The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks

By Joshua Beckman Description Reviews During 2014, Wave Books editor Joshua Beckman traveled around the country giving lectures on poetry. Collected here as two books in conversation—and inaugurating Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series publications—these talks provide a rare and unique insight into a deeply literary life. In The Lives of the Poems, Beckman offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment, a sort of echolocating—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books. Beckman traces the development of his ideas, many accompanied by images of long-hand edits, and gives his audience not only insight into making a poem, but the hope that they, too, can make a poem.Valerie Wieland, NewPages Beckman’s talks and poetry are based on what he perceives spontaneously in things when they are encountered in the momen