Joel Peckham – författare

Selected from six collections and over two decades of poems beginning with the promise of Nightwalking and carrying through to the award-winning Bone Music, Joel Peckham’s Any Moonwalker Can Tell You draws from the best of a maximalist, gritty body of work that manages to balance page and stage. Intense and accessible, these poems channel the cosmic, longlined, and loose-limbed expansiveness of Whitman and the sonic, image-driven experimentation of Kinnell. Though this is a Selected Poems, there is thematic unity—a focus on how the personal and the collective intersect, how acts of empathy can access the ecstatic, and how music has the capacity to transform despair into hope. Beginning with the poet walking at night through a midwestern town and ending among the stars in a sequence of new poems that completes the collection, there is an upward and outward trajectory. Of Peckham’s collection, The Heat of What Comes, composed in the aftermath of an accident that took lives of his wife, Susan, and his oldest son, Cyrus, Jack Ridl once wrote that “Joel Peckham has written a survival guide to America” in which the reader is “hurled through the culture’s plurality of attacks on the heart. His grief is searing. He leads us through.” Taken as a whole, this New and Selected Poems is a testament to the poet’s recognition that survival is not enough, we must find a way to keep living, keep making music even after the record has stopped spinning: “the song having ended but not the hurried beating of the heart.”

Joel Peckham's Bone Music does many things so well:  it invokes the blue tones and rhythms of Charlie Parker, and the improvisations suggested by 'Prologue' move the music and rhythms, 'layering one upon another,' throughout the book.  But, the poet is the musician, the horn blower, who must ever be 'Waiting.  Wondering where the next beat would come, if it would come . . . a pulse, a roll to bring him back into the song completely new.'  This sets the stage for the concert of prose poems that follow, and in Bone Music the reader will find the best book of prose poems since Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet from the 1960s.  In 'The Wreckage That We Travel In,' he writes, 'The world must take us by surprise,' and, indeed, we are given the details, as if they were notes played, of surprise.  If it's not the wreckage of automobiles, it may be the wreckage of lives and what to do with them. Bone Music takes us through such interludes and more. As Peckham writes in 'Arrhythmia,' this is 'what listening means,' the music 'finding in the storm, the harmony, the single tap of rain among the many rhythms, the molecule of silence beating like a heart.'

On the rainy evening of November 14, 1970, a chartered jetliner crashed on its approach to land at Tri-State Airport in Huntington, West Virginia. All seventy-five passengers were killed, including most of Marshall University's Thundering Herd football team, coaches and staff, prominent community supporters, and the flight crew. The crash of Southern Airways Flight 932— known as "the Marshall Plane Crash" and memorialized in the film We Are Marshall (2006)—remains the single worst air tragedy in US sports history. The magnitude and impact of the accident devastated not only Marshall's student body and employees, but the community of Huntington and beyond._x000D_Flight 932 reconstructs the Marshall Plane Crash and its ripple effects, blending research on collective trauma with the profiles and testimonies of surviving loved ones, witnesses, and the officials who remain deeply affected by it decades later. The result is a composite picture of an American town's struggle to make sense of the horrors of this defining catastrophe, and to still find a way to forge ahead in the aftermath.