As Much Beyond Music as Harmony Transcends Speech: The Chapbook as High Art

Review by Wally Swist

I first came across the poetry of Art Beck while working as a cataloguer in an all-poetry bookstore in 1977. Hugh Miller, Bookseller was located on Crown Street in New Haven. There were several thousand fine press and small press books in the store and Art Beck’s The Discovery of Music (Ellensburg, WA: Vagabond Press, 1977) was one of them. The book contains one of my favorite poems, entitled “Fog.” I quote the poem in full:

“My first hundred years of death I’d

like to spend driving down this

same road through the hills, the

same kind of music on the radio – Pergolesi,

Vivaldi, Telemann, over and over – never wanting

to stop, just continuing in the fog until I

manage to forget everything.

“Only after that, maybe

a town on the coast, another coast, a

seacoast I don’t know, just a spot of

sun between the cliffs, and a village,

three or four bars, some houses, a hotel.  A place

with umbrellas outside for lunch . . .  That’s

strange.  The bartender.  With the cigaret

in his mouth, absently washing the glasses.  I think

he was my friend, my sworn ally when I was ten.  He has

that same belonging look.  And the waiter.  Leaning

against the tree.  Isn’t he – the old man – Chepok!  My

Grandfather’s drinking buddy.  And there at the corner table,

relaxing, reading her book, waiting for someone.  Is

this where she lives now?  My love on

the first day I met her.”

It is not only an arrestingly poem in depicting beauty in its own particularity, which by doing so summons Jack Gilbert’s exemplary poetry, but also marks Art Beck’s own astonishment with perpetuity – in this case with the peculiarities of the afterlife. However, to focus on one of Beck’s main themes, perpetuity, as both homage and as a mirror for contemporary society itself, we, as readers would need to be aware of his own creative and publishing history to fully appreciate how fine an American poet and translator this man truly is.

The Insistent Island is Beck’s second chapbook from Magra Books, with his first being Epigrams: Marcus Valerius Martialis (translated with an afterthought by Art Beck). Beck’s erudition might be the initial characteristic which any reader would take notice, and this might just earn him designation as a poet’s poet; but this is a designation that is apt.

To see that there is a connection, through Beck’s concern with perpetuity, from The Discovery of Music to The Insistent Island is quite clear. Beck’s vision is largely classical, and to envision truth metaphorically, as well as, perhaps, metaphysically, on a seacoast or an island, for him, is as natural as revisiting the California coast or Homer’s Troy, as well as Greece itself in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

Beck’s love and passion for the chapbook is also clear since he has published several fine collections – each not only themed but scrupulously selected works of poetry, all of which can be described in one word, impeccable, in the quality of the writing itself. Some of these titles include Enlightenment: Notes for a Scurrilous Life – The Rediscovered Poems of Giacomo Casaova (Fairfax & Los Angeles: Red Hill Press, 1977) and Summer with All Its Clothes Off (Westbury, NY: Gravida, 2005).

However, an avid reader of Art Beck might instantly notice that The Insistent Island establishes this work as not only masterful but also in etching a perennial philosophy similarly as Rodin chiseled his last masterpieces in Meudon. The blurb for The Insistent Island on the Magra Books website reads that it “is a hybrid work, neither essay nor translation, but a poetic response to the myriad incarnations of the Odyssey; particularly Samuel Butler’s prose translation as lodged in Beck’s memory via a 1980s audio book rendition. The poems were written over some thirty years, finding their synergy unplanned and unexpected. Like Homer’s originals, best taken with food and drink and, of course, a pinch of salt.”

Beck himself states significantly, “I don’t know how conscious of this I was when writing the sequence. But what strikes me now, especially after reading Madeline Miller’s wonderful Circe, is that at the heart of the Odyssey is Odysseus’ ‘great refusal’ to accept the gift of divinity from Calypso. A theme, with variations, that seems to run through many of the classical Greek masterpieces. Achilles choice of an early glorious death over peaceful long life. On the opposite side of that coin, the tragedy that came from Oedipus’ parents refusing to accept their fate. And Oedipus’ final, sacramental acceptance that, in effect, “mortal” is a synomym for “human.”

The poems are largely twelve poems that constitute a “Homage to Ithaca.” Beck’s voice is familiar to his readers in the opening poems of the sequence, “Penelope,” where she is “Flirting with one, then another, feeling/ this one’s tattooed muscles, dropping a dirty/ remark to the blond with the razor spear.” Such familiarity is Beck’s brand of social criticism, the bite of sarcasm in the face of reality, a dose of dark humor as anodyne, a palliative, or counterpoint, that zeroes in where there is a paucity of anyone who abandons their moral compass.

In “Telemachus” Beck first posits “So when Athena flittered down/ and became an old man, it was no surprise.// They listened.” But then admonishes, “ . . . Get out while you can . . . / Don’t ever come back here/ without your father.”

Perhaps the most accomplished shorter poem of the sequence is “The Sirens.” Beck is often at his best when his target is darkness itself. This is not to indicate that his poems are sullen or bleak, nor does he lower the bar of his poetic art by falling to sheer descriptive verse, but it is through his achievement of lyric poetry, one with a message for all humanity, in which his work shines.

“What surprised him – so helpless and expectant –

was that the sound was something else than sound.

