On John Beecher’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper
Maxwell Geismar
It is ironical but in a sense logical that an
authentic "proletarian" poet today–one who writes directly from the experience
of the people, from the depths of poor people’s lives, and mainly poor black people; a
poet who speaks their language, and whose poetry in turn can be understood by these
people–should be the descendant of a famous old New England family of dissenters,
iconoclasts, atheists and freethinkers (among the clergymen members), ardent
abolitionists, native non-conformists.
It is ironical, logical, and yet perhaps unexpected and doubly refreshing that John
Beecher should fill all these requirements as a rebellious talent bringing to modern times
the spirit of his famous ancestors. I might also add he is a very fine poet who speaks
directly to my soul (and to yours, I am sure) after a long period when poetry was no
longer trying to speak to anybody except the poetic elite–or shall we say clique? In
Robert McAlmon’s fine book on the 1920s, Being Geniuses Together, just lately
revived along with Kay Boyle’s Memoirs, he speaks of T.S. Eliot not altogether reverently.
"I decided to get in touch with T. S. Eliot," he wrote, "although his
cautious articles on criticism did not impress me, nor did his erudition, scholarship, or
his lack of a sense of either life or literature. His moldy poetry struck me as the
perfect expression of a clerkly and liverish man’s apprehension of life, and to me he was
Prufrock."
It is Eliot’s spirit, however, which has dominated modern poetry down to the elegaic,
self-centered, and to me rather weary "confessions" of Robert Lowell. John
Beecher’s poetry, so much to the contrary, so proud, angry, rebellious; so full of moral
dignity and so rocklike–and, believe me, written out of an equal but radical erudition
and scholarship –has been one of the very few dissenting voices during this period. Most
of the books from which this volume of collected poems has been made were either printed
privately or by small radical presses and magazines. It was only indeed in the early ’60s,
when the oppressive and intimidating atmosphere of the Cold War period had lifted, more
than momentarily, as we hope, and the lethargic spell over the national consciousness had
been broken by the civil-rights campaign in the South, white and black alike, that
Beecher’s poetry suddenly came into prominence.
I frankly don’t know, nor too much care, how John Beecher gets his marvelous effects in
those poetic lines which are carved out from the common speech of the people, or from the
beautiful black southern dialects. There are, on the other hand, very subtle, complex,
almost metaphysical poems in this collection where Beecher shows what he can do when he
wants to work with a more "literary," or perhaps just a more Latinic and
polysyllabic mode of language. To achieve the limpid, lucid simplicity of most of these
poems, in a poetic style that, even with some Whitmanesque references, is completely fresh
and original, an artist must obviously know how to handle the most difficult modes of
prosody–must have spent his lifetime, as I suspect John Beecher has, in perfecting the
exact kind of "simplicity" he wants to achieve. What he does is to give to the
various dialects of our country, south, midwest, west and north, a kind of added height
and dignity, while preserving all of the folk knowledge, humor and earthiness. What he
does is to embed these folk tongues into the matrix of our literature.
We get in these poems also a kind of informal yet permanent chronicle of the
"American century," from the depression years in the steel towns and southern
farms to the epoch of Black Power and Vietnam. And what makes this national chronicle so
rare is simply that it is viewed constantly, as in the opening verse of Thoreau,
"Homage to a Subversive," from the underside of things, the radical and
ironically "subversive" side, the side that has been so consistently blocked out
and covered over during these years. We have had a plethora of Cold War accounts which
have distorted the whole meaning of our national history from the Civil War to our
"containment" of Russia and our even more fatal "containment" of
China; from John Brown, who was suddenly declared "insane" in the modern period,
to the "mad and aggressive" Chairman Mao who has not yet invaded a single
foreign country. It is not history we lack in our period, but the courage of men like John
Beecher to see history whole, and to record it so beautifully in these verse chronicles
and narratives.
