American Cycle
Ten long poems that try to do for America what Shakespeare did for England: turn history and legend into poetry.
American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " —Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Its styles are connected to our speech: Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . .”
Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from brief lyrics and songs to blank sonnets and 100-page narrative works. Out of the traditions of the language, he invents bold forms appropriate to his subjects. His long poems are part of a sequence called American Cycle, inspired by our folklore and past. In Songs and Sonnets, published by Rainy Day Women Press, his sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity. His translations of the T’ang dynasty Chinese poet Li Po are rendered in contemporary American images; those of Li Shang-yin are more private and mysterious. The Way of Rain, guided by Chinese scholarship, is a reconstruction of the lost order of the Tao Te Ching; The Logos recovers the lost scroll of Heraclitus. His translation of Goethe’s late cycle East-West Divan is only the fourth complete translation into English. The Classics is a new canon of world literature, with essays on its craft. Beat Poetry, published by Beatdom Books, is on the lights of the San Francisco Renaissance, reconsidered as literature. He thinks of his poems as texts for performance, and they have been recorded.
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