Joshua Beckman is a poet, translator and editor. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Animal Days (Wave Books, 2021).
“Lost in the flux of sensation, we discover, in pain’s heat, that the body is more than we thought, more than we can say.”
Written by Nate Rosenfield
How fragile is the word “human”? In Joshua Beckman’s new collection, Animal Days , it appears more vulnerable than we would like to admit. Animal Days, published this year by Wave Books, breaks down the syntax through which we compose ourselves as creatures set apart. Branching distinctions, recited by habit, between subject and object, human and inhuman, are all scraped and shorn away from the text, allowing us to reach into the darkness beneath words and encounter a strangeness buried deep in our bodies. Porous, silent, damp—a movement barely sensed: the parts of life from which we’d normally recoil enter our awareness, like the pulse rushing in our wrist—a foreign feeling, always present, but suddenly recognized. Winding along the roots of our grammar like a speckled rot, Beckman’s poems moisten and decay our assumptions, revealing what we are when we are no longer ourselves.
“It Seemed Too Much,” the first of the collection’s five parts, depicts the language we struggle to form when we attempt to describe our pain. Broken lines stumble along the page like the phrases we find emerging from our mouths when a doctor asks us what seems to be the problem. A pulling, a spasming, something tight—we point and grope like children for the simplest words, as pain radiates awareness through parts of ourselves we normally can’t sense (a tendon slipping around bone or an aching muscle torn and taut). The body itself feels suddenly unfamiliar, as if it were something separate from us, outside of our control. From the first pages of Animal Days, we’re gripped by the spasm of the unknown movements within us: “it seemed / too much / —the / clacking + / griping, the going / back + forth / it’s not him / nor is it anything / else—”... “the pursing / and bursting / of cells / blood / in the skin / in the face / blood exploding / inside us / like that” (3) … “curt stones / stomach pain / body pain—cell / + task” (4). The subject of Beckman’s lines has vanished. Verbs are nouns. All there is, and all we are, is movement—a sensing, a coursing, a straining. A terror rushes through these lines infused simultaneously with a strange sense of release. Lost in the flux of sensation, we discover, in pain’s heat, that the body is more than we thought, more than we can say.
Possibilities emerge as Beckman’s syntax blurs the distinction between ourselves and the movements within us. If a tremor in the muscle is in fact our life, then what of the breeze grazing against the skin? In Animal Days, the line we draw between ourselves and the world begins to ripple, as our awareness grows of the movements within and beyond our bodies, like in the following lines: “Dog / children / splashing the air / in their mouths / spitting grotesque sounds” (5). This image of fitful play transforms language itself into merely a movement of particles in the mouth. The feeling of the air as it carries the voice becomes our way of sensing the world, rather than knowing it; words are just part of what flies out of us with the spittle. Beckman makes our relationship with language physical to allow us to see the cries of children and dogs mingle in the breeze. This is no metaphoric fantasy of a communion with nature. It’s an encounter with the boundary where the inhuman, the vulgar, the “grotesque,” rub against us. We resist crossing this boundary by instinct, recoiling in disgust without a thought. Dirt is dirty. Spit is filth. What more is there to say? Animal Days reveals how our humanity is fabricated through these instinctive forms of avoidance. It shows us that flowing beyond the boundaries of the human there is a power we cannot control or resist, which must simply be ignored; to do otherwise would mean to destroy the illusions that preserve us, to go against our nature.
Beckman allows inhuman perceptions to seize hold of the innermost parts of his being—his body, and even the poetry he has given his life to produce. He compares his desire for song to a bird’s, and allows this metaphoric merging to erode the distance between himself and the creature he observes: “The bird’s whoo / on its pallet / of rock / ended / I too am singing / awkwardly to myself / is it fear? / they are always saying it is fear / but I suspect a kind of / dumbness lapping and growling / insensitively within me / caused it first myself / then now responding to / its empty echo / I carry on with a thud / a thud thud / a thud thud thud / a thud thud thud / a thud thud thud” (85-86). As the image unfolds, beauty is washed away from speech. A name or reason for song has been pulled into the current. Purpose becomes urge, word becomes sound, as the rushing movement of life strips away the constant swarm of thoughts that protect our humanity from the sheer, irreducible flow of now. Human song becomes another sound in the air, a “thud thud thud” resounding to resound, like a heart, pulsing to pulse. When we allow ourselves to see the world with inhuman eyes, our justifications crumble like mud as it dries, and the shape of our lives begins to change: “A radiant glimmer / I once saw in eye / I once felt in tongue / how stupid wet and soft / they’re seeming now / candid is the flesh / and strange the jaw / its masticating of everything / how silly its vigilance seems / as the beetle crossses / back and forth” (91).