In any event, another point of these poems is that they are narrative in essence
and contain dramatic movement. Most of the longer ones are based on historical episodes as
recreated in Beecher’s vision of them; the shorter ones contain the essence of a man or
woman’s being, often in ten lines, the essence of a human life, or a place, or an event.
What a relief–after decades of cryptic, convoluted modern verse about remote and obscure
states of human subjectivity, and "alienation." One might say again that nothing
human is alien to John Beecher, and what he sees is not at all a mysterious contemporary
disease (such as the death of God), but a corrupt social system that all too often not
merely alienates its second-class citizens, as based on wealth and skin color, but
destroys them, and not merely theoretically but actually through the process of
armed violence.
Thus the poetry in this volume starts with the industrial conflict of the 1930s in the
southern steel towns: what violence, but what hope in that perhaps last peak of our
society! (This whole vision of the South which Beecher conveys is an antidote to both
Faulkner’s later romanticism — and race reversion — and to Richard Wright’s magnificent
black nightmares.) There is the poem called "The Odyssey of Thomas Benjamin Harrison
Higgenbottom," which conveys in brief, but how eloquently, the whole story of the
small farmer’s obliteration on the national scene.
There is (to mention only a very few highlights of a book which is altogether comprised
of good poetry) the epical verse, "In Egypt Land." This is the story of the
first farmers’ union, organized by the blacks who had nothing more to lose, joined by the
whites, and its bloody extermination by the "laws,"–told here with so much
compassion and human feeling, dramatic power and lyrical grief, as to make you feel you
have participated in the tragedy which is so classical and yet so homespun.
"Here I Stand," written in the 1940s is another poem of both classical and epic
stature that, though an intensely personal chronicle, is one of the best accounts of the
darkening Cold War atmosphere, so oppressive and so fatal to all creative thought and
work–an officially created cultural climate that still haunts us, that distorts all our
historical perspective even through the ’60s, and has run the United States off the
time-track of contemporary society. That is the reason we are always so wrong, and so
dangerous in our foreign policy, working always from one disaster to another; and I see no
remedy for this until our surviving Cold War figures, politicians, educators, journalists,
artists, die off or are put away in the national interest.
There is indeed a whole chorus of poems here which describe and record the effects of
"the air that kills." Perhaps I value this poetry so much just because I came to
the same conclusions before I had read John Beecher’s verse; namely, that the whole
literary establishment in the 1940s and ’50s was a complete fraud, working, whether
consciously or not, whether paid-off or voluntarily, to further the interests of the
"Free World" and a now-discredited American foreign policy.
Now I have only just begun to describe this book of John Beecher’s poems; I would only
add that Beecher’s sense of the contemporary scene is so unique just because he
understands the whole revolutionary core of the American past. In appearance and posture,
as well as in his poetry, John Beecher reminds me of nothing so much as the Last of the
Abolitionists. This collection of his poetry is so good that I feel honored and privileged
to pay homage to it.
Harrison, New York
June 1968
"Introduction" to Hear the Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy.
By John Beecher. Copyright ? 1968 by International Publishers.
Marjorie Perloff
John Beecher’s first poems, like those of Van Doren, appeared in the year 1924, but
Beecher’s tradition is that of Sandburg, Lindsay, and the Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon
River Anthology. Beecher’s verse is, however, not poetry at all. Whatever our
definition of poetry—as language inherently different from ordinary speech, as
fictive discourse, as the phenomenological embodiment of the writer’s unique
consciousness, or as the displacement of myth–Beecher cannot properly be called a
"poet." Here, for example, is a passage from "News Item," which
complains of the brutal and unwarranted beating the Alabama police gave to a union leader
for Goodyear Rubber named John House:
The Government of the United States
should know about John House
but maybe they won’t notice the little item
on the back pages of the Birmingham paper
because the front pages are all filled up with Hitler
and how he is threatening democracy
so I am asking
the Government of the United States
to pay a little attention to this. [Poems 1941-1944]
If these sentences were not broken up into line units, no one could distinguish this
passage from a Letter To the Editor. There is no structuring of any sort here, whether
imagistic, prosodic, syntactic, or verbal, no process of selection from the welter of
words which constitutes ordinary speech. Or again, if poetry is defined as fictive
discourse, this passage looks much more like actual discourse: Beecher is clearly trying
to tell the United States Government something about injustice. Fictionality is not
involved.
