Jeffery Beam
Jeffery Beam’s more than twenty-five works include Verdant, The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, Visions of Dame Kind, The New Beautiful Tendons, Spectral Pegasus―with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, with artist Ippy Patterson, his multimedia collection What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems, and the critical anthology Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards. Troubadour: Collaborations & Inventions in Music 1971-2023 was published in conjunction with a Mallarmé Music concert, celebrating Beam’s seventieth birthday and the composers who have set his poems to music. Collaborations with visual artists, composers, and musicians, an important characteristic of his work, have taken him to Carnegie Hall, Italy, and Wales and to translations in Italian, Polish, Japanese, Slavic, and Russian. Photographer Catharine Carter and he are presently searching for a publisher for their children’s book, The Droods. In 2026 a draft beer was named in honor of his poem ENO Crow by Hillsborough’s Eno River Brewery. He is a retired botanical librarian, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Special Collections holds his archive. On his website, you can access poems, interviews, excerpts from reviews and other articles, as well Beyond the Green Door―an hour-long retrospective reading on YouTube. www.jefferybeam.com
Ten Things I Can’t Do Without
- Hummingbirds and crows at morning; hummingbirds and crows at dusk
- My husband, Stanley, and our kat-girls . . . also at morning at dusk, and all-the-times-in-between
- A dining room and table almost blinding with candles and flint glass, replete with my husband’s cooking, at which are gathered the best-chosen family ever. Although all friends can’t be there at once, the round continues.
- Flint glass goblets aglow with Aperol Spritzes, made right, served with figs, figs, figs
- My library
- Spiritual literature – past, present, and future . . . from here, there, and everywhere. For morning worship.
- The pursuit of beauty, and the husk that remains (William Carlos Williams). For constant worship.
- Singing songs; reciting poems. Mine and others. For breath; for eternal awakening.
- Garden moments: pungent plants framed by Spring bulbs, native columbine, wild blue phlox, Lady Banksia rose, chrysanthemum, Lycoris, and our moss yard. In rain; in sun.
- Mountains, For a mountain is something high and blue within oneself. (Pritchett)