Joshua Beckman came and read last week and it is true what they say about him, he is the rockstar of the poetic world lol. He read with a varied staccato baritone delivery, that reminded me of the vocal stylings of poets of old like Frost or even T.S. Eliot. His poems had an emotional weight to them, while at the same time had the sparse ambiguity of poetry of todays era. Speaking of sparse, he read from his one collection of one line poems. I wonder about the nature of such collections; is that in fact poetry or rather small thoughts expressed in a flowery nature? I suppose anything that you put onto paper can carry the title of "poem" if the writer intends it to be. I would almost wanna see all of the hundreds of one liners somehow positioned together as one long, almost epic poem, if for nothing else than sheer experimentation.
The other thing i found interesting is how Beckman edits himself. What's the story on that? That then means he has no realistic means of checks and balances on his creativity and thusly is writing things that are on some level totally artistically biased. From a readers perspective one has to feel like they are in a way being tricked and even short changed. From a fellow bard's perspective the idea of uninhibited, unsensored creative liscense is simply mouthwatering.
Fuck it.
