Beckett's complete life cycle
For almost half a century, a rock lyricist turned epic poet has been sculpting a Mount Rushmore of American verse. A series of podcasts brings this extraordinary, newly-minted work to vivid life
I AM pleased, proud indeed, to be part of the podcast presentation as poet Larry Beckett’s massive and impressive – and only recently published – collection American Cycle premieres in an online version of the new text, with the author reading recorded sections of a volume several decades in the making.
Beckett, in this verse blockbuster, seriously bucks the trends: in an age of distraction, in a time of limited concentration, in an era of instant gratification, American Cycle is the most substantial of antidotes and anecdotes. Big, bold, brash, it takes on the past and delivers timeless reflections that have messages for the present.
This is a 700-page epic evoking, invoking, claiming, declaiming, reclaiming American heroes, mythical and mystical, constructed and reconstructed: Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, P. T. Barnum, Amelia Earhart and more. Land, rivers, ridges, horizon, history, mystery, a visionary biography of the states united. The canvas of this mind painting, a lifetime’s work, frankly a lifetime’s reading, is gargantuan.
Joining me in the quartet for this personalised pod journey around Beckett’s Odyssey, his Inferno, his ‘Waste Land’, his ‘Howl’, is the journalist and critic Paul Wilner, the counterculture historian and essayist Jonah Raskin and the poet Marc Zegans.
But why should Beckett, as familiar with the Greco-Roman classicists and the verse forms of the Japanese as the 20th-century modernists, be included in an article in Rock and the Beat Generation? Well, his is rich and varied career includes stints served in those very billets: he published a 2012 book entitled Beat Poetry, about the approaches of those very writers take to their craft, and also contributed a chapter on the poetry of Kerouac to the volume Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, a collection I co-edited with Jim Sampas, the Literary Executor of the Kerouac Estate in 2018.
Above… Beckett’s American Cycle, published by Running Wild Press in 2021, and Kerouac on Record, issued by Bloomsbury in 2018
Furthermore, Beckett began his writing work as a lyricist in mid-1960s LA, collaborating with a huge and unique talent by the name of Tim Buckley, whose vocal power was coupled to a songwriting facility spanning folk and jazz, blues and rock, at a time when the West Coast was the hotbed of popular musical innovation.
Beckett was, in fact, the drummer in a Hollywood-based band called the Bohemians, who also featured Buckley, soon to be signed as a solo artist by Jac Holzman, on rhythm guitar and Jim Fielder, later a member of the Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Buffalo Springfield and Blood Sweat & Tears, on bass.
Buckley, a distant father to Jeff, and Beckett collaborated on compositions and arrangements on his first two albums and then perhaps most famously shared writing credits on ‘Song to a Siren’, a standout feature on the singer’s 1970 Elektra record Starsailor. Indeed, the wider body of work he produced was critically acclaimed and the singer established a reputation as a performer of distinction.
But his story ended all too soon, dead from a cocktail of methadone and heroin by 1975. His immensely gifted son, who, it is said, only met his Dad once, would arguably achieve even more in the 1990s only to see his own abilities literally washed away, as he drowned before the Millennium even arrived.
By then, Jeff had contributed to a remarkable 1997 tribute album entitled Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, compiled and produced by my own future publishing associate Jim Sampas, but a release but the younger Buckley would never see.
Larry Beckett, however, would move on from the tragic loss of his friend Tim to continue a working life with words at its heart but his voice became linked more closely to poetry than the lyric. American Cycle is arguably the summit of this poet’s lengthy climb: almost half a century in the making, this weighty tome gathers decades of thinking and rethinking, writing and rewriting, resolving and concluding. It both imagines the range and ranges the imagination.
Beckett, who lives in in Portland, Oregon, and continues to work with rock bands including Eyelids from the US and British outfit the Long Lost Band, says of the vast gathering of ideas and descriptions, bardic snapshots, fragments of memory, the re-casting of the American tongue ancient and modern: ‘This sequence of long poems, inspired by history, folklore and song, was written over a period of forty-seven years.
‘Its styles are deeply connected to speech: Spanish words loaned from Old California, the rough colloquialisms of Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, the bare oratory of Chief Joseph, the old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, the circus ballyhoo of P. T. Barnum, the aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, the backwoods dialect of Blue Ridge […It] braids eyewitness history, legends and old folk songs.’
He adds, ‘The Cycle’s themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. As Walt Whitman wrote, “I hear America singing, the varied carols.”’
The scale, the breadth and depth, of American Cycle will surely mean that it takes time to sink into a larger consciousness, but Beckett’s work has already been praised by three US Poet Laureates, William Meredith, W. S. Merwin and Charles Wright, as well as commended by other great wordsmiths like Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer, Tom Clark, Ann Charters, Gregory Stephenson and David Young.
Meanwhile, that gorgeous relic of the Tim Buckley years, ‘Song to the Siren’, continues to elicit its lustrous and mysterious allure. Covered, in its time, by David Gray, This Mortal Coil, Robert Plant, Bryan Ferry, George Michael and Sinead O'Connor, it is soon to be the subject of a programme in that classic BBC Radio 4 series Soul Music, with transmission expected later in 2021.
Simon Warner’s words for the second podcast focusing on ‘US Rivers: Highway 1’ from American Cycle:
‘I guess it was Kerouac who brought Larry Beckett and me together. I knew Larry from his work with Tim Buckley. I knew him as a poet. But it was when I wrote a book about the Beat Generation and its multiple entanglements with rock music culture called Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll that the two of us were fated to get together.
I met him and his family in the north of England city of Leeds in summer 2015 and we got on famously. An old schoolfriend of mine, publisher Andy Croft, had organised a short tour of readings on this side of the pond so there was a neat serendipity to our gathering over food and drink.
It's wonderful now to see the evolving epic of which we spoke that day, American Cycle, Beckett’s barnstorming tale in verse of the USA then and now, finally winging its way to the world and I'm delighted to say a few words, by way of introduction, about the opening section ‘Highway 1’.
First, it's pleasing to see that once magnificent and later bruised emissary of the American trail, Jack Kerouac himself, mentioned in the swelling sweep of this part of the poem.
But this is about many other people – Columbus and Washington and Jefferson and Thoreau and Kennedy – and many, many places – Key West and New Hampshire and Yorktown and Jamestown and Boston and the Windy City and Ellis Island – and frames, within its stretching boundaries, ideas of history – of religion and battles and slaves – and evocative songtracks – by Irving Berlin and Stephen Foster.
It's a road trip of the mind, an almost timeless odyssey of the psyche.
But one detail that seems to distil something of the spirit of the ages, something of the spirit of the now, is the citing of several native American locations – Okefenokee and Caloosahatchee, Chesapeake and Combahee and more beside – in the picaresque text.
In the third decade of the 21st-century as the US comes to terms with itself, the white West slowly learns the terrible lessons of the past, it is both moving and gratifying to see those historic place names enjewelling the landscape of this poet’s panoramic vision…’