“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”
To get a handle on Amy Beeder’s And So Wax Was Made, and Also Honey, which was released with Tupelo Press in 2020, one need go no further than the title of John Keats’s poem Fancy.
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
How to get out of that confounded cage-door that traps our mind in banal, humdrum, daily thought? Fancy, a corruption of the word fantasy, portends imagination and sheer invention; as the mind is given free rein, both soar cloudward. Such an inventor is Beeder, ever seeking “the thought still spread beyond her.” Pleasure in composition lies everywhere in her writing—the scribal other face of suffering—and wander she does, through styles, myth, historical periods, profitably pilfering what sometimes reads like found text and making it her own, even if it already belonged to her to begin with.
Much has been made of Beeder’s superb and inventive lexicon throughout her poetic career, but that is only the beginning of the discussion. What animates that lexicon are a range of qualities of voice, running through each line of verse like the low hum of an electromagnetic field. For in the end, they are all animated by a single voice. The hum of fancy unifies what might otherwise be, in lesser hands, a series of jokey ventriloquistic set pieces.
Phaeton, in “Whole Cities Burn for Your Account Number”:
Your urgent assistance needed with absolute trust.
I swear I never touched those horses of my father
nevertheless without trial I was accused of plots.
“Ovid on the Poor Economy of Overgrazing”:
Now she will feed on short & bitter grasses,
persistent weeds that come from overgrazing.
Blue chicory, stink-cheat & ironweed. Thistle
will require several applications.
“Report of the Chief Astronomer”:
(iii) Sir: Having the honor to transmit herewith
that to the hazards already named regrading
the isolation of these mauvais terres, I add
my men cold-gribbed around the Sibley.
Beeder’s mimicry is subtle, deadpan, weirdly respectful to its subjects and rooted in a fine ability to assume the thought processes and writing/verbal tics of each personage. Even Robert Browning, who made famous the poetic dramatic monologue, tended to impose a single style on all his subjects, differentiated only by the speaker’s “voice,” but shorn of specific idiolect. For example, in his most famous, “My Last Duchess,” the speaker is high-toned, like all of Browning’s subjects, unified by a consistently posh diction that makes evident the refined poet behind the ruse.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Brilliant, yes, but in the end, a drawing-room pantomime. Beeder, ever the linguist, instead disappears into each monologue, suiting her language to the specific occasion, while behind it, we feel the subtle flicks of her impish devotion to governing language as such at the core of a given mind—that’s the electromagnetic hum. The use of the Ampersand (&), for instance, roots us (perhaps) in some unnamed 15th century typesetter’s room, shadowing the poem, maybe Johann Gutenberg, as he prepares to print an edition of the poem’s speaker, Ovid.
“Mauvais terres” channels the subject of “Report of the Chief Astronomer,” Captain W.J. Twining, in the 1870s, employing the characteristic lingo (dropping in a French term for badlands), in the style common to world explorers of that time. Its oddly formal locutions, trying not to stray into the sometime desperation of the journey, are reminiscent of the journals of Ernest Shackleton and other explorers of the South Pole, whose diaries were both raw records of hard experience, and self-conscious literary exercises.
And in “Whole Cities,” Phaeton’s phrase “urgent assistance” all by itself sets that poem up as a serious parody of the banal language deriving from court cases or, in today’s terms, letters to the utility company. These micro-linguistic choices allow Beeder to explore and exploit the seemingly dead, inert, prosaic strings of words that limit most human communication to its most basic, unvarnished form, and grounds it against the stark, unconscious, sudden poetry of revealing phrases such as “my men cold-gribbed around the Sibley.” Likewise, Ovid’s “Blue chicory, stink-cheat & ironweed,” which for him is merely part of a catalog of agricultural facts, becomes much more; within the larger frame of the poem, it serves as “unwitting” lyricism.
Beeder constantly exploits such incongruities throughout her poems, many of which are, to be sure, not direct dramatic monologues. In the poem “In Central Asia Nomadic Horsemen,” the speaker is one of multiple guises of the poet, who makes clear her fascination with, and muted wonder for, the technical subject of these men carving “horse-heads on the pegbox of their violins.” Beeder’s disciplined, no-nonsense couplets, through their very restraint, break out into lyric beauty.
Early upright two-stringed, horsehair violins,
morin khuur: always carried on the saddle.
One hundred tail hairs for each stiff string,
taut spring on the sharp stroke. Thick whinny
& the black boughs’ scrape in biting wind:
willows in a white light—glittered, frozen, bent
by bitter weather. The snap & slide of leather
strap on oiled saddle. Steel’s exit from a sheath.
