Joshua Beckman, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries

 

Early 1984

Dad got a new sled for me and Randi. It’s great.
My Aunt Arlene came, and she got me an art set. I like it a lot.
Sean came over and we played Monopoly. He won.
We had Chinese food. I had a great time.
I got my new handlebars. I like them a lot.
Today I went to the YMCA. Jeff and Colin came too. It was fun.
We went to my Grandpa and Grandma’s house. It is in Florida.
We went to Clear Water beach. The water was cold.
I got to play Trivial Pursuit with my family. We had teams.
    My team won.
I went bike riding and saw an alligator.
We came home from Florida.
Today I was drawing and I had a lot of fun.
I rode my bike all day long. It was a lot of fun.
I saw my Aunt Libby and we had a picnic.
I went to art and I had a lot of fun.
I went to Hebrew School.
I hurt my ankle.
I met kids near my street. We rode bikes all day.

The latest from Seattle, Washington-based American poet and editor Joshua Beckman is A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2026), a sleek collection of careful and intimate poems that follows previous titles such as Things Are Happening (Philadelphia PA: American Poetry Review, 1998), Something I Expected To Be Different (Wave Books, 2001), Your Time Has Come (New York NY: Verse Press, 2004), SHAKE (Wave Books, 2006) [see my review of such here], the long poem Tomaž (2021) (a book I seem to have missed entirely) and Animal Days (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as two collaborations with poet Matthew Rohrer, and the stunning critical duo The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018) [a duo I mention over here]. As well, Beckman was a poet instrumental in organizing the infamous Wave Poetry Bus back in 2006, with readings in fifty cities (including a stop in Ottawa) across fifty days, bringing an array of poets across the United States and into Canada, introducing an Ottawa audience, at least, to the work of Matthew Zapruder, Anthony McCann [see my note from such here] and Monica Youn [reading poems from what became her Ignatz, which I reviewed when it landed; see my review of her latest here] as well as Beckman himself (among a couple of other poets, the full list of which escapes me).

A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries continues a process articulated through Animal Days, composing poems out of an array of rough notes, journal and diary entries, leaning fully into the acknowledgement of that process, carving poems from what might be an array of first-draft looseness, narrative and immediate. “I love how in dreams you can climb a tree and recline in the / branches.” he writes, to open the sequence “The Great Good Fortune of the Dreamer.” “I love how in dreams you can fold up a giant picture without creas- / ing it. // I love how in dreams you can order spray cane flowers for dinner.” There’s a smallness, an intimacy and an interiority, to these notes, these fragments, with titles such as “A Chapter Summary in the Style of Boccaccio,” “A List of the Creatures Who Entered My Home This Year,” “van ride to jfk,” “Body Questions,” “David Shapiro” or “brief note back.” As the prior collection held poems from notes composed across extended and ongoing illness, the poems continue that particular level of sustained and sketched interiority. “J– of Barrytown crosses the river to buy lemons,” begins the untitled opening poem, a piece titled only through the table of contents as “a chapter summary in the style of Boccaccio,” “and one there, / in a single hour has three slight misunderstandings, each of / which he weathers, returning with a salad.” 

Beckman holds such a quiet intimacy to these poems, an unselfconscious note-taking through a variety of explorations and experiments with form, a deeply-purposeful assemblage of poems that manage such incredible attention to silence, moments and how both are best held. “What broke the tooth?” asks the poem “Body Questions,” “What cracked the tooth? / What filled the mouth with dirt and metal? / What got / into the heart?” Or, as the “Chap. 1” of the short sequence “Aegina, May (Chapters 1-8)” reads:

Full of quiet concern, a dear friend suggests a new path – The gathering crowd – A punishing scene – Sun Clouds – A history of the land over which the sun clouds first appeared

Beckman’s A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries closes with the title piece, a sequence of prompts on how to do exactly what the title says, offering this brief introduction: “The following is a list of instructions for making fragments from your diaries. Each instruction can be tried multiple times in the same or different notebooks. While my expectation is that you will naturally find the notebook and pages you are interested in and will move on when needed, on occasion I have given directions to flip pages or stay on the same page in the hope this might be helpful.” Across the book’s final seven pages, the notes include:

Any page, last two lines.

 

Any page, first verb to second verb.

 

Transcribe the next parenthetical encountered.

 

Write out the next three questions encountered.

 

Next three punctuation marks, each with the word after them.

The process Beckman describes is one I find curious, given it so foreign from my own compositional structures; Beckman’s processes seem closer to Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s decades-long daily stretches of composing “log book” entries, returning back to his notes to shape poems, some of which landed, for example, in his full-length poetry debut, Singular Plurals (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014). Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, as well, works from endless notebooks, as I think does Canadian poet Lisa Robertson (there are most likely others, but those the most overt that come to mind). A sleek thing, at less than seventy pages, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries is a charming and intelligent book, one that offers so much through such delicate movement, and there are elements of his gestures I might even compare to the works of certain Canadian minimalists—Cameron Anstee [see my review of his latest], Jack Davis [see my review of his debut], Guy Birchard [see my review of his latest] or the late Nelson Ball [see my review of his posthumous selected]—all of whom manage a carved, careful and fiercely intelligent density across the short lyric, but Beckman presents as a moving target, holding those as elements of his work but not exclusively so. The form, one might say, is as much the thing, and the variety throughout the collection provides. Consider the poem “A. Said,” for example, a lyric of one word per line, with empty lines between, scrolling down across fifteen full pages. For brevity, there’s an awful lot of it, composed as a string of words that precisely roll and accumulate. “I // don’t // know,” the poem offers, mid-way, “R. // said // you // know // you // know // I // love // you // you // know [.]”

Etcetera : some commentary, and a few new(ish) poems,

Thanks to Katie Naughton's Etcetera, I did some short write-ups on particular works by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Susan Howe, Joshua Beckman, the anthology on grief co-edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird, and the infamous 1960s Canadian poetry anthology by Eli Mandel (through which I discuss Bowering and John Newlove), all of which you can read here (alongside two new poems, as well). Also, Nate Logan was good enough to post a poem of mine (originally composed for Scientific American, but I couldn't figure out how to submit to them) up at his buffalopluseight. So many things!

Joshua Beckman, Animal Days

 

September 1

flailing around

September 2

I could see who was alive
now and who died

I could see now
who was dead

who was alive (“AUGUST”)

The latest from American poet and translator Joshua Beckman is Animal Days (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021). As the back cover offers: “Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world.” Animal Days is composed via six extended poem sequences, each threading together an accumulation of short fragments: “IT SEEMED TOO MUCH,” “LITTLE PRICKLY COMING OF STORM,” “THE GLACIAL TRIP,” “DRAWING X’S ON THE TABLE,” “AUGUST” and “ANIMAL DAYS.” Beckman writes from the inside of an awareness of the frailty of the human body, even from the first page of the opening poem: “the pursing / and bursting / of cells / blood / in the skin / in the face / blood exploding / inside us / like that [.]” There is such a slowness etched into the lines and fragments of these accumulations, extended stretches of thought that sit perfectly against each other. There is such a slowness etched into every word—a slowness that coheres and allows for simultaneous pause and quick thought—and one that is remarkably physical. Honestly, for anyone who is attracted to slow, thoughtful work with remarkable speed—one could think, also, of Cameron Anstee, Michael e. Casteels, Jack Davis and the late Nelson Ball—Beckman’s dual essay collections The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018) are perhaps the finest collections of critical prose I’ve read (so much so that I’ve been completely unable to articulate how good they are).

There are moments when his sketched-out fragments give an epistolary sense, as though he is writing from his kitchen table, perhaps, out to someone (whether generally or specifically) in the wider world: “reading it / even as I / got reading / it even as / I write you / this letter” (“DRAWING X’S ON THE TABLE”). Throughout the six threads of Animal Days, Beckman’s lines adhere to a particular minimalism, but one that furthers the line of thought as far as might be possible, stretching out across the lyric. “a sheet / of it / held,” he writes, as part of “LITTLE PRICKLY COMING OF STORM,” “constellation-like / in the back yard / responding / to wind // clothespins for / fingers // houses / blown down the road / through the town // like a toy [.]”