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 [.]”

Leila Chatti, Wildness Before Something Sublime

POSTCARD

Sky of new snow open
like eternity. Numinous, benign. All
day wind moves the day
along. January still
blank as if unbegun. I’ve come to face it—
I have to live and go on
living. With the knowledge
oblivion excludes me, apart from
brief, fathomless sleep. This unshakable quiet
I am told is peace. For you,
I count the blessings
which stitch me to this earth. Lacework
of time. Pines feathered and faithful as swans.
This morning, I woke
and pain, a while, stayed dreaming.
Children unknowable to me
left before my seeing
angels in the yard.

I’ve been aware of Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti for a while, but hadn’t seen a collection until this latest, Wildness Before Something Sublime (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2026), a follow-up to her Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). “This book was written when I wasn’t writing. This is what I said, anyway—I’m not writing. Yet, of course,” her “AUTHOR’S NOTE” at the offset begins, “these poems exist.” Her note suggests the work in this collection a kind of pivot, shifting her work’s trajectory in a way that makes me curious to see an eventual comparison between this and her prior collection, and the collection or collections still to come. She compares the process to one of dowsing—which by itself only occurs through one being open to receiving such broadcasts—a process not far from the late San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s suggestion that he was but a transistor radio for broadcasts from the “Martians.” As Chatti’s note continues:

I think of myself as having discovered these poems rather than having wrought them—I am the one who held the rod, entered the field, but I did not conjure the water already there. I feel they are cowritten: some in conversation with another (unaware) writer, others a dictation of a voice beyond my understanding—my unconscious or an external force—call it God, the Muse, I can’t say, but I know better than to claim it as mine alone. Call it divine.

The poems in “Oracle” are written as echoes or shadow sides—responses, negative images—to poems by women whose voices first led me to discover my own. Each poem in “Divine” was written while flipping very quickly, at random, through beloved books and recording words and fragments that evoked a bodily response or otherwise snared my attention, as well as my misreadings, reactions, and associative leaps. The “Night Poems” were written on the brink of sleep, on my cell phone. Often, I would doze off midway through. The final sections, “After Thought” and “Shadow/Self,” are the poems that arrived once I learned again, at last, how to move out of my mind’s way.

Might someone else be able or willing to track the distances and differences between this collection and her prior? I would hope so, given how deliberate such an opening declaration. Chatti writes of being open to receiving the words, as well as returning to the foundations of what prompted her to write in the first place; finding her ground, again. And Chatti offers an array of responses, after works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Jean Valentine, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Alejandra Pizarnik, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich and C.D. Wright, citing a few of these poets more than once. Through returning to this array of poets, as she says, “women whose voices first led me to discover my own,” it seems to reinforce this consideration of the author attempting to find ground after feeling untethered. Go back to the basics, as it were, returning to those poems and those writers that provided those original reasons to begin. In the first poem “after Sylvia Plath,” the four-poem sequence “ONE WOMAN: A Poem Unvoiced,” Chatti writes:

I am wild. I am wild. It is the wildness before something sublime.
The violet hour after the earth stills, when the roots
Bury their tails, their suffusion. It is so raucous, elsewhere.
The shades, the bodies, are black and moving, like infinity.
Silence approaches and swells. Its invisible clarity
Swells, ink opening to let stillness in.
It erases knowledge, languageless.

Across five sections—“ORACLE,” “DIVINE,” “NIGHT POEMS,” “AFTER THOUGHT” and “SHADOW/SELF”—these poems do seek a return to balance through and after loss and grief, the sensation of such spelled out through poems such as “GRIEF,” that opens: “Like a hawk, gyring / out of reach. / In sweet of shadow / larger than its origin.” Across deeply intimate heartbreak, Chatti writes around infertility and dreams, desire and the impossibility of hope. “Will you ever / speak to me again, beyond / my nightly resurrections? My desire / displaces, is displaced.” she writes, as part of the poem “MY SENTIMENTAL AFTERNOON,” a poem that offers this devastating closure: “It’s true: I am learning to believe / there are beautiful things / never meant for me.” Still, there are ways through which one can see this a book of optimism, working through as Chatti composes poems clawing through the dark and attempting what might lay beyond, although the collection as a whole is far more detailed, more complex, than simply that. Through connecting her grief and hope through the language of other women, other poets, Chatti works to reconnect to her very roots, reminding her of that sense of community especially required through such feelings of untethered loss. “I run under water / a fistful of blueberries,” she writes, in the poem “FOR THE BABY THAT IS NOT, IS NO LONGER, COULD ONE DAY BE,” “a kettle / I watch until it shrieks. My face, / so I can face it.” And here, the crux of the collection, perhaps: however dark this moment of grief, to be able to face it, however screaming and wild and silent; for grief to land, to process, it has to fully be, and it is, here. Or, as the poem “A WOMAN HAS TO LIVE HER LIFE” ends:

You took you from us
and two decades later I’m on a mountain
startling at butterflies, shivery
phantoms in the yellow clover.
And the clouds quietly knit over.
And I take a different path back down.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeannette L. Clariond

Jeannette L. Clariond [photo credit: Daniel Tamez] is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It confirmed writing as a long-term vocation rather than a passing impulse. Though one knows since birth that the vocation lies within. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I only read and write poetry and essays. It is hard to read fiction. And harder to distinguish it from reality.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing come quickly at first, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
For me, writing always begins with reading. I read slowly and deeply, feeling the author's voice and allowing it to find its way into my life. No notes, just memory and previous experiences. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem usually begins with a line, an image, or a rhythm. I like listening to Gregorian Chants. Dreams also start a project. This happened with Leve sangre (Unburdened Blood), translated by Curtis Bauer a few years ago as Image of Absence. That collection is sustained by music. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m afraid I’ve read too much of Job: If I speak, the wound bleeds. If I remain silent, it bleeds too. 
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
No theoretical concerns. I write questions for which I find no answers. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of a writer is to create consciousness of our world, as scary as it may be. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor can be disturbing, as it requires letting go of certain attachments. In this book, we (Forest and I) discussed many lines. I am happy because he was much of an editor at his best, not only a translator. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
What I am doing new is writing by hand, eyes closed, allowing myself to see images inside the words I write, no matter how strange or extravagant they might seem. My fears, old and new, my desires, ancient and actual, flow along the ink in an endless drift. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Translation is (to me) the best way to learn how to deep read. I do not feel I am taking time out from my work; on the contrary, it is a way to nourish my own process. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Not too much of a routine. Your eyes stare at poetic figures, and you learn to decipher the ones that will start-jump you into a poem. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Good cinema. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Face cream.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Theatre, opera, woods, dawns. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Hölderlin, Trakl, Benn, the poetry of Kabbalah. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Drama. One actress. A soliloquy. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Poets are born poets. No options here. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My mother’s eyes and her way of reciting Hamlet or Kipling. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Francesco Petrarca & Giovanni Boccaccio. 

Film: Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on two prose books that I started during COVID. Both are the continuation of Cuaderno de Chihuahua. They both relate to my ancestors, exile, and madness.  And in a poetry collection, Abandonments. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;