In Arcadia: poems by Craig Beaven. Number 20 in our Rane Arroyo Series.
[ cover: Jesse R. Lucas, In Arcadia ]
Publication: November 15, 2023 [100 copies]
41 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-07-5
$ 12.00
Craig Beaven is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You (Anhinga Press Poetry Prize). A scholar and fellow to the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, his work appears in Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Hollins Critic, and many other journals. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Methods of Grieving:
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
I would climb
all the dim stairwells
over to the old wing
of the library and sit high up
where no one was
in a little wooden booth
like a catholic confessional
and watch the new student center
slowly emerge in the gray
rain—you couldn’t hear
the construction
from up there.
And sometimes
I missed a floor
and found myself
in a different carrel
with different graffiti,
surprised, the unfamiliar
handiwork. Each day my task
was to get a little further
through The Complete Poems
of Emily Dickinson.
I did the math
and created a schedule.
I would take my pen
and trace the swears
carved in the wood—imagined
I could be one of those
who doesn’t care,
or who is so committed
to the word fuck
that I had to gouge it, crudely,
with a dorm key.
There are 1,775 poems
in the Dickinson. I read the bio
of the women who arranged
her work posthumously.
I read the true crime book
about the poems that were forged.
I kept reading. I thought
I could get smarter,
and that if I was smart—
it was a compulsion.
I didn’t cry at all during this time.
This was one method
of grieving.
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