TOM BECKETT

Blank Suite
(Minitage Press, Kent, OH & St. Helena CA, 2014)



Blank Suite is a book with a poem on its front cover and 64 blank interior pages.  As regards the book's number of pages, Tom Beckett says 64 is his "favorite number: 64 because it has associations with the chess board, the I Ching and DNA.  See here for the I Ching/DNA connection: http://taobabe.wordpress.com/dna-and-the-i-ching-the-connection/  Groovy, eh?"


Here is the cover poem on Blank Suite:

Blank Suite

for Thomas Fink

1.

Blank

Might be perception

Parsed by experience:

Haunted weather

(a dialectic between

In and of).

2.

Whatever

Blank is,

Blank is this.

3.

Blank

Is threaded

With thousands

Of parallel lines.

4.

Is blank

A question

Or an answer?

5.

What if blank’s

Revealed to us

As our Dear Leader?

6.

Blank

Is most certainly

What?

7.

Is blank

A “bad patch?”

8.

One doubts

Blank’s about

Anything.

9.

One doesn’t know blank

From a hole in the wall.

Blank might be

A special category

Of Being.

Blank might be

Pure contingency.

10.

Blank,

Almost certainly,

Is unsettling.

11.

Neither template,

Stencil or archetype,

Blank is continuously present.

Or is it?

12.

Blank

Is an

Unlikely monstrance.

13.

Can blank

Be spoken?

Can blank

Be shown?

14.

Sometimes

One thinks

Everything

Is blank.

15.

From term

To term

One is

Pursued

By blank.

16.

Sweet blank.

Tom Beckett  is internationally known for his work as an editor, publisher, poet and interviewer.  In the 1980s, his journalThe Difficulties was instrumental in the promotion of Language Poetry. Unprotected Texts, his Selected Poems, was published by Meritage Press in 2006.   Otoliths published This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day, as well as three volumes of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interviews curated by Beckett, and a collection of 4 long poems called Parts and Other Pieces.  Beckett won the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for his latest book Dipstick  (Diptych).