Jeffrey Beam is the author of seventeen works of poetry including Midwinter Fires (French Broad) and Visions Of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), and a spoken word audio collection, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977 - 2001. His The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems, 1977 - 2001 is forthcoming (Off the Cuff Books).
I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, “That’s too much nonsense,” but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry.
Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.
enough of this scrambled leg fest
here in the west we crispen taste until
the pizzicato version post-conflatio
has been dandled all that anymood can take
and lightning spokes its way in-
to an azurely electrolytic sky
chopped into well-made slipknots
feigning piecemeal overthrow
of my setaside for you and your
yearned fever at a glance
resembling every wiki pediatric tip tone
modest in its sugary neuralgia