One: Physician to Poet

Interviewing Selves: Are you at your home in Barnet this morning? 

Robert Beckhardt: I'm talking to you from my cozy little room in my wonderful little house in Barnet up in the Northeast Kingdom, which is the most rural and backward part of Vermont—the infrared parts of the state.

IS: Interesting. Do you find that the political makeup of where you live affects your your work or your creativity in any way? 

RB: Not in the slightest. I insulate myself mentally from politics. Everybody up here doesn't talk politics very much. And I don't either.

IS: As a poet and a creator, you have a really interesting story. What is so interesting about it is how it's changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Back in 2017, you were writing and creating poetry — phoetry, as you call it. And yet, it's only within the last five years that your work has really exploded. You've been published in multiple journals. What has it been like moving from out of the spotlight into the public eye?

RB: The pandemic, a monumental event in the world's history, made everybody at least initially much more reclusive. As someone who's a retired physician, I kept up with the science, which has continued to keep me weary.To keep busy, I started to join meetups that were conducted on Zoom. The first was one with Green Mountain Writers. I became a regular that attended the open genre group that met on Friday mornings. You can submit any kind of writing and I started to submit my “phoems.” 

After I retired, I started to read more and more poetry and began to really enjoy two particular poets: John Ashbury, who continued his prolific output till his death, and James Tate, who had a great sense of humor. He's also deceased. Both of them are Pulitzer and National Book Award winners. Ashbury is renowned for density, obscurity, and frustrating his readers, but there are some critics who have been able to pierce that obscurity. I just love his use of words. I liked reading newspapers and magazine articles, and when I found something I liked, I would snip it out with my X-acto knife. My first collection which was published as a series of poems is called “Karma Coroner.” 

IS: Yes, I've read that.

RB: It’s about very peculiar ways in which people met their end.

IS: Of all the things that you've published, I think that initial work is really one of the finest.

RB: It is and it captures what my essence is.

IS: Once you started to see your work in the public eye, did it impact your work or your sense of self?

RB: [In the early days] my work got the sort of reaction I would expect. Perhaps the best example was someone who said: “This sounds as though it ought to make sense.” That struck me as very accurate, and it gave me some motivation to continue. There were some people who “got it”, so to speak, which is that they took my advice to not look too hard for meaning and enjoyed it! Which was all I was looking for - for people to enjoy it—to get what they could. 

I kept exploring poetry more and immersively reading about it and I gradually just gained willingness. Even though now I identify as a poet, I was a physician for 35 years. My identity was really fixed as a physician. So calling myself a poet felt alien. I was a poet with a small “p” so to speak. I was a dabbler. But the writing group experiences led me to conclude that I ought to open it to as wide an audience as possible. 

I made the step from the Green Mountain Writers, which is a relatively small group to the Burlington Writers Workshop’s poetry group. They’re specifically devoted to poetry. Joining the Burlington Writers Workshop felt like moving into the big leagues. There were full time poets. I got critical feedback that told me I ought to make my work available more widely. My wife was very instrumental in pushing me. I think I was lazy. So when I was willing to submit work, I suddenly found that there were people who found it worth publishing. 

Once you get published, and you're through the door, and you're part of the larger poetry community, then you’re getting published in Poetry Magazine, which has been around for over 100 years. That's almost as big a deal as the New Yorker.

IS: Many poets I’ve interviewed say that, once they were published in Poetry Magazine, it opened doors for them. Was that your experience?

RB: Yes, because they include new poets. At the end of every issue they list all the poets who are included, and asterisk the people who have made it into the magazine for the first time. They also do a lot of graphic stuff as a portion of each issue. So people whose poetry lends itself to more graphic representation can be included.

IS: Which makes so much sense as to why they were interested in your work.

RB: Yeah. The thing is, when I would work in the workshops, I would show people the “phoem”, the picture, but some of this stuff was hard to read so I also typed it up as a translation. Really the biggest part of the work is that I run it through Photoshop, so you can see the letters much more clearly; it becomes more legible and readable and still has all the other evidence that all the words are from elsewhere, and that the only thing that is mine is the context.

The two issues that I think are important are context and intent. The context here is that it's from elsewhere. The intent is to underline the notion that all the words ever thought up and in dictionaries have been used hundreds, thousands, millions of times, and yet, people still combine them in ways that are novel. But what you see with most published work is a clean page with words on it. You don’t see —unless the poet dies and some university gets his notes— you don't see any of the effort that went into it. My pieces leave a sufficient amount of grunge and grit on the page. Plus, you see clearly the outlines of the pieces that underline the notion that all poets are thieves. All writers are thieves.

IS: All creators, really.

RB: All creators are thieves. They appropriate. I thought at one point of keeping track of a specific set of clips with a bibliography, but it's too complicated. I do have a webpage devoted to those writers who think they've identified where I got a particular couple of words. And if in fact, it's accurate, and it's big enough, it would be given a citation.

IS: I get that.

RB: So that's been gratifying to me. I feel more secure in my waning years being somebody who could be legitimately called a poet. William Carlos Williams was a doctor and a poet and was well regarded historically. Then there's Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive his whole life. But he wrote poetry that was obscure, dense, impossible to render much traditional meaning from, and he's well regarded, too.

IS: And those people serve, I feel, not just poets, but all creators. It serves creators to see what it looks like to powerfully inhabit multiple identities, which in modern American society, isn’t really modeled for us. So I see your move from only physician to physician/poet really as an act of courage on behalf of yourself, but also modeling that for other people who seek to inhabit multiple identities.

RB: What made it easier for me was that I had a large retirement that came to me because of an illness and I needed to give up my career. So I had plenty of time, space, and silence: the true luxuries in modern life. Unlike Stevens and Williams, I didn't have to do it simultaneously. I dabbled simultaneously but I was very absorbed in my career, raising my family, and other kinds of activities, so I never really gave poetry the devotion it needed. 

It's a lot of work, and that's one reason why I've never been able to find anyone who does it exactly the way I do. There are approximations. Perhaps the most famous is William Burroughs, who started doing what was called “The Cut-Up Machine” in the 50s. People have done various cut and paste things, there's blackout poetry, etc. But nobody's ever really put together in a grammatically and syntactically correct form, something that ought to make sense. But you need a mind shift to get sense from it.

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Two: Writing Without Trying To Become Something

IS: Any time a unique form of art is birthed into the world and catches fire, I believe that society had an empty space that was waiting for it. Can you speak to culturally, either in a broad sense, or within the poetry community, what you felt was missing, that allowed your work to rush into that void?

RB: More and more poetry has become a place for novelty and experimentation. Almost any new idea finds some place. There are a lot of people who claim to publish poetic photography or photographic poetry, but it's just a picture that people think is poetic. So, I felt an unexplored place was to underline the fact that people needed a more in-depth understanding of how all art has been built on what came before. No art form is out of the blue. Each art form has its legacy, its traditions, its ancestry. I felt that emphasizing that gave me a context that hadn't been fully explored.

IS: Yes. The glue that you might see or the edges of the cutout pieces in your phoems really stand as a reminder of how well trodden language and words really are. Every time a poet types up fresh words on a fresh of piece of paper, there is an implied newness to it. But your objective is really to show how we use language over and over again. That comes through in that patina of “grime and grit.” It serves as a visual reminder of that. 

RB: It comes back to context and intent. That’s part of the intent, other than to have people find pleasure in whatever can be found. So the context is what might be called “language poetry”, which was a term for a movement in the 1960s and 1970s. But the intent was to underline artistry’s legacy, an homage to all the places anonymous and otherwise that creative pursuits build on, whether it's poetry or photography, or sculpture or whatever.

IS: Poetry is at its heart a solitary endeavor. You're plumbing the depths. You’re spending time with all these cut out pieces. And yet, when you’ve talked about your meteoric rise over the last five years, you have cited your wife, the Burlington Writers Group; you've cited many sources of encouragement. Can you speak to that balance between solitary pursuits and connecting with people that push you towards your next phase?

RB: Well, I would get feedback in various ways, whether it's formal, critical feedback, that appears as a book review in a magazine, or otherwise. It was a communication with other writers, people who wrote to me and I would write back. It was those things that connected me and validated me.

IS: That’s interesting. So it was individual relationships with other poets that you feel emboldened you to move your work to the spotlight?

RB: Well, one thing I don't do is public readings. Because I really feel that it's necessary for people to truly immerse themselves with frequent repetitive readings to get something out of my work. I encourage people to read it many times. Read it to somebody else. Have somebody read it to you. Read it out loud. Record yourself reading and and listen to it, because there'd be too much flummoxed consternation in just reading it. 

I would read it to people in my groups online, but in all cases, the phoems were sent well before the meeting, so people had a chance to immerse themselves to some degree. When I opened it for critiques, people said it changed the way they thought about it. But reading cold to an audience? I've never crossed that tier. I just feel it would be too confusing. Though, never say never.

IS: I think things really shifted for you in that initial publication; you had three pieces that were in the Southern Review. That was sort of a seismic shift. Did fellow poets within your community treat you differently after that work was released?

RB: Well, your initial publications change the world for you tremendously. If you've been willing to put yourself out there, and the world says, “Okay, we're gonna advertise you,” you achieve a modicum of celebrity.

IS: Which you have at this point.

RB: Yeah. But I'm still one of those people who would be described as reclusive. I don't do a lot of these interviews. I don't do public readings. I don’t teach classes because I don’t think I know enough about this. I'm content to continue my workshops. 

One of my earliest published volumes was “The Poems That Write Themselves.” That’s the way I think about it. I don't set out to write about something. I find a few opening words that make sense to me. I think the opening and the closing of a piece, like a short story, has a particular need for punchiness. First you want to pull people in, maintain their attention, and then at the end you want to leave them with something that echoes, something they'll return to. 

IS: There's a certain amount of humility that I hear guiding your work. You said you wouldn't want to teach workshops because you don’t know enough. You said you don't set out to write about something, you let the words guide you. That’s an interesting way of being as a creator. It's more in tune with the universal flow of not knowing, of uncertainty, and pushing ahead as a creator, as a poet, without having too much control. Do you think that humility and a trust in the cosmos guides you and your work?

RB: I hesitate to compare some of what I do to well known artists, but sometimes the comparison demonstrates a particular point. I don't think Jackson Pollock really set out with a particular idea. He set out in a similar way: “Oh, here's a niche! Action painting! That hasn't been explored. And I'm going to explore it!” If you look at his stuff, there is some patterning that you see in the way he threw paint, but he didn't know how it was going to turn out. 

IS: One of the main obstacles that creators face is when their work feels truly new and unique, being that humans really like patterns and familiarity. It can be off putting. What I think is interesting about your work is that you stuck with it enough, like Jackson Pollock did, to get past that initial hump of suspicion—to bring people into this new idea. I think that is admirable and stands as an example for anybody that's pushing new or different work into the world. 

With you and Pollack, I see the humility piece as related to the ancient Greek definition of the word “genius”, in that genius did not lie within the creator. The person channeled genius. They let things come through them. 

RB: I think one of the things that helped me a great deal is that I didn't set out to become a poet. Whereas many young writers desperately want to be seen. I've talked to some who talk about how they keep track of how many submissions they've made to various magazines or other platforms. They have spreadsheets to keep track of dates and contests and all kinds of stuff. None of that was what I started out with. What I started out with was the pleasure, personally, with what I produced. It felt clever. It felt humorous. It felt original. It felt good! That was long before anybody else even took the time to see it. I would read it to my wife. And she'd say: I like that. But beyond that, there wasn't anything that involved the world. Whereas a lot of people try to get into the world, before they’ve got stuff. That's a problem for a lot of artists: they don't like that word “artist,” because it sort of shouts, “I did that!” That self-doubting part of yourself can really get in the way.

IS: Yes. In interviewing artists over the years, they often speak to this idea that they are creating for themselves, and the rest of the world happens to enjoy it. They share it and yet, at the base of it, like you said, it feels good to them, which really is what life's all about. 

You mentioned these young poets tracking things meticulously, and that that was not not your route. It makes me wonder what advice you would have for a new poet?

RB: Well, every decent bulk of advice about writing, period, says, you have to keep doing it. Some go so far as to say: you must do it every day. You must do it first thing in the morning, while you can still get in touch with dream material. I don't know that I would be that strict. I would say you have to keep at it. Keep at it. Because that muscle in your brain is like a muscle, any muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it is. 

I would say don't wait as long as I did. Joining a group is good for any artist now that the internet has really matured and there are these ways to connect. Joining a group, not having to travel, and having people from all over the world perhaps be part of the group really enriches the experience and can kickstart your efforts and get you to produce material. So that's the biggest advice I’d give.

Read as much as you can. Always be reading something. I have books on my phone that, when I'm mowing the lawn, I can listen to the book. Reading a lot; having what's called a “rage for words,” helps.

Use a thesaurus all the time. If there’s anything I would say that people don't do enough, it’s that they don't take advantage of exploring variations for saying what they want to say. Always use a thesaurus. Look up obscure words. Read dictionaries. Collect books that have lists. Cultivate that rage for words.

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Three: Obstacles Have No Loyalty

IS: I have always seen your poetry as a meditation on and a celebration of language, and less as a deep exploration of self. Is this true for you? Do you look at your poetry as a way of either consciously or unconsciously exploring things within yourself or is it more a celebration of language?

RB: Well, it's certainly a celebration of language. You could say that it's kind of impersonal. It’s certainly not confessional. But if you read enough of it, there are themes that emerge. I write about their political things. I often use characters to portray something rather than putting it into more words. So people like Robert Mitchum, or Brad Pitt or God will appear, but not necessarily to be themselves but more to afford the reader a marker, a signifier for an idea. 

In that sense, I guess everybody is to some extent exploring their unconscious more than their conscious. Some people very self-consciously use “I.” For me, and I learned this from John Ashbury, the use of various pronouns makes it impersonal. 

IS: I believe all of us who are creators are working through things that happened to us early in our lives. Can you tell me about how any of your early life or family life impacted your work?