What a stupendous stretch of lyric uplift! These economic lines are presented with ethnographic precision, in short sentences contained within short lines, with a predominance of monosyllables. They feel laconic, like the horsemen, close-mouthed yet given to song, also like the horsemen. Even without us hearing the nomads’ direct speech, we feel that we have heard its echo, or that we heard their music and from it can infer their speech. At the same time, the poem pops with instances of delicious language packed with consonance, assonance, bursts of parsimonious iambs and trochees that suggest both the unpredictable wildness and the reliable stoicism of these horsemen. “The snap & slide of leather/strap on oiled saddle. Steel’s exit from a sheath” is a satisfying mouthful of deeply lyric language. It sounds exactly like what it is. Same with “taut spring on the sharp stroke.”
Beeder might seem in some poems to practice bricolage, which Claude Lévi-Strauss defines as making things out of whatever materials are at hand and in literary parlance, suggests an author using a wide range of sources. That is the feel given off by the work of many of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, such as Ron Silliman in “Revelator.”
Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’s mall lot
Summer’s theme: this year’s humid
—to sweat is to know—
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye:
There is a deliberately disjunctive and incongruous quality in Silliman’s composition, leaving us to trace how “ink as blood or pus” relates to the putative scene of “some far suburb’s mall lot.” In such poems, we are asked to puzzle things out. Beeder, on the other hand, offers absolute clarity of conception and execution in each of her poems. We are only asked to understand what the initial conceit or gambit is. We know she will assume many guises, grounded against the stability of a deadpan speaker who is half sincere, half ironic, and we know that no matter what the guise, restrained emotion lies pulsing behind the mask. Then we simply follow out each poem’s premise to its consequences.
The apotheosis of this approach, fittingly, is the final poem of Wax, “Leviathan,” that mighty sea serpent and eater of the damned in the Hebrew Bible. The Leviathan in this case is a diminished old man of the kind usually found in a nursing home. Right away, we understand that Beeder is going to play with that stock personage in an unexpected manner. She numbers each of her seventeen “verses” in biblical superscript, letting us know that she is drawing from Isaiah 27 or Job 42, chapters devoted to Leviathan, and her poetic style roughly simulates biblical language like that of the NIV. Except that Leviathan here is an achingly diminished man.
1 Can you coax him from his house after the worst fall
and keep him for weeks in a rehab?
2 Can you put him in a nursing home they now call
something else?
3 Will he sign those papers with a shaky hand but
nevertheless joke with the admissions director
so that she says he’s spunky?
Job 41 of the NIV begins:
1 Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
2 Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
3 Will it keep begging you for mercy?
Will it speak to you with gentle words?
This juxtaposition creates pathos in “Leviathan,” as well as a canny relation between speaker and hearer (us within our conflicted ethical being, addressed directly, being asked to decide the man’s fate). If this were simple parody, the old man would become a figure of mirth, a source of comedy and complaint, the focus on his terminal diminishment. But Beeder is too smart for that. By grounding this familiar scene of pending internment in the Bible, the focus falls on the former grandeur of the man, the implication that he was once “mighty.” He is not a total fool as he himself cajoles the director with his jokes into her calling him spunky (patronizing but better than the alternatives). He still has enough agency to deflect pity. And lurking behind is the original conception of Leviathan, who is powerful enough to destroy, yet who might choose to “speak to you with gentle words,” or, as the verses of Job unfold, might become your pet, like a bird, or a slave for life, or put on a leash “for the young women in your house.” These possibilities are negated with violence by the end of Isaiah 41, yet they are floated as a thought experiment, before Leviathan’s full terror is displayed to cow the mighty. At one and the same time, we are tracking the vast incongruity between Leviathan and a feeble old man, and experiencing that man as a being who once was filled with his own sense of power and autonomy in the world.
The pathos that follows in Beeder’s poem is sometimes flat-out comic, to be sure. Yet darkly and profoundly so.
8 Any hope of subduing him is false. Who can make him wear hearing aids?
9 Who can make him stick to his diet? Who can keep him from driving?
Having watched my own father go through this decline into death in a veteran’s home, and currently, among a team of siblings, living out the complexity of contemplating assisted living for our old and infirm mother as she rapidly declines, while bedeviling our attempts to care for her and keep her (and others such as drivers on the road) safe from harm, this poem takes on personal resonances for me, from caustic to poignant to tragic. Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey make this rare book command attention.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
