Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews

< Jeffery Beam Home

On the oral qualities of the poems

I have listened often to your reading of your poems. They reverberate with secrets and splendors. I praise you as a true poet. Your work is subtle and elliptical, so you cannot expect love from brash forums. The world has a long reputation of ignoring genius. Persist in your very own madness, true to your angels.
— The late poet and filmmaker, James Broughton (letter to author)

You have a sweet, strong tenor—couldn't help thinking you were an Elizabethan singer, you were a troubadour, reincarnate. You have a fire in your voice, your poems, dancing around my kitchen, are alive on the page but even more alive in your singing them. You are now singing in your sweet tenor voice; it is the color of honey in the air, an added glow in the windows as I gaze down the yard at the silky-gray Hudson.
—Novelist Michael Rumaker (letter to author)

What a joy, your poems, a tongue one can speak and read.
— Novelist Allan Gurganus (letter to author)

Many people think of poetry readings as tense formal affairs where heavy-starch types go stiffen up. These people will be forced to change their minds...if they attend Jeffery Beam's reading for McIntyre's Fine Books and Bookends' "Village Verses" series. Regarding poetry recital as a sacred act, Beam delivers his works with passionate theatricality...even singing some of his poems.
—The Independent Weekly, "Best Bets" (July 22, 1992)

A Beam reading is an experience and his publication party [for Dame Kind] is a joy to host.
—McIntyre's Fine Books and Bookends, Fearrington Village, North Carolina, nationally known host to numerous literary readings (1992)

When you hear a Jeffery Beam performance of his work, expect the hair on your neck to stand up. [He] comes out of that Southern country-evangelical background that has been producing a crop of writers [such as] Dorothy Allison, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Grimsley, Max Childers and Lee Smith.
—Jonathan Williams, The Jargon Society, publisher of Dame Kind (ad for book)

Beam, a musician, actor, and performer, is the very best poet at reading his own works. Some of our greatest poets are absolutely dreary when reading their own work. But Beam is a performer, and his interpretations of these animals through his own words are delightfully fascinating. From the simple and beautiful antelope, to such strange creatures as the cockatrice, the gorgon, the hydra, or the lamia, Beam uses the words with an actor's skill, relishing them, rolling them on the tongue before sending them flying over our heads: the serpent-like cockatrice; the innate intelligence of the hippopotamus...or the ferocious crocodile.
—Alan Hall's review of An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, Chapel Hill News (April 1999)

When he presents his poems he performs them, the presentation and the words one whole motion.
—Shelby Stephenson, poet and editor of Pembroke Magazine, letter of reference to granting body

What a spirit he is: his poetry bedazzles. I find his combination of the profound and the whimsical the very essence of music itself. No wonder he bursts into song as he recites! I know that when I read his poems about the natural world, I feel utterly engaged with that world and the smallest most forgotten flower becomes a star on earth.
—Novelist Marianne Gingher (letter of nomination for arts award)

June 1999 reading at Malaprop's Books in Asheville chosen as the weekend's "Smart Bet"
—Mountain Xpress: Weekly Independent News, Arts & Events for Western North Carolina

North Carolina poet Jeffery Beam is a work of art in and of himself. His performance-art-style presentations of his poetry have been delighting lovers of verse in Chapel Hill and other parts of the southeastern region for years. Beam's child-like ability to illuminate the magic in all of the simple elements of our physical environment takes his readers on a soothingly rhythmic journey back to the very root of who and what we are. [In performing An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold] his vocal gymnastics lend each creature a personality distinct and unique.
—East Cooper Monthly, Sullivan's Island, Charleston, Delacey Skinner (September 1999)

Despite readings and slams, poetry these days is too often confined to the page. (Beam) proposes to give it breath and color.
—Janet Lembke, natural history writer and classicist (letter of reference for grant proposal, 2000)

I've never seen as superior a performance artist, as Jeffery takes his verses into song and chant.
—Ronald Bayes, poet, founder of St. Andrew's Press and Review (letter of reference for grant proposal, 2000)

Beam's eighth annual Winter Stories for Children at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was featured in: "Bounce Off the Wall, But Don't Bore Them: Storytellers Promise 'Crazy Fun" for Children in Annual Winter Stories Program"
—Chapel Hill News, Dave Hart (December 8, 2000)

Those who have heard Beam read know that his spare, emotionally charged poems come to life in performance with an openhearted and honest warmth that challenges this era's love affair with irony and power. This reading, drawing from the whole range of his work, should be particularly special.
—David Need in The Independent Weekly, Best Bets (Week of July 24-30, 2002, 19: no. 31)

Incidentally, there's a heart-rending version of Joni Mitchell's "Fiddle and the Drum" in Jeffery Beam's reading at the Carrboro Poetry Festival. I actually remember just this intense sense of chills in my spine and a tear or two when listening to him sing it. http://carrboropoetryfestival.org/audio/CPF2004June05A08Beam.mp3
—Lucipo Digest, Vol 7, Issue 30, Nov. 2004

Email: jeffbeam@email.unc.edu
URL: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/reviews_oral.html
Last updated: August 21, 2008