RB: My sister is an artist. Has been from a very early age, is extremely gifted. I kind of envy that. Even though I decided very early on my career path, too. We both succeeded. So that, I think, may have contributed. Both my parents had creative pursuits. My father wrote music and played music. My mother was a gardener and cook and tailor. So there's a background of looking for stuff that fits a pattern in a way that's appealing. Jobs I had gave me a lust for looking at things and looking for patterns. Words were not big. I'm not somebody who wrote a lot when I was younger. 

My sister from the instant she started drawing, produced stuff that was outstanding. So, I kind of got the feeling that artists and creative people were born that way. It wasn't something that just anybody could do. So I felt that I wasn't one of those people. Until when I was a junior in high school, I had an English teacher, Mrs. Green, who made it a point that anybody who wants to write can write. And that always stuck with me. I didn't do a whole bunch with it. But it changed me from that genetic view to a view that: Hey, it's like exercise. Anybody can do it, you just have to do it. Took a long time to do it, to find a way to do it that felt right. When I try to write from my head it feels like old sushi on cardboard in a dumpster. It stinks. I just can't do it. Some people can. This method removes that stink.

IS: I love hearing about that trajectory. So many artists, creators, poets have a pivotal person in their life that explodes a constrained view of what is possible. I think the poetry world at large is very thankful for Mrs. Green at this moment.

RB: In later years, I think I encapsulated it in a phrase. It's as if I always believed that obstacles were loyal to some limiting entity. But now I believe that obstacles have no loyalty.

IS: You have said before that quantum physics factors into your work in a fairly sizable way. Can you point to a particular phoem where this is present and can you also speak more broadly to this influence?

RB: It's there in every phoem. It’s the notion that a big shift occurred in the 20th century. Isaac Newton had the genius to discover laws of physics in the macro world that reigned supreme, unchallenged for three or four centuries. What quantum mechanics did in the 20th century, was open up the micro world in a way that hadn't been done, which has proven extremely successful in explaining an awful lot. The biggest shift in a general sense was from a way of looking at the world that was fixed by rules. The outcomes were A to B to C to D period. Quantum mechanics depends heavily on probability. 

There's nothing certain. I like the idea that what comes to me comes by chance. It’s aleatory: happening by chance. I like the word, aphoria, which is an ancient rhetorical philosophical term for doubt and things related to doubt.  I like the phrase, “the utility of doubt.” The Surrealists often depended on chance, but in a very random way. They would cut up words, put them in a bag, pull out one word after another, and lay them out in the order that they were pulled out. That was their response to chance. 

I rely on chance to come across things I might cut out. I rely on chance as I flip through all my collections of cut-outs. But putting pieces together is not by chance. The more pieces I have, the more probability there is that I will find things that connect. Sometimes I'll get into a piece and I'll keep finding things that fit easily. Sometimes I'll get four or five lines and then it stalls for years, until I suddenly am writing something else and say to myself: “You know what, there's a line from this little fragment. I'm gonna take it and break this up.” I’ll forget about what I was doing there, and use it somewhere else. 

Chance and luck and things related to probability play a big part in my work. It's very interesting that when you look at things at the micro level and then start to move up towards the macro level, that boundary where things no longer connect is not all that clear. Because ultimately, everything in the macro world is dependent on the probabilities, not the finalities and predictabilities. It has a lot to do with the notion of the butterfly effect, so to speak, which says that initial conditions within any system have a lot to do with what happens in that system, however far away you move. So that's why the initial conditions may include a butterfly results in some piece of a hurricane.

IS: I have one final question for you. It's more on a personal note. I heard you recently became a grandfather of twins. So you've stepped into another identity there as well. Physician to poet. Poet to grandfather. What has it been like to step into the identity of grandfather? Has it impacted your creative process or output at all?

RB: Well, to use a metaphor of medicine, the identity was in the waiting room for quite a while.

IS: I see. 

RB: It sort of was like becoming a parent. Because I knew from however far back, I can remember that I was going to be a parent. Some way or another, I was going to be a parent.  I went from a very self-conscious teenager believing at one point  “Who's ever going to marry me?” to being sure that I would get married and have a family. I just knew it was gonna happen. And it almost didn't happen. But “almost” doesn't count. There's no part way. It happens, or it doesn't.

IS: It’s so interesting that for you, there were certain identities that were rooted —they were waiting in the wings— whereas your identity as a poet didn't quite feel as rooted, but was one that you had to capture and practice in order to eventually ensnare?

RB: Yes. It wasn't ever something I gave much thought to, as this person in the waiting room. This person was out there. I often thought about this, as a physician that on any given day, things were happening to certain people who are gonna eventually show up. It might be tomorrow, and it might be three years from now. But they were making their way slowly and surely, by a whole series of unpredictable events. To me, it was fate, so to speak. But it also had a lot to do with chance. But being a Poet—that was never as clear cut. It is somewhere that I can't see where the roots go.

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