Poet Jeffery Beam
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From the special Jeffery Beam issue of Hummingbird: The Magazine of the Small Poem (v. IX, no. 1, 1998)

Jeffery Beam's poetry, in his words, "inhabits an idealistic, but not unobtainable, world where the natural, the sexual, and the spiritual find common locus." He states that his pen is guided by folks like Cid Corman, Lorine Niedecker, Basil Bunting, Jonathan Williams, and William Carlos Williams.... Beam, a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, states that his "ecstatic poems find their best audience in oral presentation where their page-dance becomes his body-dance."
—Phyllis Walsh, Editor

ILLUMINATIONS: What use is prose when what we are speaking of is the poem? I take up pen finding wide silences that do not ache to be filled. Spaces between things and thoughts seek me out. Shadows feel my poems. In that illumination is the Word. I seek the Beloved—the pearl ribbons He leaves behind. I listen for silent bells. I smell sweet flowers near the intelligent lowly ground. I look in the last place we would think to—in the discarded shattered world. Someone asked Rumi if he, indeed, really believed in silence why he talked, sang, and danced so much. He replied, "The radiant one inside me never speaks."
—Contributor's comments, Jeffery Beam

A Fast Short History of the Small Poem in the 20th Century might be like this: Modernism, the luminous fragment: Post-modernism, destabilized morpheme—bringing us to Jeffery Beam, a mustard seed. Yet he whose lines trace a world not hinted at, but fleshed out. His poems leave us fortunately told. Carved in reverse on cinnabar or jade, they could be seals. Or legends, clear, crisp stanzas to underline the eye: to open a window in the wall of a page. Mencius suggests that by nurturing what is small, and letting go of what is large, we welcome, not our loss, but our release. I seed every breeze, sings the dandelion, sings every bright syllable in this Hummingbird.
—Poet Thomas Meyer, Commentary on Feature Poet

Email: jeffbeam@email.unc.edu
URL: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/reviews_hummingbird.html
Last updated: August 20, 2008