After Animal Days peels back the boundaries that define the human, it probes beneath them, searching painfully for a cause. The second part of the collection, “Little Prickly Coming of Storm” opens with an elegantly drawn image of an egret feeding: “as it pokes / into the fleshy / fish with its / beak and has it / speared there / then / throws back / its head / so the creature / goes perfectly / vertically up / and in a straight line / comes all the way / back down / right into / its mouth” (11-12). A group of hikers walks “through the bushes / wearing hats'' gathering to watch this strange sight, when a thought passes over the crowd: “but just consider / the living creature / who does something / like that / the terrible / crushing of bones / and eating” (12). Beckman reveals a latent instinct beneath this commonplace reaction by comparing the egret’s feasting to a childhood memory of a fishing trip, in which the poet suddenly finds himself to be the one removing a fish from water and mangling its flesh: “I, myself / earliest / and first / displaces into a / satchel-shaped / silhouette / or two fish / bumping chest— / and everyone thought, / smiling / Second / same thing / and so on / weightless / obliviation / of it never / ending” (13). The subject “I” is cut away from the verb “displaces” by its improper conjugation. An unseen “he” is falsely implied, who we are forced to imagine carrying out the act (for “I” could never do such a thing). The grammatical incoherence of the lines bears the mark of an experience torn violently away from memory through denial. Even the verb choice obscures the true relationship between the subject and the real action taking place. What is ‘displaced’ here and what does it mean to ‘displace’ it? The verb itself, muffled and squirming, silently prods at what is truly going on. These ‘errors’ are meant to keep the killing quiet, tossed quickly out of sight like the body of the fish thrown into the “satchel-shaped silhouette.” The only clear image is the “bumping chest”—movement which seems to have been too shocking to forget—and the presence of the “smiling” others, whose willful obviousness seems to enforce the all too human need to abandon to “weightless obliviation” the thought wedged in this intimate act of crushing and chewing and swallowing. A kernel of it stabs at us constantly, despite our endless attempts to ignore it. In this image, Beckman illustrates that our humanity is formed through our endless struggle to resist an essential foundation of all life: that we are sustained by the deaths of others, and that to live means to partake in the same gnawing movement that will destroy us. Animal Days shows us that our elaborate linguistic acts of self preservation will always fail to protect us from this inevitable truth. Like a hard seed-casing meant to break into the soil, our human life might seem to be the world that holds us, but it too will someday crack and fall away.
Joshua Beckman has crafted a poetics to uproot deceptions deeply embedded in our concept of the human. Covid-19 and the global threat of climate change have forced us to encounter how dangerous these deceptions have become. The integrity of the self and the body, the distinction between the human and the inhuman, and the separation of life and death have been pressed to a breaking point. Animal Days shows us what it’s like when these assumptions snap, and new forms of understanding are allowed to take root. All of us are now involved in the task of nurturing cultures capable of sustaining life on earth. The most basic parts of daily experience, from walking past a stranger on the street to ordering a meal at a restaurant, now require us to reimagine our connections to the life forms circulating all around us. It’s an overwhelming task often fraught with confusion and paranoia, and it’s difficult for the poets guiding our language through such a crisis to avoid the rationalizations most of us can’t help but indulge in despair. Irony, hyperbole, fantasy and nihilism are not hard to come by when browsing the shelves for new collections.
Joshua Beckman’s Animal Days provides a powerful example of how poetry can help us re-envision our relationship to the world amid disruption and catastrophe. Rather than elaborating on our inability to even recognize the world beyond the human, Beckman plunges into the darkness within our bodies to rediscover the intimacy of the life we’ve alienated. Animal Days challenges the notion that language is what separates humanity from other forms of life. By spawning a new kind of grammatical tissue, Beckman’s collection scabs over and rejoins the vital growth we’ve torn away from ourselves. With all the pus and pain and swelling of a creature in the process of its remaking, this book will heal you if you give it time to grow.