which was published as a chapbook in 1969 by the Hiram Poetry Review.

The author notes that The Ballad explored his perceptions of contemporary America using techniques he had first developed in the volume published by Hiram Poetry Review. In that chapbook he had used a series of fictive events to provide a context in which to understand the individual poems as registering significant moments in the life of the anonymous narrator. With The Ballad, this fictive person found his name and a characteristic range of vocal effects and thematic concerns. The resulting form is a sort of novel in verse, portraying a series of events (with related reflections) implicitly narrated by the central character.

Artz provides a somewhat unconventional perspective on the chaotic decade of the 1960's. Drawing inspiration from such writers as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, his poems are lyric in style, but their sequence suggests the on-going story of Artz's life between the Fall of 1969 and late Summer and Fall of 1970. The poems reveal transformations in his character and his perceptions of American society and culture. Artz subsequently came to be the primary figure in much of the author's poetry, a sensibility through which his experiences could be filtered and to some degree objectified. Today, after three additional volumes of poetry and prose, Artz remains deeply anti-metaphysical, a 'naturalistic' presence critical of assertions of transcendent knowledge and morality, more concerned with lived human experience than with abstract reflection.

The author, Ty Bouldin, is a West Virginia native who majored in English at Concord College in Athens, WV between 1965 and 1969. In his senior year, he and a musician friend presented a reading of poems and songs under the stage name of "Cornpone and Carbuncle," satirizing a snobbish passage in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland that describes an assertive lower-class male as a "young man carbuncular." Most of Bouldin's original material in this reading was contained in the chapbook that was published that year by the Hiram Poetry Review and which ultimately gave rise to the character of Artz as he appears in The Ballad. Earning advanced degrees from Miami University of Ohio and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bouldin taught English for 31 years at West Virginia State College and The University of Arizona, from which he retired in 2003. After retirement, he and his wife Susan-a painter and photographer-returned to their rural home in West Virginia where they now live on a wooded 25 acres with dogs, birds, flowers, and transient wildlife.