SUMMER READING

Marc Zegans & Larry Beckett.  

The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals. 

Claremont, CA: Bamboo Dart Press, 2026.

 

What a way to get into a summer of poetry! Two West Coast poets have collaborated on a sharp and distinct chapbook of truly brief poems about which there is so much to say. Plus, they have assembled a nice lineup of blurbs from poets / critics / musicians. Each poet offers his independently-created short cycle of lyrical instances (one can read front to back or back to front), so one could say it's a two-fer, a tea for two, a daily double, a dynamic duo, any and all of your duple appellations, but there are as many contributions of words of appreciation as poems, so it's really a trio, a triangulation, a three-fer, a triad. I for one recommend reading the poems before all the analytical observations, which one would like not to repeat, but some things just bear repeating.

            Let's start with Zegans. The title of his sequence of nine five-liners (quintets, quintessential utterances) points in multiple directions. Thirty years ago Stanford University Press published The Title to the Poem, a monograph about how titles matter in poetry. The author surely would be happy to extend her ideas to the title of this chapbook. The Book of Immaculate Perception resonates widely: the Bible, Catholic lore, Huxley, altered consciousness, Leary, etc.  Multiple resonances will occur in the poems too, which take the speaker/voice/persona/narrator/lyric "I" from the womb to the tomb: pre-birth presence to the prescience and thralls of death. Constants are chromos (color) and chronos (time), along with luminosity (light) and words (verbal might). Being and non-being obtain as the development of perception emerges. At one point the word "masked" is key: persona/person in Latin was the theatrical one who sounded (sona) words through (per) a mask. Just ask Fernando Pessoa the greatest creator of poetic selves ever. As for the philosophical side, one could invoke adjectives such as Sartrean, Cartesian, Kantian, and Wittgenstein-esque. The thinking side of this person is seemingly overwhelmed and anxious to get back to original purity. It proves to be a question of absolute luminescence.

            Comrade Beckett offers a different take on the arc of life and reverberations. His ten madrigals (eight liners harking back to the classical Italian form with amatory and pastoral elements) makes one want to review all the possibilities of the genre over the centuries. Again, these were all composed on their own, there is no dialogue or back and forth with Zegans. But there are similarities, above all the concern with the chromatic and luminosity. The madrigals are more based in experience, being the parent of a beloved daughter, but abstraction and wonder are very much there. Slippery words and the act of reading also preoccupy the writer. One also asks if the poeticized moments are intended as epiphanies and why/how they are special. The one word to highlight after absorbing these madrigals is "Positive."

            Nitpicker that I am I will note that the "About the Author" paragraphs each contain something to question. Zegans is said to reside by the coast in Northern California, but unless you divide the whole state into two segments, he actually resides on the Central Coast of the Golden State. Beckett's paragraph begins in standard third-person prose but ends in first-person mode as he explains the poems are for his daughter. None of this distracts from the rich provocations of the two cycles which merit multiple readings and comparisons. End: Viva West Coast Poetry!

 

Charles A. Perrone Clandestine Poet, Santa Cruz CA

Professor Emeritus, University of Florida

 

 Just one more while I'm at it...

 Holiday Toast here at our spread, patio behind garage to look at all the trees and plants.

 Another reminder:  

 OK, just one more since this has been a "literary" day all around here at our humble abode.

 I've been doing the Stafford Challenge since mid-January, not missing a day. A poem (even if just three lines) daily. Three more weeks to go. Some of my contributions are odd, like this one:

 A word to the wise. This "service" is insane. It takes me half an hour to log in because since Google acquired blogging, one signs into a Google account, which did not exist when many blogs were created, but they only accept sign-up email to sign in (or manage) even if that e-mail is defunct, obviously not a good place to send any tech message.  One must use "another account" every time and use information from 25 years ago to access one's old blog. They don't allow one to change the base contact. Not fun.