Poet Albert Goldbarth loves to talk about his spaceship collection with anyone who will listen, yet the 61-year-old poet refuses to use e-mail.

“Some days I must say, I’m kind of noble and heroic about it and other days I know people consider me a great big pain in the ass,” Goldbarth said. “I can only say that for me it seems absolutely right to draw the line and not accept that technology in my life.”

Goldbarth returns to Iowa City to read from his latest poetry collection, To Be Read in 500 Years, today at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque. The poet distinctly remembers his time spent at the UI, where he received his M.F.A. in 1971.

“I have fond memories of walking along the river, looking at Iowa co-eds, drinks at the Mill and the Foxhead,” Goldbarth said. “Poetry readings were everywhere. Those were days where I could just walk the streets of the city late at night and hold out my tongue and poetry would be sitting on it like a snowfall from out of the sky.”

Goldbarth has more than 25 works of poetry under his name, and is the only author to receive the National Critics Circle Award for poetry twice.

The writer is infatuated with the 1950s science fiction image of flying cars and spacemen, a reoccurring theme that is seen in many of his books including Budget Travel Through Space and Time and the more recent To Be Read in 500 Years.

“I have a kind of layman’s curiosity about what’s happening in biology, astronomy, and contemporary physics,” Goldbarth said. “I own, I think a very lovely, frankly, collection of old 1950s space toys. Rocket ships and ray guns and things like that.”

Goldbarth even devotes an entire room in his house to his futuristic collection.

“Well all these toys, I’m looking at this room now, it’s an entire room jam-packed with, for the most part, vintage 1950s toys,” he said. “Most of them tend to be of spaceships and bubble-helmeted spacemen. The look of those just says immediate antigravity wonder and adventure to me.”

Despite his infatuation with science fiction, Goldbarth manages to write about all aspects of life, ranging from his thoughts on religion to popular culture. Yet his work somehow all seems very connected.

“I don’t think of myself as being invested in being all over the place or having a wide range of interests, but I also don’t think of myself as a one-note poet,” Goldbarth said. “I try to make, if not individual poems, certainly a range in writing within a month or a year, as fully representative of human capability as I know how.”

Goldbarth said that he has a new book of poems in the works, which he is currently working on piecing together for a possible release sometime in the fall.

“Let me say I hope the new book will be read in one thousand years,” Goldbarth said.

Excerpt from Goldbarth’s latest work:

Albert Goldbarth To Be Read in 500 Years

“If We Were Honest”

When I tell you that cultural ritual is artifice

I’m thinking of death. Its worm is always

be honest? — every poem is “Sex.” (Or “Death.”)

the Dolphin first made port in Tahiti, it was discovered

nails into smooth, bamboo-brown human grain …

they were trying to deny it with the drive of such