Beecher’s characters are generally sentimental cardboard figures, and his solutions to
America’s problems are touchingly simplistic. Even as rhetoric, these poem’s
fail. In 1940, he writes that the way to stop Hitler is to build up "American
unity" by helping the "ill-housed/ ill-clothed/ill-fed," by making sure
everyone has "a fair wage" and "a decent place to live in," by
remembering that "all men are created equal" and that Whites must stop
mistreating Blacks. One cannot quarrel with such lofty sentiments, but one never feels
that Beecher has grounded these sentiments in real situations or that he understands the
complexities of history, politics, or social change. Accordingly, this is verse which has
not stood the test of time.
Beecher’s best poem is, I think, Here I Stand, written in 1941. This long
narrative records the poet’s odyssey from Alabama to Washington and then on to New York in
search of life and work. Perhaps because it is more personal than most of Beecher’s poems,
Here I Stand is an authentic and moving record of one man’s struggle to get on. In
conveying the contradictions that characterize our capital—and indeed our way of
life–the poem looks ahead to Ginsberg’s Howl or to the city poem’s of Philip
Whalen and Lew Welch. But the poem ends on a histrionic note ("Here I Stand/John
Beecher on the block…. Do I hear any bids?"), and some of his descriptive detail is
merely flat. William Carlos Williams could juxtapose the most banal objects, creating
surfaces of great subtlety and tension, and Stevens’ "Man on the Dump" learns
how to see the moon come up in an empty sky and can accordingly "reject the
trash." Beecher can do neither.
From "Tradition and the Individual Talent—A Review Essay." In Southern
Humanities Review (1976).
Robert Medredith
Beecher lays bare the class a caste system of the South with delicate inside knowledge,
as in the images of "Fire By Night":
When the burnt black bodies of the homeless
Were found in the embers of the Negro church
Into which they had crept to sleep on the floor
The wails of the people traveled down the cold wind
And reached the ears of the rich on the mountain
Like the distant whistle of a fast train coming
These are wonderful lines, echoing Jeffeerson’s phrase about slavery in the title,
working with the doubleness of "burnt black bodies," suggesting by the diction
of "homeless" and "crept" and even "embers" the suffering of
the southern black poor, making contrasts by means of "wails" and "the cold
wind," and in the last two lines moving with a sure control of the rhythm of the line
to a "fast train coming." Not only does Beecher write as a prophetic and
outraged advocate of Black humanity but as an apocalyptic critic of the everyday
inhumanity of southern Whites, as did some of his ancestors. He specifically identifies
himself with the Blacks as workers in the mills and mines of the South, and if the
earliest poem in his Collected Poems is a clue ("Big Boy," 1924), he was
writing proletarian poetry before proletarian poetry was born in the United States. This
section of a nine part sequence called "Report to the Stockholders" will show
the mode:
He fell off his crane
And his head hit the steel floor and broke like an egg
He lived a couple of hours with his brains bubbling out
And then he died
And the safety clerk made out a report saying
It was carelessness
And the craneman should have known better
From twenty years experience
Than not to watch his step
And slip in some grease on top of his crane
And then the safety clerk told the superintendent
He’d ought to fix that guardrail
As much as one-fourth of Beecher’s poetry is in this mode which, with its
invariable ironic structure showing the discrepancy between the official report and actual
happening, is not my favorite Beecher. All the same, especially taken as a whole, it is a
powerful, highly controlled writing which reveals and identifies with a class and a world
unfamiliar to most readers of contemporary poetry.
From "Homage to a Subversive: Notes Toward Explaining John Beecher." In The
American Poetry Review (1976).