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BECK

Contact

pixelated self-portrait of the artist. (that's me!)

For inquiries, commissions, collaborations, propositions, accusations, etc., contact me at [email protected].

About

The artist Jasper Beck slowly dissolving into a cumulonimbus.

Hi! I'm Jasper Beck, a technically award-winning poet and artist from Oregon. My primary medium is free-verse poetry with a playful, philosophical bent, but I also love exploring other mediums, such as short-form prose, essays, podcasts, videos, and ambient sound design and music. See my Publications tab for examples!

Publications

The cover of a really cool book, trust me!
A thumbnail to a really cool video, thank you for your continued trust!
WTF?! A PARASAUROLOPHUS? but they've been dead for eons...
Also the cover of a really cool book, continue to trust me!

What's On My Mind?

a surreal depiction of the artist's mind, lonely and austere.

Thbloughts

  • i'm one drink away from sea shanties at the bar

  • i only like slow metal

  • the nuclear engineer crouched /

  • appraising the integrity /

  • of his five-card fate.

  • a world where all media is narrative, all communication plot, governments whispering through shell tv shows, no real discourse but mere readings, and re-readings, and re-re-re-re-re...

  • Leave something to be desired.

  • if we live in a dystopia, where's my cool dystopian shit?

  • i'm the "o" around which a "d" and "g" orbit.

  • three comedians / dressed as the joker / told to dance / as sincerely as they can.

  • i just want to be able to tell my children that when your mother and I were your age, we DID have to walk to school through the ice and snow...because after the Third and Final World War, the country’s transportation infrastructure completely collapsed, and renegade "wilderness schools" started popping up all over the nation.

  • it's not that there's no escape. it's that there's no "no escape." no certainty, no happiness for Sisyphus. our whole lives, we walk through fog.

  • different art processes can nest inside of each other, the finished product one one become the basic unit of the next, (writing -> editing, songcraft -> sequencing, etc) indicating that consumption is the final art, so consume beautifully.

  • only 10% of my brain gets paid for its labor. the rest idly draws and erases dungeons.

  • my whole life is just a placebo effect.

  • most video games are just Groundhog Day simulators.

  • i love people in the way that people love dogs, and i hate dogs in the way that people hate people.

  • the notion that the past is passed is based on incomplete information, just as the future rises above my desire for it to be solid, like the vodka slowly evaporating from the jell-o shots in the fridge.

Reading List

  • Currently:

  • History & Obstinancy by Alexander Kluge & Oskar Negt

  • The Masnavi by Rumi, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi

  • The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda, trans. William O'Daly

  • Previously:

  • Angel Sharpening Its Beak by Michael McGriff

  • I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

  • Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

  • Solaris by Stanisław Lem

  • Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

  • Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff

  • If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

  • The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

  • Gold by Rumi, trans. Haleh Liza Gafori

  • Science and Poetry by Mary Midgley

  • The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

  • Little Big Bully by Heid Erdrich

  • The Book of the Dead Man by Marvin Bell

  • A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning by Ray Jackendoff

  • Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu

  • Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley

  • The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight trans. Simon Armitage

  • Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing by Ian Bogost

  • Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

  • The Essential Rumi by Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks