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Shake
Beckman’s new poems come to us directly and intimately. Compulsively readable, full of fear and persistence, they resonate with the wildness and generosity of Ginsberg, Whitman, and Ted Berrigan, turning the everyday into an encompassing, harrowing, humorous, necessary vision. Beckman is, as Publishers Weekly notes, “the real thing.”
Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous poetry collections, translations, and collaborative works. His awards include a NYFA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.
Joshua Beckman is the author of numerous poetry collections, translations, and collaborative works. His awards include a NYFA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.
- GenresPoetry
79 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
6 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Joshua Beckman
35 books25 followersJoshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of six books, including Take It (Wave Books, 2009), Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/31-...
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/31-...
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 19, 2008
This book made me such a shy girl. I saw Joshua Beckman at a party for another poet, and I hid in a corner and worried about him being there because I had read this book many times, and still want to read it again, because his word choice, his language, the way he feels distant and accessible all at once and so present here in New York in a time when poets feel so far away, it all made me blush.
August 3, 2007
I'm reading this now. It is thus far worthwhile.
My bookmark is a scrap of paper on which I've written:
parody of sanity - - dream - - Lorine Niedecker
do you remember Wisconsin? well do you?
I just finished it; am most likely to purchase it within the next half hour. Once it is legally mine, I suspect I will instantly make this noise:
yessssssssssss...
My bookmark is a scrap of paper on which I've written:
parody of sanity - - dream - - Lorine Niedecker
do you remember Wisconsin? well do you?
I just finished it; am most likely to purchase it within the next half hour. Once it is legally mine, I suspect I will instantly make this noise:
yessssssssssss...
April 20, 2019
Umm yeah, NO. I previously read Beckman’s book Take It and really didn’t like it, but I decided to give him another chance.
But, no change. Even my previous appreciation for his interesting stringing together of words has worn off for me now, it all just seems too ostentatious and at times even ridiculous.
But, no change. Even my previous appreciation for his interesting stringing together of words has worn off for me now, it all just seems too ostentatious and at times even ridiculous.
December 23, 2019
Brooklyn poet ur-text. Terrible themes, clever with the form he uses. I don’t care about straight white people having sex. He’s known for translations, I guess, and I can understand why he was successful at this
October 4, 2018
Melancholy, intimate, depressing, beautiful
July 5, 2021
didn't really do it for me. some nice language, gave me feelings of asynchronicity
June 9, 2009
Maybe I'm under-read in New York poets (and this is my first 15 minutes in the closet with Joshua Beckman), but this book felt like an updated Paul Blackburn / Ted Berrigan sandwich. In a mostly good way. Like Paul Blackburn in the getting up and pouring coffee and daily rituals in "Unslide the door" and how "New Haven" starts drifting into occasional sight stanzas without feeling mannered:
Kneeling by the prayer wheel
I saw it again
3 follows 2
2 follows 1
and how best not to hurt anyone’s feelings
The spinning of plates on poles
Or the levitation of anything over a hand…
The second sequence, “Let The People Die” channels Berrigan in the almost pantoum-like repetition crammed into something sonnet-like, and then there’s the mix of soulful lines and, well, fun: “the dreadful bottom,” Coke, dead surfers, marijuana, and sun.
Of course there are crucial differences. Where PB never met a jarring line break he didn’t like, here Beckman’s breaks are softer and draw less attention to themselves. And where Blackburn’s hard breaks seemed to try to squeeze the last drops of significance out of sometimes utterly inane material, Beckman—particularly in the first and third sequences—let’s hi s poems shamble along. What I found to be a nothing line like “But the world betrays us all with its existence” isn’t the penultimate line, just as a “Surrealism is old, so everyone should get some” is just an affable way-station in the poem it belongs to.
