Wyatt Earp
A Longform Poetic Narrative of a Wild Life in the Wild West
by Larry Beckett
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Wyatt Earp is more than a legend; he’s the embodiment of the American Wild West. It’s easy to reduce a man of such stature to mere stereotypes and iconoclasm, to leave out the women who inspired him, or to rely on the slander of those he defeated; but forgoing the myths, wordsmith Larry Beckett skirts the overwrought icon and gives us instead the aches, loves, and morals of the flesh-and-blood human.
Wyatt Earp follows the famed lawman and his historic posse through the streets of Tombstone, in a natural five-act tragedy: the western zone, rise of the outlaws and hero, the showdown, fall of the outlaws and hero, the vendetta ride. In striking longform prose poetry that makes use of Earp’s own words, Beckett has mined newspapers, from Tombstone’s Epitaph to the San Francisco Examiner, Earp’s written testimonies, and biographer interviews to get to the humanity behind the folklore.
Wyatt Earp was a man of his word, committed to the law, who faced his father, armed mobs, assassins, and, as his companion Doc Holliday says: he walked right in. But he also believed in peace and did all he could to avoid violence. Antithesis makes myths of American men, and as his friend Bat Masterson says: the story of Wyatt Earp is the story of the West.
Content Warning: gun violence (mild, poetic)
Winner of the 2019 Electric Book Award
Praise
“Whoever said that the long poem is dead, was dead wrong. Larry Beckett’s elegant, hefty Wyatt Earp proves that the extended poetical narrative is alive and well and still kicking up its heels, spurs and all. Mining history, legend, and biography, Beckett has reinvented the American West and recreated one of its best-known gunfighters and lawmen, world-famous for his role during the deadly shootout at the O.K. Corral. Almost everyone who grew up watching Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel, and Maverick will enjoy Beckett’s journey back in time. In Wyatt Earp, the landscapes feel authentic, the frontier towns seem as alive and dangerous as ever, and the voices of the Old West echo loudly and clearly. Beckett’s poem is a hoot that provides real entertainment from beginning to end, and all the way through. If you have to get out of Dodge, or some other dusty town or derelict city, take Beckett’s Wyatt Earp with you, and leave your six-guns at home.”
—Jonah Raskin,
Author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation
“Decades in the making with whiskey, gunsmoke, and trail dust enough to catch in your desert-parched throat, this whip-smart and vivid masterpiece breathes new and rarefied air into its re-envisioning of the Earp legend. Scattershot and peppered throughout with lines that crackle like a prairie wildfire, Beckett delivers both a Beat and gritty epic rich with spit-blood and ferocious poetic detail and a magnum opus few ever even dream of attempting. Honestly, you’d have to be a madman to try such a book—much less to pull it off—but Beckett is exactly the gunman for the job. A highwater mark and instant addition not only to his canon but to American poetry writ large.”
—Hosho McCreesh,
Author of A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst
“From his beginnings in the 1960s writing lyrics, through his more recent down-to-earth academic-level explorations of the Beat Generation writers, to this new epic-length prose poem about Wild West icon Wyatt Earp, writer Larry Beckett has captured America in all of its manifestations—cultural, political, and historical. He and his writing are beautiful.”
—Pat Thomas,
Author of Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary and producer of Allen Ginsberg’s The Last Word on First Blues
“Larry Beckett’s Wyatt Earp is a work for the ages, an American epic, vivid, alive, and utterly compelling. This heroic song of the West as prose poem unfolds with strength, vigor, and sovereign originality. Like the American “West” for whom its protagonist stands as metaphor, Beckett’s Wyatt invents itself. In refreshing contrast to recent serious longform poetry, this anti-cow-boy saga succeeds without a whiff of meta-discourse, though that is abundantly available to the analytic reader. In Earp, Beckett has created that rare sustained poem whose primary material simply thrills. By substituting rhetorical devices for metric repetition, and by drawing out the sonorities and tonalities of Earp’s distinctly western voice via notably de-punctuated dialogue, this Tombstone Homeric brings a remarkable new way of telling into the American tradition. Like Melville’s potent incorporation of whalemen’s speech into Moby-Dick; Whitman’s long lines; William Carlos Williams’ capture of the poetry inherent in Paterson’s vernacular; Kerouac’s steaming and streaming bop prosody; the taut telegraphic dialogue of film noir; and Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Beckett’s epic markedly expands the bound and prospect of the American tongue. If you want a poem that will take and ever change you, walk through Tombstone with Wyatt Earp.”
—Marc Zegans,
Author of La Commedia Sotterranea and The Book of Clouds
“The languages and landscapes that Larry Beckett captures in Wyatt Earp are intricately drawn and bitingly original. Here is a poet embracing that Brautigan Beat attitude before taking us swiftly and deftly, as quickly as Earp’s draw, off into the Sonoran Desert and into barrooms “after midnight, when the aces burn off, and the pharaoh rules in the down and out dynasties.” This collection digs deep into character and style with wit and a deep understanding of Earp to reveal a world teetering off “in the distance between desire and consummation.”
—Michael Garrigan,
Author of Robbing the Pillars
“The poems in Larry Beckett’s Wyatt Earp simmer and hiss, conjuring the sounds and imagery of the Old West. You can almost hear the rattle of a sidewinder and the jangly chime of spurs on outlaw boots walking the dirt streets of Tombstone, see tumbleweeds twisting in dusty wind and the flash of gunmetal under an unforgiving sun. This spectacular, historic collection is cinematic and wild, full of whiskey-drenched tavern tales and swaggering shootouts, all loaded like a gunslinger’s pine box on an eerie, anachronistic ghost train of Beat poetry.”
—V. C. McCabe,
Author of Give the Bard a Tetanus Shot
“This is the absolute real deal, full of prose flavor that reads like Faulkner, but with a wild, unbridled style all its own.”
—Eric Shonkwiler,
Author of Above All Men, 8th Street Power & Light, and Moon Up, Past Full
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• Longform Narrative Poem | Wyatt Earp
• 5” x 8” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• Cream Paper, 138 Pages
• Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-17-7
• Paperback ISBN-10: 1946580171
• Hardcover ISBN-13: Coming Soon
• Hardcover ISBN-10: Coming Soon
• Ebook ISBN-13: Coming Soon
• Ebook ISBN-10: Coming Soon
• LCCN: Not Registered
• First Edition: March 3, 2020
• Short URL: acpbook.link/earp
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Cover design by Leah Angstman, with restored daguerreotype by Laura Fletcher.
About the Author
LARRY BECKETT’s poetry ranges from songs, like the modern standard “Song to the Siren,” to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, published by Rainy Day Women Press, to the epic American Cycle: out of which come Paul Bunyan, from Smokestack Books, Amelia Earhart, from Finishing Line Press, and this volume. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance.
Media & Images
• Reviewed by Paul Wilner on Zyzzyva
• Listed in Entropy’s “Quarantine Reading: Books You Shouldn’t Forget to Buy”
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