Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam was in town last weekend for Loco Logodaedalist, the celebration of Jonathan Williams’ work hosted Saturday night by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, so I talked him into coming into the micro-studio at WPVM to talk about his work. He read a few poems from his Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon, 1995), a book whose vision I’ve long admired, but we spent much of the program reading and discussing poems from his new (as in brand new) The Beautiful Tendons, Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007 (White Crane Books, 2008). It’s a fine, emotionally searching and honest, collection of love poems – when we’re in the kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter whom we see as the other, the same rules pertain, and this book limns them with a forthright grace.
Several of Jeffery’s poems have found musical settings, so we discussed the relation of music and poem, and Jeffery, in honor of his lifetime love of the old songs he grew up in Kannapolis singing, and which he feels still inform his work, closed the show with a remarkable rendition of the old Methodist hymn “In the Garden”.
If you don’t yet know his work, here are three poems from Beautiful Tendons that he read on the show, just to give you a glimpse:
TWO LOVES This is my lesson in humility. My lesson in grief. My lesson in the cruelty of the human heart, my own. Trudging through deep southern snow: finding both of your faces frozen in the white. Sparrows still singing in the shrubbery. I could not say it then. I cannot say it now. My heart split in two. A tree limb weighted by ice. A white quiet and protective. A white dangerously warm. My hands spiritless in the drifts. Why do birds continue to sing? LOVE COMES not silent, but noisy and indiscreet, rowdy and persistent. He comes in leaf fall. musty earth in his palms. Held out to me I can do nothing but take it, and take it gladly, earth being the one coolness other than water to be enjoyed. The fact of the matter is this: tomorrow he may come silent. Tomorrow may be love quiet as mist, but today, his cheeks rough with new hairs, I smell furrows of new fields. I turn over fertile soil. I hear burrowing insects, happy worms. I taste the gentle, crude, excavating damp. The stain of love upon the earth! Stain of love! His sleep rattling me. His sunrise and breath awakening me. THAT NIGHT That body tree on a misty hill That face fawn with dark eyes That full moon surrounded by evening skies That hour pavement ending in dust That grass green with summer's black-green That night coming over us with its breath That sound crickets singing at eye level That body me on the ground with their song That body another touching me with fire That fire round as the moon burning as the sun That face fawn with dark eyes That you speaking in tongues unknown and green That sound crickets singing in my ear That body tree on a misty hill
There were many more, so give the show a listen. Given that Asheville will be in the throes of Bele chere this weekend, it’ll be available through Sunday, August 3rd, at WPVM’s Archive page (just scroll down to Wordplay) as on-demand stream and download.
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The show opened with McCoy Tyner playing “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from the 2007 release McCoy Tyner Quartet. We also heard three of Billy Holiday’s classic performances, “Easy to Love,” “Life Begins When You’re in Love,” and “Summertime,” all from Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles. Keith Jarrett’s “Paint My heart Red,” from the 2006 The Carnegie Hall Concert: Selections for Radio, took the show out.
Enjoy,
Jeff
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The photo of Jeffery is by M. J. Sharp.
Cross-posted at Natures.
Tags: Jeffery Beam, poems, wordplay