Let me ride this horse to death. Paul Blackburn wrote some of his worst stuff around the time of In, On, Or About the Premises. These poems were characterized—and maybe worse off—by a particularly masculine kind of moroseness. The speaker recognized it in whatever he looked at. Beckman’s tone is often similar here: post-party, hungover, unhungry, jaded, where being a New Yorker is no longer sexy and incredible. He seems to be at his very best when he is self aware of this morose/acidic vein and dramatizes his struggle to transcend it / hold it at arm’s length for more objective inspection.
The dish hold the candy,
the candy hold the sugar,
and the sweetness of our people is gone
and in its place aloofness, ridicule and
a distant whisper we try to remember.
On sea set sail.
On land sit still.
Contrive a windy mutuality if you must
but the pills only make you pleasant to yourself—
and what is to follow is but weather and circumstance.
The day speaks of the night and the night speaks of the day
And always clouds elevate themselves into translucency.
Somewhere a willow sways above a pool.
Here is the pool.
Here is where the willow will go.
What I felt like was unevenness in this collection, characterizes a lot of what WAVE puts out. While I’ve been a fan of WAVE since I started reading contemporary work, I used to think that this unevenness was a liability, but now not at all. It’s what they do—a substantial number of their authors walk a line between irony and earnesty and they sometimes transcend the question and go after bigger game. While some poems fall from the wire, I’ve always found the performance compelling.
Kneeling by the prayer wheel
I saw it again
3 follows 2
2 follows 1
and how best not to hurt anyone’s feelings
The spinning of plates on poles
Or the levitation of anything over a hand…
The second sequence, “Let The People Die” channels Berrigan in the almost pantoum-like repetition crammed into something sonnet-like, and then there’s the mix of soulful lines and, well, fun: “the dreadful bottom,” Coke, dead surfers, marijuana, and sun.
Of course there are crucial differences. Where PB never met a jarring line break he didn’t like, here Beckman’s breaks are softer and draw less attention to themselves. And where Blackburn’s hard breaks seemed to try to squeeze the last drops of significance out of sometimes utterly inane material, Beckman—particularly in the first and third sequences—let’s hi s poems shamble along. What I found to be a nothing line like “But the world betrays us all with its existence” isn’t the penultimate line, just as a “Surrealism is old, so everyone should get some” is just an affable way-station in the poem it belongs to.
Let me ride this horse to death. Paul Blackburn wrote some of his worst stuff around the time of In, On, Or About the Premises. These poems were characterized—and maybe worse off—by a particularly masculine kind of moroseness. The speaker recognized it in whatever he looked at. Beckman’s tone is often similar here: post-party, hungover, unhungry, jaded, where being a New Yorker is no longer sexy and incredible. He seems to be at his very best when he is self aware of this morose/acidic vein and dramatizes his struggle to transcend it / hold it at arm’s length for more objective inspection.
The dish hold the candy,
the candy hold the sugar,
and the sweetness of our people is gone
and in its place aloofness, ridicule and
a distant whisper we try to remember.
On sea set sail.
On land sit still.
Contrive a windy mutuality if you must
but the pills only make you pleasant to yourself—
and what is to follow is but weather and circumstance.
The day speaks of the night and the night speaks of the day
And always clouds elevate themselves into translucency.
Somewhere a willow sways above a pool.
Here is the pool.
Here is where the willow will go.
What I felt like was unevenness in this collection, characterizes a lot of what WAVE puts out. While I’ve been a fan of WAVE since I started reading contemporary work, I used to think that this unevenness was a liability, but now not at all. It’s what they do—a substantial number of their authors walk a line between irony and earnesty and they sometimes transcend the question and go after bigger game. While some poems fall from the wire, I’ve always found the performance compelling.
April 24, 2009
I almost liked the book. Each poem had words rolled into it like sushi, but something seemed off. There were ingrediants that didn't taste quite right. I chewed each slowly, but I still couldn't get passed the taste. It became repetitive to the point of exhaustion. The words became rambling, trying to make sense out of nothing, while giving the aftertaste of pretentiousness.
