Poetry. LGBT Studies. "Poetry is an enrapturing process that intensifies the discovery of experience and only what arises out of this urgency produces utterance that is distinctive and honest. Here in these sinewy acts shine the mobilities of praise, the delight in the body's beauty and its surprises, the wonder of beholding energy and love. The poems are glimpses of sensual epiphanies, lightning flashes on the dramatic heart of event, memories from the crux of dream. Here are secrets that lie within the adventures of desire. Pursue them, and participate in the pleasure."—James Broughton "Jeffery Beam's THE NEW BEAUTIFUL TENDONS proves what many of us have known for some time: he is one of our most important and valuable poets. No matter what he touches on, it is always observed with Beam's precise and careful eye in spare, direct language that's as fresh as a sunrise and the sweet air of morning. Read these poems and brighten your day. I guarantee it."—Michael Rumaker "All children should hear you, the universe glistening. The spirit of poetry and nature and Eros are carried forth into and for the future. You are one of the poets I feel closest to—kindred spirit in love with the natural world and kindred spirit of awe and affection to our own kind. Feather to feather, wing to wing."—Antler "These juicy poems, at the intersection of spirituality and sexuality, leave me breathless with their erotic thrust."—Edward Field
In The Broken Flower poet Jeffery Beam journeys beyond merely human stories into the radiant IS - the I AM hidden in earthly shadows and gleaming foliage and skies. Poems written over several decades coalesce "not just to say / this or / that / But ... to say / what is between." In their "words' melancholic / swarm" Beam finds human feeling in Nature's broad manifest, a world ripe with anniversaries - of the bobwhite, the copperhead, owls, tree frogs, deer, apples and persimmons, mountain fogs and river rhythms, Monet, Cathar spirits, Paracelsus, Lazarus, and falling stones - affirming that "there is a reason for being here / ... however / it insinuates itself into you." The Broken Flower, Emersonian in its scope and wisdom, seeks not the perfect, but the infinite in the quotidian, the "unrestrainable / heart" within "the last place we would think /to look // ... in the discarded shattered world," where the stem-less flower proves to be "the most perfect flower" because it is broken. These poems fulfill William Carlos Williams' maxim of writing for "the pursuit of beauty, and the husk that remains." The Broken Flower is a work, in which the awkward, the broken, and the common welcome the reader with verity, wholeness, and grace.
Jonathan Williams’ work of more than half a century is such that no one activity or identity takes primacy over any other—he was the seminal small press publisher of The Jargon Society; a poet of considerable stature; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist and Juvenalian critic; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand. Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and his sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, with his incisive humor and social criticism, and his confidently experimental, masterful poems and prose. His interests raised “the common to grace,” while paying “close attention to the earthy.” At the forefront of the Modernist avant-garde—yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional—Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved those things he described as, “more and more away from the High Art of the city,” settling “for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.” Subject to much indifference—despite being celebrated as publisher and poet—he nurtured the nascent careers of hundreds of emerging or neglected poets, writers, artists, and photographers. Recognizing this, Buckminster Fuller once called him “our Johnny Appleseed”, Guy Davenport described him as a “kind of polytechnic institute,” while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as “the Custodian of Snowflakes” and Williams as “the truffle-hound of American poetry.” Lesser known for his extraordinary letters and essays, and his photography and art collecting, he is never only a poet or photographer, an essayist or publisher. This book of essays, images, and shouts aims to bring new eyes and contexts to his influence and talent as poet and publisher, but also heighten appreciation for the other facets of his life and art. One might call Williams’ life a poetics of gathering, and this book a first harvest.
In its procession through indirection to attention, Gospel Earth, Jeffery Beam's big book of little poems, traces a transcendent open ecstasy & radiant physicality. Bridging aphoristic composure, Vedic & Zen alertness & the ecstasy of the Christian, Bhaktic, & Sufi mystics, the poems invoke earth spirits & the luminous power of the Word, breaching the divide between creation & humanity, healing the domination heating the earth & searing our moral compass. The poems animate the natural world beyond the confines of language, demonstrating once again as North Carolina's Independent Weekly stated "how large a canvas he can paint with a few deft strokes." Described by the poet as a work intended to "invigorate the startling propulsion of haiku's accessible simplicity & minimalism," Gospel Earth assembles a new Gnostic gospel, a distinct & astonishing beauty.
The Beautiful Tendons is a collection of more than three decades of award-winning poet Jeffrey Beam's lyrical, metaphysical work. Both spiritual and stirring, Beam's poetry was described by the late James Broughton as "sensual ephiphanies, lightning flashes of the dramatic heart of event, memories from the crux of dream." These are subtle works that can be sung to the soul or to your fellow man.
An intense "marvelous and fateful game," Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements brings to the page a six-month blogosphere collaboration between Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and American poet Jeffery Beam, depicting a Hero's journey through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials, and revelations into redemptive vision. Originating loosely in an ancient Welsh folk tradition and the death of the painter's father, painter and poet marry their impressive powers of myth and dream into individual but sympathetically resonant designs--inward landscapes wrought startlingly real--at turns plain and flamboyant, poignant and joyful. "The grace of these paintings and poems is in their wildness," fashioned ultimately by Hicks-Jenkins' and Beam's compassionate confrontation with dark forces, reviving forgotten knowing and healing powers, as pilgrim/hero meets Horse/Man, thus "patching up some almighty fear in the fabric of heaven" and the searching self. Features twenty-one full color illustrations, sixteen poems, and illuminating essays by Sarah Parvin, Mary-Ann Constantine, and Claire Pickard. Book design by J.C. Mlozanowski.
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