Sign, Wyoming; hook up north to the Tetons,
and cross into the Hole: they call it lonesome,
where the dirt’s smoking, this country, under
the summer ice, the cuts jammed with reeds:
face mountains naked of meaning now, like
that lost paradise? ah no, it’s even farther,
her face I’d loved, strange, in this abandon
go on desiring: rain’s thick, and the last light
shining through Shoshone woods: so sing,
what else, in this inhuman beauty, inside,
to an old air, not fire, but failure, there, on
the highway behind, back water: outskirts
of Cody, this actual cowboy, in his whiskey:
—You sad? You ought to get up in my eyes.

Larry Beckett’s poetry has been published in Zyzzyva, Field, Salamander, the anthology Portland Lights from Nine Lights Press, and his first book, Songs and Sonnets from Rainy Day Women Press, was favorably reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Beat Poetry, a study of the San Francisco renaissance, was put out by Beatdom Books. Three book-length poems have been published, Paul Bunyan, by Smokestack Books, Wyatt Earp, by Alternating Current Press, and Amelia Earhart, by Finishing Line Press. These texts were collected, with seven others, as an epic, American Cycle, published by Running Wild Press. The Book of Merlin, a translation, is out from Livingston Press, and Song to the Siren is forthcoming from Halbaffe Press. His work has been commended by Jonah Raskin, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer, Tom Clark, Ann Charters, Paul Wilner, David Young, and U.S. Poet Laureates William Meredith, W. S. Merwin and Charles Wright.