2009 Festival

Jeffery Beam

Jeffery Beam’s The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969 – 2007 (White Crane Wisdom Series - White Crane Books/Lethe Press, 2008) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and an American Library Association Stonewall Award. On Hounded Ground: Home and the Creative Life, an essay with poems (Bookgirl Press, Japan), and A Hornet’s Nest, a quote book of Jonathan Williams - (editor, The Jargon Society), were also published in 2008. His many award-winning works include Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse and Buggy), The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press), and the online book, Gospel Earth (Longhouse). His spoken word CD with multimedia, What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001, was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. An expanded Gospel Earth (Skysill Press, England), and Invocation, a limited edition hand-made chapbook (Country Valley Press) will be published in 2009. The song cycle, Life of the Bee, with composer Lee Hoiby, continues to be performed on the international stage. The Carnegie Hall premiere with Beam reading and the songs performed can be heard on Albany Record’s New Growth. His book-length surrealist gay-themed prose poem, Submergences, originally published as a chapbook in 1997 was reprinted in 2008 in Rebel Satori Press’s Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. On December 1, 2008 (World AIDS Day) in Boston, MA, composer / counter-tenor Steven Serpa premiered a cantata Heaven’s Birds: Lament and Song based on three of Beam’s poems from The Beautiful Tendons with mezzo-soprano Michelle Vachon, accompanied by a trio of voices, a violin, viola, and cello. He and Richard Owens (Damn the Caesars) edited a Jonathan Williams feature for Jacket magazine in early 2009 – which they hope will evolve into a book. Beam continues to work on The Life of the Bee, an opera libretto based on the Demeter/Perspehone myth, and a commonplace book on poetry and the spirit entitled They Say. The Broken Flower: Poems seeks a publisher. Beam is poetry editor of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review and a botanical librarian in the Biology-Chemistry Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Immolation / Resurrection

From The Life of the Bee, a work-in-progress

Stars had abandoned you
You looked down and
a sea of eyes looked up
diminishing at warp speed

But this is earth
stars should be above but
above was
void
    without name

If stars sang in the sky
their wisdom spheres where

    the whirring

Now on rich earth
        humic heaven
in an clump made static form

there stars sang and laughed at you
not sad           ringing
with sphere’s secret latitudes and longitudes
with resurrection tin stars
hammered roughly
                by lullaby verbs
                by earnest limbs trembling
                by staccato
                sleek luminous particles
grown into ache:
eye coalescing into
                galaxy
Self rang then
                in the hive
under dull lamps just coming on:

evening percolating dense blackness
    a smoothness made of crow voice
                lizard blue

    made of moon falling
    painted white mum odor

A being so unlike itself
                it was itself:

so curried and steamed it rose up

    skin shining sweat
    voice on fire
    weed taking field
    field becoming rain

^{Posted on 2010-05-19}