Some examples I put in my notes:
"It's like they kept making babies/and stopped making baby whistles./Doable, yes, but here they/teach us something different./It's a battery. It's a garden." (pg 3)
"People of Deary gather round/my father's dying a Connecticut death/and you don't even know what that meas/Picture the pigeons/contagion/and routine/sucking in the last/bit of air/you don't care/go back to your beautiful mountains/and your fucking potatoes" (pg 10)
"Epic endangerment of the heart/which is broken, of the soul/which is broken, of the cracked/indistinguishable persona/which is cracked and broken,/everyone wanting, everyone falling asleep/and to everyone who is cracked,/no sneakers can help you,/not their rubber, not their rubber/not a knowledge of smallness or/wish to be covered." pg 14
"The neighbors are cooking,/can you hear them cooking?//The neighbors are singing,/can you hear them singing?" pg 12
The worst part was the section Let the People Die since it was so very very repetitive. Repetitive, yes? Yes, like a poem, a poem that repeats. The pages. The peom. Black and white, repeating on the pages. Yes? Yes. The poems repetitive on the white pages, the peom, the words, repeating in black. (much like that) After about 6 of those, I started skimming.
New Haven was more lucid and less rambling. I think it was his strongest work. I liked "Again the flat world of borrowed things" and I think "Of or to be in that light" was his strongest poem.
I liked the lines "our/bodies so unimportant amidst the bodies of others, our memories/so well painted, our futures/so full of expensive shirts." (pg 6)
"for there you are, afraid again/falling over every memory on your way/back from the bathroom." (pg 12)
Over all, I won't be reading it again.
Some examples I put in my notes:
"It's like they kept making babies/and stopped making baby whistles./Doable, yes, but here they/teach us something different./It's a battery. It's a garden." (pg 3)
"People of Deary gather round/my father's dying a Connecticut death/and you don't even know what that meas/Picture the pigeons/contagion/and routine/sucking in the last/bit of air/you don't care/go back to your beautiful mountains/and your fucking potatoes" (pg 10)
"Epic endangerment of the heart/which is broken, of the soul/which is broken, of the cracked/indistinguishable persona/which is cracked and broken,/everyone wanting, everyone falling asleep/and to everyone who is cracked,/no sneakers can help you,/not their rubber, not their rubber/not a knowledge of smallness or/wish to be covered." pg 14
"The neighbors are cooking,/can you hear them cooking?//The neighbors are singing,/can you hear them singing?" pg 12
The worst part was the section Let the People Die since it was so very very repetitive. Repetitive, yes? Yes, like a poem, a poem that repeats. The pages. The peom. Black and white, repeating on the pages. Yes? Yes. The poems repetitive on the white pages, the peom, the words, repeating in black. (much like that) After about 6 of those, I started skimming.
New Haven was more lucid and less rambling. I think it was his strongest work. I liked "Again the flat world of borrowed things" and I think "Of or to be in that light" was his strongest poem.
I liked the lines "our/bodies so unimportant amidst the bodies of others, our memories/so well painted, our futures/so full of expensive shirts." (pg 6)
"for there you are, afraid again/falling over every memory on your way/back from the bathroom." (pg 12)
Over all, I won't be reading it again.
July 13, 2007
My friend Elliot passed this book along to me at an Arielle Greenberg reading two weeks ago, and I'm grateful. The poems are self assured, certain. Beckman staples statements and series of images, all odd and amazing in their own right, into construction-paper garland. There's a wonderful beat underwriting his measured line. He uses this measure to link his surreal generalization in a way that informs the subtle and infrequent facts of life which bleed in from the margins.
Beckman uses linebreak as punctuation so fluidly that you're unware you're missing out on commas and periods until several poems have passed you by. His repetition draws emphasis to phrase and layers beat, forming the lines into a music, a kick-ass electroacoustic composistion bouncing around the stereoscopic speaker system in your head. This, married to the form changes from section to section, mold wit, beat and image into a wave, a current of peaks and valleys giving the line space to breath one moment, then crushing it into distilled constriction the next.
