Search Results for: art beck

September 6, 2015

“Ghazal: Back Home” by Zeina Hashem BeckPosted by

Zeina Hashem Beck

GHAZAL: BACK HOME

for Syria, September 2015

Tonight a little boy couldn’t walk on water or row back home.
The sea turned its old face away. Again, there was a no, no, back home.

Bahr* is how we were taught to measure poetry,
bahr is how we’ve stopped trying to measure sorrow, back home.

“All that blue is the sea, and it gives life, gives life,” says God to the boy
standing wet at heaven’s gate—does he want to return, to go back home?

My friend who hates cooking has made that eggplant dish,
says nothing was better than yogurt and garlic and tomato, back home.

On the train tracks, a man shouts, “Hold me, hold me,” to his wife,
bites her sleeve, as if he were trying to tow back home.

Thirteen-year-old Kinan with the big eyes says, “We don’t want to stay in Europe.”
“Just stop the war,” he repeats, as if praying, Grow, grow back, home.

Habibi, I never thought our children would write HELP US on cardboard.
Let’s try to remember how we met years ago, back home.

On our honeymoon we kissed by the sea, watched it
rock the lights, the fishing boats to and fro, back home.

* Bahr is Arabic for sea. Also, in Arabic poetry, bahr means meter.

—from 3arabi Song

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Zeina Hashem Beck: “This ghazal is for Syrian refugees, whose stories this week (and every week) are heartbreaking and surreal. The poem refers to many tragedies that we’ve read about this week: the little toddler drowned in the Aegean sea, the refugees at the train station in Budapest, that video of the Syrian boy simply saying “Just stop the war,” and the video of the man holding on to his wife and baby on the train tracks.” (web)

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June 3, 2013

“Howie Night at the Drottkvaett” by Burt BeckmannPosted by

Burt Beckmann

HOWIE NIGHT DRÓTTKVAETT

Next to the surf-road
six sat late,
thinking we’d found out
a fine hideaway.
The ladies were laughing,
lapping up beer,
we warriors were not
woman weary.

Pleasant that party
until the lager
made the girls piss.
Staggering, giggling
down the dunes
they descended,
hardly aware
of Howie.

There as they squatted
his squad car
came sneaking: in floodlights
the females were framed.
Still spraying, they skimmed
across the strand,
wetting their wear
in the brew-tide.

Meanwhile, hearing the hassle
we hastened
to see how things stood,
our odds in the fist-storm.
Ready to reckon with rednecks,
for a brawl
we abandoned the brandy.

I remember our ranks,
brutal in gang-play:
no bolder berserks
than Ratzo and goat-bearded Jim.
Carrying clubs to the conflict,
dangerous with driftwood,
they meant to split skulls
in the old style.

Already the ravens
were rending the cowards to bits,
in our minds we saw
wolves making short work
of wounded foes, crabs clipping
at corpse flesh,
when around us arose
those sons of trolls.

Capture brings credit to none.
Who cares for his name
should look after his heels,
the swift foot of his beer friend
full readily praise:
Had his luck not run out
brave Ratzo would still
be outrunning the hounds.

But the first to fall
was fierce James,
lord of hard liquors,
lightning-quick drinker.
Corralled by the cops
in a crapper,
the hero was handcuffed
heaving his muffins.

Escape was not easy
on that escapade.
In the confusion
I fled for the fen.
Immersed in slime,
muck up to my ears,
I thought I would drown
in frog spawn and gnats.

Over the rushes
the searchlight played.
The voice on the bullhorn
inveigled in vain.
Thanks to that dousing
I pulled one on Howie;
alone I defended
the honor of thanes.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
Tribute to Speculative Poetry

__________

Burt Beckmann: “At an early age I came to imagine that I was inhabited by a cat, and as I grew older I discovered that the cat would purr verse.”

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September 20, 2009

TAKE IT by Joshua BeckmanPosted by

Review by Virginia Konchan

TAKE IT
by Joshua Beckman

Wave Books
1938 Fairview Avenue East
Suite 201
Seattle, WA 98102
ISBN 978-1933517377
2009, 88 pp., $14.00
www.wavepoetry.com

The opening epistolary poem of the stately, silly collection Take It, “Dear Angry Mob,” in the voice of “Ranger Lil,” sets the tone for the book, which, ironically, reads more like a book of devotional poetry (albeit tongue-in-cheek) than most other contemporary collections. Beckman’s metaphysical concerns, as in his previous five books, are filtered through the idiom of postmodern pop culture: the result is a prose poetic dense with wounded understanding of heroic proportions.

“I direct you to the grand panorama God has built—” the speaker intones in one of the collection’s 51 untitled poems, adding a few lines later: “The Beckman clan calls for the death of another animal.” Never have the lines between the personal, public and political been so expertly woven: “I do wish I were not so stubborn,/ for I would much prefer to return home to you/ and fill that little bowl with milk myself . . . I dream . . of the spastic dismantling . . . of my enemy.”

Beckman’s soulful theatrics, like those of Dean Young, have taken the humorous lyric to new heights (his previous collections include the 2002 collaborative book project Nice Hat. Thanks. with poet Matthew Roher), but perhaps less readily appreciated is Beckman’s mastery, not just of the quotidian, but of the tragic. Poems that begin “I don’t long, I don’t die, I don’t await/ the departure of those I love,” and end “I have often misunderstood destiny,/ I will misunderstand it no more,” posit Beckman in an entirely new category altogether: that of a postmodern elegist whose focused grieving is for the purposes of self and cultural indictment.

Beckman’s genuine sorrow and grim perception create an impassioned dialogue between the values the Romantics held dear (love of truth, beauty, Nature) and a modern world that could care less. This is the voice of a survivor of spiritual and ecological devastation whose form of social critique is not merely incisive, but ruthless: “We are a failed and ruined people/ incapable of even silence”; “My life is a dream. When they ask, say/ His life is a dream.”

The moments when his high-toned humor turns serious approximate battle cries: “What I have not claimed or executed on behalf/ of my lover, I will this time for you”; “Unmistakable quality will soon be upon us”; and “Judge, for I judge. Judge, for my household judges.”

What rescues Take It from lapsing into a collection of anecdotal confessions is the sincerity (an antiquated word now enjoying a revival) with which he undertakes his task. Lines often take the form of lifeboats, as when Beckman tunes his ear to the apocalyptic wailing from the universe, or the smatters of confused babble that surround the speaker. Fellow Wave Books author Dorothea Lasky’s poem “The Mouth of the Universe is Screaming in Agony” from her collection Awe sings in tandem with Beckman’s line “When one recognizes/ a ghostly squeal from but tacit reminiscences, one is near,/ as they say, the deep end.” Beckman is, furthermore, as unafraid of plunging into blunt scorn as he is of religious polemic: “The earth given to us, we have lost even that./ Big eaters of America, I join you in your parade;” or, from a different poem, “Cross yourself . . . a wind of evil just blew/ through this place.”

“Yes,” Beckman declares mid-way through Take It, as if answering to an invisible arbiter: “I understand folly.” And yes, Colin, the leader of my Irish gang, terrorizes the neighborhood, and yes, there is a snack in your pocket, and do you know why? From “Time worn through as a great task or cloud”: “I put it there.” Lucky are the readers who chance to enter the “bright green, confusing life” Beckman creates for his reader, however mournfully: don’t just take it, he implores, eat it, and give thanks.

____________

Virginia Konchan’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and her criticism in Rain Taxi, ForeWord Magazine, and elsewhere.

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February 24, 2009

“Sonnets to Orpheus: Part 2 #13” by Rainer Maria RilkePosted by

Rainer Maria Rilke

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS: PART 2 #13

Anticipate each goodbye, as if it were
already behind you like a winter that’s passed.
Because underneath these winters is such an interminable
winter, that only by hibernating can your heart survive.

Always be dead in Eurydice—climb out the way a singer climbs,
in a voice rich with loss and celebration of that pure connection.
And here, below with the ghosts, in the empire of bitter endings,
be the clinking glass that, even as it shatters, rings.

Be—and at the same time—realize your inescapable non-existence
is the unquenchable root of your deepest resonance.
And just this once, be all you were meant to become:

To those already used and discarded, and to the numb, mute
stockyard of bloated nature—to that unspeakable sum—
count yourself gladly in and nullify the count.

—tr. by Art Beck

—from Rattle 29, Summer 2008

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July 16, 2008

“Torching the Playhouse” by Mark D. HartPosted by

Mark D. Hart

TORCHING THE PLAYHOUSE

Flames incinerate our years of studied play.
It had been an old pig barn, and we squealed
to have it as our own, mopped it out,
washed the windows, drug into it desks, chairs,
and a couch resembling Freud’s that now
lights into smoke and flame and
vanishes like a dream, unrecoverable by analysis.
Labs with colored chemicals whose rows of jars
beckon like crayons to idle minds exploring a
Middle Earth between innocence and adulthood
fall and shatter as tables and shelves give way beneath them.
Posters, calendars, remnants of the haunted house
for Halloween flower into flame, we watch them go,
watch flames lick the rough boards, hungry,
inside because we lit the match
until heat drives us out and we stand back
bright-eyed, flames crawling out the rafters,
running up the roof, leaping, roaring,
bestial, eating out the blackening core
more swiftly than we had guessed.
Arsonists of our childhood,
privy to the plans to burn it anyway,
we seize the chance to fire this final rocket,
to send something of our intensity skyward,
adrenal, no hope of recovery, we want to see
the deep death latent in all things, play with it,
welcome it, fill our ignorance of it,
let the structure collapse
and its matter and time implode into
the black holes of our eyes.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

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August 30, 2024

“Waiting” by J.R. SolonchePosted by

J.R. Solonche

WAITING

My daughter is with me in the car.
She does not wait for anything.
She sleeps.
 
