Sunday, March 16, 2014

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).






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