A sense of sunlight in the ear, a fragrance

that could only be heard and then a wing

and the utter joy of flight.  As much beyond music

as harmony transcends speech.  A heartleap

into a resonance so god-like he suddenly

knew what it was the gods worshipped.

And all this from the tonsils of three

wretched crones who sang as mindlessly as

spiders weave.  Hunger is treacherous.”

In “Being a Poet,” Beck provides yet another offering of a poetic gem, and his language is not so strikingly similar in its characterization of Homer, yet with both the elegance of and reminiscent of the poetry of James Wright in how the blind Greek narrative poet “might somehow avoid his own/ dark trip into those ant caves where/ millions upon millions patiently work.” However, it is in how Beck concludes the poem that he makes it memorable, “Countless, breathless eyes/ caught up in our every word.” If that is Beck’s take on the art of poetry, then it is an extraordinary, as well as an accurate, image that he has crafted.

Any review of The Insistent Island would be remiss without at least a mention of “Kalypso,” with Hermes and Circe providing challenge to Ulysses, who “staggered out of the pounding/ surf: parched, speechless, and blind with/ salt, trembling, like a soon to be sacrificed/ lamb.” For Ulysses it would be a period in which “Circe had him for a year (with Kalypso),” one in which he “lost track of time,” and through his experiences with her, he finally “asked if he might be allowed to go/ home to die with his old wife, after which she thinks, “I’ve had the best of him. The rest/ is nothing but loss.”

Philosophizing isn’t normally aesthetically prudent in most poetry, especially since most writers aren’t poets enough to write well enough to portray it appropriately, but Art Beck accomplishes that in the sequence’s concluding poem, “Pork.” Many poets might have tried to write that “who” but the “swineherd Eumaeus” could “in the end” be the one who “saves their bacon/ at the slaughter of the gluttonous,” but this is one poet who sure can. Beck closes the poem, and the sequence, with a perennial philosophy worth noting:

“And your chest swells while you smile

never suspecting you’re just a blur

in nearsighted old Homer’s

book-ruined eyes.  That it’s the platter

in your greasy fingers he’s trying

to tempt within reach.”

An aspect of harmony and balance not to be missed in the construction of The Insistent Island is that Beck closes the selection of poems with two sonnets, a poetic form of which he is a master; so that there are fourteen poems in the volume, as there are fourteen lines in a sonnet. This lends a further dimensionality to the chapbook, and, thus, instills a sturdy classicism and elegance within the work itself.

One of the more insightful, and gifted, translators of Rilke, Beck includes a translation of the German poet’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Since there are so many translations of this poem who could possibly translate it differently enough to make it unique? Well, Beck has; and this translation of what may be Rilke’s most famous poem belongs next to those of other translations that are also remarkable as those of Stephen Mitchell’s and Edward Snow’s. This work by Beck alone is worth the price of this book. In fact, it would be unfair to quote it in full in a review, however, it is nearly impossible not to include a portion of it, so that readers will order a copy of this volume for this alone, as in these last concluding verses of the poem:

“If not, this would only be a fragment

of mutilated stone under the shoulders’ transparent

slump.  Wouldn’t glisten, anymore than a predator’s

fur, or leap like radiating star fire.

Because there isn’t any single  part of  it that isn’t

watching you. You have to live another life.

Why this translation is so fine is because, like Beck’s other translations of Rilke, especially his Orpheus Sonnets, is that the language sizzles like a live wire through the poem – in harmony with both Rilke’s tone and imagery, with his meaning and his vision – truly, like no one else’s but possibly the original itself.

Readers should take note that the last poem in the book, as his Rilke, in keeping with the “archaic” elements of The Odyssey itself, especially in that it is also just like life itself, in that similarly, as Lorine Niedecker wrote that writing poetry was, indeed, “weeping a deep trickle,” as did her hand pump on her land in Wisconsin, Art Beck spends years crafting his poetry. “That Day at the Met” written while on vacation in New York City, is noted to have been written between the years “1999-2018.” It is a remarkable and memorable poem for any number of reasons, but it is itself a kind of artifact. It even begins, singing about its perpetuity, quietly, like a voice heard from the past: “what really whispered to me were not/ the remnants of their useless gods.” It ends more like the final cadences of a symphony – one in which we find ourselves grateful not only to have heard but to find solace, and blessing, in our first having ears and the sense of hearing itself to be able to listen to:

“ . . . Abandoned lines from decades ago in an almost

discarded vacation notebook.  So many since lost,

unforeseen, gone.  So many new reasons to again be so

haunted by the breath in those dead stones.”

Magra Books takes its name from the eponymous region in the Lunigiana region of Tuscany, which is a watershed that rises above the Appenine and flows southwest into the celebrated Gulf of Poets, which is demarcated between Lerici and La Spezia. This is appropriate for the instance of Art Beck’s work, since it reflects the classicism of the work itself.

The Magra Books website states that the press is located “somewhere between Echo Park (Los Angeles) and Bagnone (Provincia di Massa-Carrara, Italy).” At least for the work of Art Beck, it is apt for Magra Books to publish “works that feature unique works by important writers,” since his poetry deservedly belongs to literature of global significance, since it resonates from a dais that is not only international, but also worldly, due to its tenor and substance.

The Insistent Island