"The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals" by Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett

The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals is a tête-bêche (flip book) by Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett in which both Madrigals by Beckett and The Book of Immaculate Perception by Zegans read from their respective fronts-to-backs in a single spine format. The confluence between these paired chaps extends beyond shared narrative lines to independently formed yet common imagery and complementary methods of composition. In each body of work, you will find compactness of speech, form that liberates line, and an easy flow from poem-to-poem that animates and enriches the experience of reading these two sets of poems in each other’s company.

In the stunning chapbook, The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals, Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett partner to give shape and form and witness to the yet to be. Zegans’ liminal spaces between light and dark are braided with Beckett’s madrigals, spare, concise, and shaped with touchpoints from a horse to a murmuring tv, to the moon. In this new twist on the madrigal tradition the plaited voices form a new song in a world where Nothing stands for anything; it just is. Yet it gifts us with Your eyes light, inventing blue. An exultation, a prayer, one where the reader is invited to bring their own notes to the song.

—Ed McManis, author of Trash Truck 7:38 A.M. (And Other Love Poems).

Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett have given birth to a beautiful and moving thing. With Immaculate Perception, Zegans shows us each our personal, universal genesis story, with words as serpents, and illumination as the solvent that dissolves them (and absorbs us). In Madrigals, Beckett brings us to our senses, a world of snaking rivers and fingertips. His light is the unalloyed ecstasy of our nature. The synthesis of the two works is a truly brilliant creation.

—David Scott Ewers, author of Ultimate Resort

Often, we forget. Words as if pressed into a faded photo album or the picked wildflowers of childhood between the pages of an infant’s first book. A mesmeric reminder of a time we thought we could never summon memories of is recalled here, stoking the feeling of being new and the fresh vivid colours of the world in its endless fascination.

—Paul Walmsley, music producer and writer

These two sets of poems will awake something in you. They are both a broadcast from infancy and early childhood. When you have difficulty articulating your own early childhood apprehensions, trust a poet to enable you to reach back. Like a ‘Madeleine de Proust’ these poems discard time and leave the reader in the nursery and the garden of child-wonder Eden. Zegans explores the soft universe of developing awareness, knowing words were stretching to be born too. A poetic masterstroke. Equally remarkable, Beckett gently plants the perspective of parent, in empathy with a child’s first reaches and joys, using the madrigal, strongly associated with nature poetry. Both poems are laden with jewels of innocence. Treasure.

—Stuart Anthony, singer/songwriter, Mirabeau Bridge, Love & Trial, Though We Have Only Love: The Songs of Jacques Brel

Zegans & Beckett

Memoirs of Now

Language without words

It’s all raw beauty—

These two poets

Tell of time before birth & just after

Time infiltrated with color, experience

The world of yes/no dark/light

& then growing

—Robin Rule, author of Porch Language and This River the Road

These lucid, shimmering poems and madrigals slip in and out of the cusp where generation and perception join. Even the physical book, which can be read backwards and forwards, right-side up or upside down, invites us deeper into the liminal space between being and becoming.

—Dr. Samantha C. Harvey, professor of English at Boise State, and author of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature.

The visions brilliantly gathered here by Zegans and Beckett are pointillist in how they bring the delights of discovery into a fresh and newly focused world—a joyous encounter.

—David Perkins, author of In From Forever, Post-Modern Blues, and I May or May Not Love You

It’s a dialogue, it’s a dance, it’s a duel. In two spare, splendid sets of poetic utterance published face to face, in a single book with the split-title, Madrigals / The Book of Immaculate Perception, two poets go at it, each in his own manner, Larry Beckett’s madrigals a bit more raw and ruddy, Marc Zegans’ free verse more meditative and serene, both siphoning off speech, and while acknowledging the limitations of language, dare each other, and the reader, to dig deeper “in your world before words,” (Beckett), to the wellspring of “Perception immaculate, yet to be.” (Zegans). Drawn from a zone of knowing where, ordinarily, words dare not tread, it’s the only zone worth mining.

—Peter Wortsman, poet, playwright, author of prose, long and short, real and contrived, translator and pontificator.

