Vox Pop

By Melvin Maddocks

COLLECTED POEMS, 1924-1974

by JOHN BEECHER

290 pages. Macmillan. $8.95.

If John Beecher were a character actor instead of a poet, he could play all the best parts in a pageant of America past. He has the face for roles as a Confederate general, a turn-of-the-century president of Harvard, or even the most distinguished presence in the hobo jungle, the man everyone calls "Gentleman Jack."

A native of Alabama, a student at Harvard and Cornell, a steelworker and a merchant seaman as well as a professor of sociology, Beecher, 70, seems less a poet than a one-man recorder of American experience.

Beecher writes work songs about mill hands who get a "shoeful of steel" when a ladle burns through, and ballads about a "Frankie and Johnny" rodeo team who almost (but not quite) kill each other. He composes a jazzy lyric for "Kid Punch" Miller, who played trumpet with Jelly Roll Morton, and a kind of epitaph for a Pueblo Indian grave robber beset by legal problems and liquor:

. . . The pots he and his wife had dug were sold off

one by one for busthead

He brought a pair of bleary-eyed old biddies home

he 'd picked up in an Albuquerque bar

and turned the place his wife fixed so nice

with Navaho rugs and Spanish furniture

into a old folks ' whorehouse . . .

His civil rights poems of the '60s, bloody as a bashed head, have the angry surge of an Abolitionist sermon by his great-great-uncle Henry Ward Beecher:

I disremember all the meanness that they did

treating them Yankees like they was us

dragging that 70-year-old white lady down the courthouse steps

with her head going bam on every step

Beecher is nearly prose-flat, simplistic, partial to Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp" and defiant about it: "Must I be schooled,/ veil plain speech in symbolic fog, costume/ polemics for a merry morris dance,/ practice new types of ambiguity . . .?" He can be perversely unsophisticated, monotonously on the side of the "little guy."

Native Son. A twelfth-generation American, the Ivy League scion of a U.S. Steel executive, Beecher has worked furiously to turn himself into a self-made common man. "Bard of the people" might be the title he has aspired to for 50 years, like Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg before him. But Beecher is no folk charlatan. He has paid his dues. When he refused to sign a loyalty oath during the McCarthy era, he was fired from the faculty of San Francisco State College. The city of Birmingham, which declared May 1 John Beecher Day, was not so pleased with its native son ten years ago when, as a thoroughly participatory journalist, he was celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. in the pages of Ramparts.

Nor has Beecher had it easy as a poet. He became a printer in order to publish his own rejected verses. These poems may lack finish; they do not lack authority. "Strength," as Beecher himself points out, "is a matter of the made-up mind." Now Visiting Scholar at Duke, he is at work on his autobiography. It should be worth anticipating. A lover of American character--the last man who would still dare speak for the People--Beecher is a character himself, perhaps his own best poem.

sbMelvin Maddocks

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