A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries, Joshua Beckman
Wave Books, 2026
At the end of A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries (Wave, 2026), Joshua Beckman writes:
“A few years ago, I was teaching a remote introduction to poetry for my mother and her friend Marcia. For a class on Dorothy Wordsworth, I had each of them keep a diary. The following week we were to read Sappho, and I wanted some way of introducing them to the literary fragment, so I created a handful of suggestions they could follow. To make their own fragments from the diaries they kept. One day a friend who had been reading through her diaries came by for a visit and said she could use a hundred of these suggestions, so I made the guide included here….
(Notes and acknowledgments, 67)
The eponymous Guide appears from pages 55-65 of the book, and includes such suggestions as:
“Any page, up four lines from the bottom, begin writing until first full sentence ends.
Any page, last two lines.
Any page, first verb to second verb.
Transcribe the next parenthetical encountered.
Write out the next three questions encountered….” (61)
The bulk of this book, however, features 18 of Beckman’s own poems, or perhaps we may call them literary fragments, though they often have more in common with the list poem than the sapphic fragment. Up until this point in the book, the reader may assume that Beckman himself made these poems using some of the guide he concocted for his mother, or at the very least from his own diaries. Such an assumption, however, becomes refuted as his notes continue:
“At the beginning of the book you will find a variety
of poems written in different forms, and while none of them were made using the
guide, many come out of similar formal experiments.”
So, in a sense the title of the book does not accurately describe over 80% of the book’s contents, but “trick ending” aside, the collections of poems included is great in their formal, genre-bending, achievement, as the book builds to increasing complexity and intensity culminating with “the record of reoccurring thought” or “today,” depending on whether you prefer the title in the t.o.c. (which is more descriptive) to the title on the poem ‘proper’ (52-53). Early in the book, the third piece, “A. Said” (aka “advice recorded,”) consists of one-word lines that out Creeley-Creeley in compelling vertical---rather than horizontal-- attention, weaving contrasting characters into an anti-plot narrative that is beautifully sustained for 15 pages, creating a believable social fabric distilled to a deep psychological essence, precisely because it is stripped of context. While “van ride to jfk” (which gains more weight if we consider its alternate title, “things seen on a first trip out, may 2022”) is an observational list poem, “The Great Good Fortune of a Dreamer” is more rhetorically epideictic, with each line beginning with the phrase “I love how in dreams.”
Immediately after this poem appears, a list of questions (aka “stillness skills,” 30) appear as a transitional piece between the dream poem and “Body Questions” (31-32) The one page lyric on page 33 (aka ‘first yoga poem”) features the verb “bows” metamorphizing to the noun “bow” while the poem on page 34 emphasizes the “bowl” like qualities of the body, as if to answer the body questions. Then follows a beautiful tender lyric tribute to a master of beautiful lyric tributes, David Shapiro. Reading this four-stanza poem, which begins:
David Shapiro
closes himself up
in a violin case and sleeps
like a Russian baby
The End
And ends with:
And inside that, his poem
And inside that, his voice
And inside that, his joy
which immediately escapes
into the world’s air
playing as it goes [,]
I do become very curious how it may have had its genesis in aa diary. The theme of “joys” continues in the next list poem, the 5 page “some joys (requested by friends)” which moves from simple perceptual joys like “Hold me Tight by Johnny Nash” (which itself reminds me of the David Shapiro poem with the repeated use of the line “When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy ledge”) on 36 and “Lake ice/ Lake ice sound” on 38 to more complex subjective joys on page 39 as:
“New interpersonal knowledge finding its way through the failing body
The private desire to bring someone hurting joy, manifest in their laughing.”
This book also includes “The Portrait (a transcription of what my mother said while painting my portrait the last few minutes of four different sittings),” a 7 page piece in which Beckman lovingly inverts the artist/model relationship in perhaps the most narrative piece in the book. While it may be relatively easy to imagine the roots of “Early 1984” in a diary entry, by the time we get to the collection’s final poem, “Today,” it is much more difficult to imagine it has its origin in a diary. though it shares the cadences of the list poem with most of the work in this book, “Today” complicates it by alternating lines starting with “Last night” with lines starting with “Today.” Yet, once again, the poem does not click shut like a box, but, rather, leaves an opening in the final five lines:
“Today summerless
Today light
Today with cracked tooth
Today okay too late
Tonight to not be there.”
Chris Stroffolino has published 9 solo collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (Blaze Vox, 2025); he’s also published a poetic collaboration with Steve Carll, Dreaming to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, Periodicities published his short essays on Virginia Konchan and Rae Armantrout; poems are forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives in Oakland, CA. where he taught at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025, when he suffered a stroke.