What a strange and wondrous book of poetry! Immaculate Perception / Madrigals is bound by an exploration of memory, how we come to know the world, and the revelation or boundaries of language. Marc Zegans’ section casts a line into a massive topic — ontology — through poems that walk a razor’s edge between playful and precise. Using language at times mathematical, at times mystical, he takes us in 9 delicate poems on a journey from pre-birth to old age. His final poems explore whether it’s possible to experience true perception — a state of grace that experiences light in its purest form — without words: The irony being that Zegans is able to explore these ontological threads through his use of language to “sing the light.” Larry Beckett’s poems are equally delicate and sparse but hold an erotic charge in their sensuality. With quirky syntax, Beckett takes us through memories of his daughter from her ecstatic conception to later childhood. His tight rhythmic poems are studded with visceral memory as painterly witness to his child’s first experiences. These poems are brimming with love. Both sides of the chapbook delve into a “world before words.” Where these two poets’ worlds meet is ours to encounter, ponder, savor, and not answer, just like young children new to perception.

—Jennifer Greer writes piano-driven funky art pop. Her latest album is Speaking with Ghosts.

Totemic brevity – what a jewel of a book! This unique object (tête-bêche or book that has two narratives joined back-to-back) offers up a meeting of two, complementary, master wordsmiths, revealing in highly distilled language a coming to awareness on life’s journey. For Zegans, language forges an exquisite koan-like argument against itself in relation to a beautiful world as is—‘words come and take it all away’. In return, Beckett (addressing his daughter) reveals chronological scenes from her childhood (from conception onwards) through a series of visceral and sensual madrigals. Consummately placed words reverberate with pulsing, paternal heartbeat and consecrating memory, aware also of their place, ‘storying, in your world before words’. Paradoxically, these two exemplars of the poetic art, remind us of the power and importance of affirming life beyond representation. This is echoed by the totemic design of the book that symbolizes the interconnected, unbroken loop of evolution. In reading, there is a sense that these brief illuminating narratives reflect us all. The dual, reciprocal voices synergistically summon a custodial muse of hope, empathy and regeneration, for a world in crisis. Its reader recognises that mousikē draws attention to what matters and briefly sets us free from the pummeling wrath of political existence today.

—Sarah Tremlett, British poet, poetry filmmaker, artist and theorist, author of Horse-Woman (a poetic memoir with early paintings), and the ‘groundbreaking’ The Poetics of Poetry Film.

"The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals" is a tête-bêche (flip book) by Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett in which both Madrigals by Beckett and The Book of Immaculate Perception by Zegans read from their respective fronts-to-backs in a single spine format.
The confluence between these paired chaps extends beyond shared narrative lines to independently formed yet common imagery and complementary methods of composition. In each body of work, you will find compactness of speech, form that liberates line, and an easy flow from poem-to-poem that animates and enriches the experience of reading these two sets of poems in each other’s company.

Marc Zegans

Poem and concept: Marc Zegans
Art and design: Lark Simmons
Score and video mastering: Dennis Callaci

Larry Beckett

Poem, Reading, and Score: Larry Beckett
Editing and film footage: Dennis Callaci

Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett

Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett (with Susannah Beckett). Larry Beckett photograph by Laura Fletcher.
Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from songs to blank sonnets and 100-page narrative works. His lyric, "Song to the Siren," is a modern standard. In the years since, he’s written the postmodern epic, American Cycle, including the long narratives Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and he has reinvented Sonnets. The Book of Merlin is a recovery and translation of the 6th-century Brythonic poet, and Romances Without Words / In Solitary is the first translation of the prison manuscript of Paul Verlaine. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. These madrigals are to a child from conception on. They’re dedicated to his daughter, Susannah Beckett.

Marc Zegans’s seven collections of poems include Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Červená Barva Press, 2020). Ghost Book (Kite String Press, 2024), a fine art photo book collaboration with photographer Tsar Fedorsky, is held in the special collections of the Boston Athenaeum, the Getty Research Institute, Yale University’s Haas Family Arts Library, Haverford College, the Peabody Essex Museum, and others. Marc reviews poetry for Liberated Words in his column, “On the Cutting Edge.” Films based on Marc’s poems appear regularly at festivals around the world. He lives by the coast in Northern California.