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STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT
The poetry of James Beall
If
there were ever an ideal candidate for the
the 2018 William Meredith Award for Poetry,
James Beall is close to the top of the list.
First off, his new collection of poetry,
Onyx Moon is such an exquisite work, poems
from a master poet like Meredith, whose
classical background and artistic talent
combined with a scientist’s
curiosity and attention to the details of
the wide world match those of his friend
and colleague William Meredith. Wind, rain,
volcanoes, jungles, mountains, and always
stars weave their way through his poems,
and like Audubon he paints his subjects
with exactitude of color and precision of
detail.
A
working association with Meredith is not
a pre-requisite for awardees, but in Jim
Beall’s case, their history as colleagues
in the art makes an even stronger case for
this award which the William Meredith Foundation
is honored to present as the 2018 Award
for Poetry.
In
1978, Beall approached William at a poetry
reading at the Folger Library while Jim
was a Congressional Science Fellow at the
Office of Technology Assessment for the
U.S. Congress. As the US Poet Laureate,
the Library of Congress had approached
Meredith about putting together a symposium
on science and literature which led to an
invitation by Meredith to visit him in the
Poetry Office. Their collaboration led to
The Science and Literature Symposium in
1981, with Beall as co-moderator. The program
featured lectures by the the Nobel Laureate
in Chemistry, George Wald, O.B. Hardison
(then director of the Folger Library), Sir
Fred Hoyle, Gerry Pournelle, and Gene Roddenberry
of Star Trek fame, among many others.
Stars
shine brilliantly throughout Onyx Moon as
one would expect from a physicist. In his
poem, “The Fire on Magdalena Mountain,”
he recounts travel to the large array of
radio telescopes near Soccoro, New Mexico:
They
are like flowers tracking a dark sun.
Those distant instruments listen to the
sibilant
stars, stars that mimic no human speech.
It is a sound
similar to the wind blowing across old ruins,
a level just beneath hearing, that conjures
beyond our capacity to understand or comprehend.
But like the camouflage worked into the
coat of a stray buck
who crosses their path, “mottled with
the color of pine bark and
rock,” the poet intuits, “a sort
of randomness, a kind of plan.” One
thinks of the “bright watchers”
in Meredith’s poem, “Country Stars”
comforting the near-sighted child on a winter’s
eve, to have no fear,
or “only proper fear,” as elsewhere
in Beall’s poem, “Pavane,”
the
poet lassos the stars with similar lyric
beauty and ambiguity:
Then
will be silence and a beauty there
upon the snow: a thousand crystals drear
and cold, refracting pale light, the sun
late in the winter slant walking
its rainbow speckles upon a frozen sea
crafted by storm and left so we may wonder
at the wasted, dormant time, where yet
the cold night comes and with it
other wastes of stars.
James
Beall’s work is at first an enigma.
What to make of his challenging vision,
his unique voice, the round-about syntax,
his penchant for unfamiliar diction, his
seemingly schizophrenic take on the world.
For here is a poet blessed with double vision,
a man who sees the world with both brain
and heart, who is fully at home
in his bicameral mind, scientist and mystic
at once.
The
literary landscape is rife with physician
poets, of course. Poetry has long been linked
to medicine; in mythology, the Greek god
Apollo was responsible for, among other
things, both healing and poetry. Poets like
John Keats, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and
William Carlos Williams were all trained
as doctors. One thinks of the late poet,
Dannie Abse who wore both “white coat
and purple coat.”
But
fewer poets who are also physicists come
to mind unless one considers Einstein whose
theory or relativity reputedly came to him
in a dream, or the kinship between theology
and quantum physics found in the work of
John Polkinghorne who is both a
theoretical physicist and Anglican priest.
One thinks of the Jesuit scientist Teilhard
de Chardin who posits that even the very
rocks have a kind of living energy or “rayon”
which is accumulating into an omega point
from which mankind is about to make an
evolutionary leap. It is not an exaggeration
to find the same sort of philosophical insight
in Beall’s poetry.
Here
we see both the careful scientific method
of observation leading to a thesis as well
as the appreciation of synchronicity that
informs the reality of a Reike practitioner
or a shaman. The two chevrons, orange-red
on a blackbird’s wings at Gettysburg
mirror the late sun, the way the speeches
of Pericles or Lincoln help his imaginary
listeners understand a cause. In “Military
Intelligence,” soldiers digging a foxhole
“will make of his or her small space/
a home of sorts, as carefully in place/
as any nest or den the animals/ or insects
in their pantomime of thought,/ would take
as ease.” The
soldiers here imitate the creatures around
them as do the creatures imitating thought.
Often
in Beall’s poetry, a poem traces the
poet observing his own thought process like
a poem by of the late John Ashbury. But
in Beall’s case, the poem is more accessible,
more, frankly, “beautiful.” The
poetry constantly goes beyond the surface
with a kind of x-ray vision. He is as interested
in the shadows a moth creates, for example,
as the creature itself:
“The
sun swept on. The small window of shadow
opened out./ As if it knew, the moth shook
and shivered, warning/ the reedy center,
prepared to fly.” Walking the fields
of Gettysburg, the scientist “... lingers
to read the gentle lines the land/ makes,
caused somehow by the layers of rock/ below
these peaceful fields.”
In a short poem memorializing 911, “the
shiny pastures of his thought” could
not finally befriend nightmare. Only after
he describes the explosions with extraordinary
metaphor, “ the lesser suns/ began
to blossom and bloom, before falling into
darkness”
can
he afford the almost biblical summary at
the poem’s end: “Thus,
the Angel of Mercy, made Fury again.”
The final stanza of the final poem in the
collection, “The
Convergence of Meridians,” mirrors
the idealist philosophy of
Ekhardt Tolle in his remarkable book,The
Power of Now:
There is a moment when all the past
and future come together in the timeless
now,
a place with no part showing save the heart.
In
2015, astronauts and Star Trek actors performed
the Vulcan salute upon the death of Leonard
Nimoy. James Beall is no Pollyanna, but
Onyx Moon is also a kind of greeting and
blessing. As William Meredith writes in
his poem, The Cheer,“Words
addressing evil won’t turn evil back,
but they can give heart.” James Beall
too is one of the “bright watchers.”
Onyx Moon seems to say, as would Dr. Spock,
“dif-tor heh smusma,”: live long
and prosper.
Richard
Harteis
President, William Meredith Foundation
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