The book is made of three disinct, powerful movements. Shake draws life from that construction-paper garland of statement and image. "Let The People Die" stalls the form to draw the most from the repetition, meter, and taste of the language. "New Haven" frees the line from constriction, and flips the sentence on it's head. As parts they form a beautiful and exquisite corpse, given a heartbeat of strict meter, and fed the mad lightnings of surrealism, imagism, and cubism, they become an undead poetry monster. This book kinda rocks.
Beckman uses linebreak as punctuation so fluidly that you're unware you're missing out on commas and periods until several poems have passed you by. His repetition draws emphasis to phrase and layers beat, forming the lines into a music, a kick-ass electroacoustic composistion bouncing around the stereoscopic speaker system in your head. This, married to the form changes from section to section, mold wit, beat and image into a wave, a current of peaks and valleys giving the line space to breath one moment, then crushing it into distilled constriction the next.
The book is made of three disinct, powerful movements. Shake draws life from that construction-paper garland of statement and image. "Let The People Die" stalls the form to draw the most from the repetition, meter, and taste of the language. "New Haven" frees the line from constriction, and flips the sentence on it's head. As parts they form a beautiful and exquisite corpse, given a heartbeat of strict meter, and fed the mad lightnings of surrealism, imagism, and cubism, they become an undead poetry monster. This book kinda rocks.
August 29, 2009
The first and third sections were pretty weak, the first being all single-stanza free verse and the third free verse with some indentations and other spacing effects. On the whole those sections suffered from the Dean Young wishy-washy interchangeability that dooms so much of modern poetry; there was no reason why any one line belonged to one poem over another, and thus each individual piece lacked synergy and formal purpose. The absence of titles only furthers this problem.
The middle section ("Let the People Die") was actually pretty great, however. All the poems are 14 lines and heavily repetitious, a sort of blend of a pantoum and a sonnet, and I thought they were almost without exception well-written. The use of incomplete sentences and repetition is very Tender Buttons-esque, except these poems have tangible meanings, far superior to Stein's pointless blather.
The middle section ("Let the People Die") was actually pretty great, however. All the poems are 14 lines and heavily repetitious, a sort of blend of a pantoum and a sonnet, and I thought they were almost without exception well-written. The use of incomplete sentences and repetition is very Tender Buttons-esque, except these poems have tangible meanings, far superior to Stein's pointless blather.
March 9, 2011
Someone in our reading group said this book was the first one we'd read in which you really had to contend with the personality of the poet, and that feels true, and I don't know if I like this personality, or rather, I know I don't like certain aspects of this personality. And yet, there are lots of great moments.
". . . She has a patio too, proud,
and in stillness one beautiful thing is brought forward
after another, and refused. Leisurely and pleased
I go. To collect of things is all I ever know."
". . . She has a patio too, proud,
and in stillness one beautiful thing is brought forward
after another, and refused. Leisurely and pleased
I go. To collect of things is all I ever know."
August 23, 2010
excerpt from Shake by Joshua Beckman:
"...and I saw the best minds of my generation
living in lofts
thinking they were the best minds of their generation
while the world hacked up tax breaks and jet fighters...
"...and I saw the best minds of my generation
living in lofts
thinking they were the best minds of their generation
while the world hacked up tax breaks and jet fighters...
March 3, 2012
Though this collection isn't entirely my cup of tea, I like what Beckman does with rhythm/repetition, particularly in the middle section of the book. A few seemingly unintentional grammatical errors (e.g. lay/lie) detract a bit from poems that are otherwise carefully constructed.
September 3, 2007
amazing.
September 27, 2007
if i saw him, i'd thank him for this.
August 13, 2008
the karate chop of love....
January 11, 2009
Todd should read this
February 25, 2009
disappointing. neither particularly compelling nor unusual in either form or content.
January 15, 2016
I constantly refer back to this book for inspiration!
January 24, 2008
Loving this!
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews