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Larry Beckett's poetry ranges from brief lyrics and songs to blank sonnets and 100-page narrative works. Out of the traditions of the language, he invents bold forms appropriate to his subjects. His long poems are part of a sequence called American Cycle, inspired by our folklore and past. In Songs and Sonnets, published by Rainy Day Women Press, his sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity. His translations of the T'ang dynasty Chinese poet Li Po are rendered in contemporary American images; those of Li Shang-yin are more private and mysterious. The Way of Rain, guided by Chinese scholarship, is a reconstruction of the lost order of the Tao Te Ching; The Logos recovers the lost scroll of Heraclitus. His translation of Goethe's late cycle East-West Divan is only the fourth complete translation into English. The Classics is a new canon of world literature, with essays on its craft. Beat Poetry, published by Beatdom Books, is on the lights of the San Francisco Renaissance, reconsidered as literature. He thinks of his poems as texts for performance, and they have been recorded.
""This magnum opus of poetry."" —Kirkus Review ""Larry Beckett’s new big book of poetry, American Cycle, takes readers into the past and rewrites our national epic for the twenty-first century."" —Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation ""This is a 700-page epic evoking, invoking, claiming, declaiming, reclaiming American heroes, mythical and mystical, constructed and reconstructed."" —Simon Warner, author of Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture; co-editor of Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack
