This is the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 50s, reconsidered as literature: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s lyrical cityscapes, Jack Kerouac’s blues and haikus, Allen Ginsberg’s saxophone prophecies, Gregory Corso’s obsessive odes, John Wieners’ true confessions, Michael McClure’s physical hymns, Philip Lamantia’s surreal passions, Gary Snyder’s work songs, Philip Whalen’s loose sutras, Lew Welch’s hermit visions, David Meltzer’s improvisations and discoveries, and Bob Kaufman’s jazz meditations. 
 Scholarship dances with poetic intuition and insight. Skip the footnotes, or not. Larry Beckett generates where it's at, cats. —Dan Barth, poet and Beat scholar, author of Fast Women Beautiful: Zen, Beat, Baseball Poems 
 I was genuinely knocked-out by [this] book. A generous &amp; insightful work on poets writ w/ a poet's mindful heart. Because of its timeline, I assume (&amp; hope) there will be more. It would seem immodest for me to blast a blurb, but my enthusiasm is genuine &amp; immediate. —David Meltzer 
 Larry Beckett's vivid, highly readable testament to the Beats provides a useful introduction to this wild-side school-out-of-school of American poetry, identifying the movement's twentieth century "oral scripture" (to quote his essay on Philip Whalen) as enduring Gospel for the Millennium. — Tom Clark poet, author of Jack Kerouac: A Biography 
 Oh sure, it's all these poems by poets whose names sing in our blood as the heart pumps; but it took Larry Beckett to marry ink to paper in such a way that it appears the words are written on wedding sheets. — Robin Rule poet, publisher of Beckett's Songs and Sonnets 
 "4.5 out of 5 stars... an intriguing exploration of the history of Beats and their poetry." - Portland Book Review

Beat Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Beckett, Larry

United States

Beatdom Books

Amelia Earhart

Poetry

Finishing Line Press

Larry Beckett’s long-awaited first book, Songs and Sonnets, was written over a 26-year period. His blank verse sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity. The man speaking and the woman addressed are the same, but the time and place keep mysteriously shifting. The whole sonnet tradition, from Petrarch and Wyatt to Montale and Lowell, was influential. These poems use strands of iterative imagery, as developed by Shakespeare, to make diffused metaphors. The hardbound edition contains a CD of a live performance, which premiered the first thirty-two sonnets.

Songs and Sonnets

Rainy Day Women Press

Wyatt Earp is more than a legend; he's the embodiment of the American Wild West. It's easy to reduce a man of such stature to mere stereotypes and iconoclasm, to leave out the women who inspired him, or to rely on the slander of those he defeated; but forgoing the myths, wordsmith Larry Beckett skirts the overwrought icon and gives us instead the aches, loves, and morals of the flesh-and-blood human. This poetic narrative follows the famed lawman and his historic posse through the streets of Tombstone, in a natural five-act tragedy: the western zone, rise of the outlaws and hero, the showdown, fall of the outlaws and hero, the vendetta ride. In striking prose poetry that makes use of Earp's own words, Beckett has mined newspapers, from Tombstone's Epitaph to the San Francisco Examiner, Earp's written testimonies, and biographer interviews to get to the humanity behind the folklore. Wyatt Earp was a man of his word, committed to the law, who faced his father, armed mobs, assassins, and, as his companion Doc Holliday says: he walked right in. But he also believed in peace and did all he could to avoid violence. Antithesis makes myths of American men, and as his friend Bat Masterson says: the story of Wyatt Earp is the story of the West.

Wyatt Earp

Alternating Current

American Cycle

Running Wild Press

American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " --Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist.American Cycle holds Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . ."

American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " —Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist.American Cycle holds Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . .”

Ten long poems that try to do for America what Shakespeare did for England: turn history and legend into poetry. American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " --Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Its styles are connected to our speech: Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . ."

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Beckett, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Beckett, Larry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Beckett, Larry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Beat Poetry

Amelia Earhart

Songs and Sonnets

Songs and Sonnets

Wyatt Earp

American Cycle

American Cycle

American Cycle

American Cycle

American Cycle