Sleeping may be waiting to wake up.
But I do not think it is.
I think it is something else entirely.
 
The clouds fill the plate glass window
of the store my wife has gone into.
There they share the sky
 
with teakwood bowls and brass candlesticks,
with rattan chairs and dried flowers
that look like tennis balls
 
sliced in half and painted impossible green,
with soapstone lion paperweights and
vases of colorless colors and shapeless shapes.
 
How serene they are as they float
in their twin heavens, in front of and above me,
these ghosts of the ships that we have
 
waited for all our lives but have never come in,
these blissful hosts for whom waiting
is the end-in-itself, O blessed end without end.
 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

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J.R. Solonche: “Why do I write poetry? I can do no better than to quote the poet Art Beck: ‘Since You Asked Why’: ‘Poets are children until they die / and wine brings Christmas every night.’ The $200 shall bring many Christmas nights.”

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April 17, 2018

Notable News from Past Contributors to Rattle

Note: click the issue # links to find some of their poems!

 

• Art Beck (The Impertinent Duet) has published his translation of Martial, Mea Roma. Starting with a “dissenting” translation of Martial’s Book of the Spectacles, Back translates 130 poems “strictly from a literary standpoint.” (October 17, 2018)

• Chaun Ballard (issue #60, PR) won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize from Tupelo Press for Flight. Judge Major Jackson described it as “… songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race.” (July 19, 2018)

• Rodrigo Dela Pena, Jr. (Ekphrastic Challenge) just published on his first book, Aria and Trumpet Flourish! Frequent Rattle contributor Luisa A. Igloria blurbed that “these poems sings always out of a sense of urgency underwritten by love.” (July 13, 2018)

• Donna Hilbert (issue #57) just published on her New & Selected book, Gravity, with Tebot Bach! “Donna Hilbert’s poems are brave, unsparing and heartfelt revealing a woman’s life in a way that is universal,” says Joan Colby. (June 28, 2018)

• Martin Ott (issue #20) just published his eighth book, Lessons In Camouflage, which “spans his turmoil as a U.S. Army interrogator to conflicts personal in nature …” (June 24, 2018)

• Chera Hammons the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award for poetry! Two of the poems in her book, The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City, appeared in Rattle: “Sparrows” and “Tornado Alley” (June 15, 2018)

• Lynne Knight has a new book, The Language of Forgetting! Lynne has appeared in seven issues of Rattle and #PoetsRespond, and was winner of the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize. Order the book from @Sixteen_Rivers Press! (April 27, 2018)

• Timothy Liu (issues #43, #47, Poets Respond) has a New & Selected book, Luminous Debris, just out from Barrow Street. “Timothy Liu is a poet faithful to forms of unruliness,” says Roberto Tejada. (April 27, 2018)

• Luisa A. Igloria (issue #24, 27, 59 & Poets Respond) has a new book, “The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-life Crisis from Phoenicia Publishing. “Poem after poem reveals the Buddha.” (April 17, 2018)

• John Gosslee (issues #39 and 56) has a new book, Fish Boy, where “he turns to face the raw nerve of grief with guts and grit.”

• George Bilgere (issues #51, 57, and more) has a new book, Blood Pages. “The poems in Blood Pages take the bland surfaces of our daily lives and beat the daylights out of them.” (April 17, 2018)

• Big congrats to Malachi Jones (RYPA 2017) on winning a $10,000 scholarship through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards! (April 17, 2018)

• Lowell Jaeger (issues #26, 37, 59) has a new book, Earth-Blood & Star-Shine: “… poetry turns every-day life into a meditation on what it means to be human.” (April 17, 2018)

• Yakov Azriel (issue #59) also has a new book, Closet Sonnets: The Life of G. S. Crown (1950–2021), which “turns life as a closeted gay male into an aesthetic form …” (April 17, 2018)

• Finally, congrats to Michael P. McManus (issue #24 and more) on his new book, The Buddha Knot, a book about love, death, and “the slow erosion of all we cannot keep.” (April 17, 2018)