Rediscovering Memphis’ Kenneth Beaudoin

The Poet of the “Pulsing Now”

by

It’s late afternoon, unseasonably warm, the final day of February 2023, and I am standing in the shadows of the Harahan Bridge on the Mississippi’s Arkansas side when Jimmy Crosthwait dials my phone. A few hours earlier, over tacos in Cooper-Young, I had sat down with the artist-musician and longtime Memphis treasure to learn about his long-ago friendship with a mostly forgotten poet named Kenneth Beaudoin.

Now, Crosthwait has called me back to clarify a point. It has to do with Beaudoin’s “wonderful” reading voice. Suddenly, though, as if he’s had something else in mind all along, he shifts to the subject of another deceased poet friend — one Harvey Goldner — whom Beaudoin influenced. Crosthwait asks if he can share a poem of Goldner’s called “The Resurrection of Bert Ringold.” He begins to read, and within a few stanzas, I understand this is a poem about an exhumation. “With a childish prayer and a crowbar, you pry open the lid of the casket,” Crosthwait incants in a wonderful reading voice of his own. Then I hear:

Inside, a nice surprise: Inside there is nothing but a diamond, a crystal as big as a Civil War cannonball. It shines from within, it dazzles your eyes like a late afternoon sunshine blazing on the Mississippi River, once upon a time …

Crosthwait has no idea that I am gazing at that very moment on the river he’s invoking. Nor does he know that I’ve spent the hours since our lunch interview trespassing my way through the fields and forests south of the bridge, trying to pinpoint the plot where Beaudoin once kept a cabin retreat and writing studio.

Similarly, Crosthwait is unaware that it was his own colorful account of meeting Beaudoin — pronounced “BOH-dwin” — at the cabin for the first time in the early 1960s that inspired me, on a whim, to drive into Arkansas and take this hike by the river. (In Crosthwait’s account, his teenage self had just ingested a healthy dose of peyote — “at the time it was legal,” he told me with a grin — before encountering Beaudoin, dressed in sandals and a sarong and “looking like a Hotei Budda” as the poet lugged buckets of water to his corn garden.)

What Crosthwait certainly has no way of knowing is that his impromptu reading has entranced me, that hearing it in this context, in this place — the Memphis skyline shimmering across the water, the bridge’s ghostly stone piers rising up around me — I have fallen into a portal of sorts, a momentary time warp that even as it fades has left an imprint.

When Crosthwait finishes, I feel an urge to explain the serendipity of his call. I want to tell him also what he’s unwittingly conjured: how somewhere in the midst of his poem about a boy hacking into a casket, I had caught a glimpse of Beaudoin, the “poet laureate of the river” himself, hard at work in his ramshackle studio, his walls surrounded by driftwood and arrowheads and sherds of pottery. And beyond that, briefly, was a flash of the primordial Central Mississippi Valley that Beaudoin always searched for in his best work.

Thankfully, I have the good sense to keep these things to myself. To pick apart such a moment would risk killing it. And besides, I realize, Crosthwait probably knows more than he’s letting on. Because of course it was no accident that he chose this one poem about the river and a shining crystal, and the surprises that might be in store when digging up the dead.

In the two-plus years that have passed since that warm February afternoon, I have taken on new projects beyond researching Beaudoin’s writings and life. I have moved on as well from calling the Bluff City home. Yet I have not been able to shake the feeling that there is something in this obscure poet’s story that’s calling out to be exhumed.

To that end, I’ve located others beyond Crosthwait who knew the man. I’ve continued to read through Beaudoin’s Memphis archives, and I’ve requested scans of his correspondence scattered in writers’ collections across the country. The picture that’s emerged, like the river that served as Beaudoin’s muse, is murky and full of shifting sands. Yet one thing is clear: A stark and very odd disconnect exists between Beaudoin’s talent, prolific output, and connections to some of the deepest currents of American avant-garde thought, and the degree to which his name has slipped toward oblivion.

How did it happen that a poet once championed and mentored by William Carlos Williams is now forgotten and entirely out of print? How did it happen that a poet who was read deeply by e.e. cummings, who corresponded with Ezra Pound and Randall Jarrell and countless other lesser-known lights, has barely emerged as a footnote in American letters? Similarly, how is it not better known that Beaudoin, first in New Orleans’ French Quarter, then as a gallerist and editor in New York City, led a brief but very real charge to reshape his generation’s conceptions of art and literature?

Even in underground art circles, few today have heard of Iconograph, the literary journal Beaudoin founded and ran between 1940 and 1947. Fewer still have heard of Galerie Neuf, the Upper East Side art gallery he opened as an extension of his publication. Yet through those mediums, along with his own experimental poetry, he became the force behind a short-lived post-war modernist movement — the Indian Space Painters — that would eventually be described as “one of the peaks in the mountain range of American culture at mid-century.”

All this is to say nothing of the “father figure”-like role that Beaudoin played within his hometown’s cultural milieu. In Memphis, the city where he accomplished most of his writing, the city where he was constantly teaching younger poets and promoting their work and modeling, by example, a muddy-river-tinged joie de vivre, he managed to seed the ground with vitally needed intellectual energy, in the process influencing a whole generation of creatives and countercultural rebels.

Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin was born in Michigan in 1913 but moved to Memphis at the age of 12, when his father accepted a job as a supervisor for the local Fisher Body Company plant. The family settled into a modest bungalow in Vollintine-Evergreen. Beaudoin, an only child, grew into a precocious and intelligent teen. He excelled in public speaking at Catholic High School, and in 1932 enrolled at West Tennessee Teachers College, where he immersed himself in academics. A glance at his 1935 yearbook profile reveals him flashing a beaming smile next to a long list of leadership roles in foreign language clubs and the arts.

After graduation, Beaudoin briefly attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He then moved to New Orleans and took a job with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. Most significantly, he began to regularly publish poetry and discover his identity as an artist.

“We were all young then and madly in pursuit of some redeeming beauty which would be our salvation,” he later wrote of this time. “It was an exciting period for us … for somehow all of us felt we were entering a new period of human awareness which at least had not happened before in the South … .” This sort of ambition imbued the first issues of Iconograph Beaudoin published from his French Quarter apartment. Later, in New York, seeking out the “new methods of artistic contact,” he carried his ambition even further: By the late 1940s, he was working 20-hour days and writing that he and his circle were “together being dragged toward artistic responsibilities to our generation it almost frightens me to realize.”

Strangely though, at this very moment when Beaudoin’s aesthetic vision seemed to be breaking through, he made the decision to permanently leave New York. Financial struggles were the cause, he claimed. But judging by the “sickness” and “little shock” he suffered during the “bad winter” of 1948, he likely had a nervous breakdown. Whatever prompted the move, by early 1949, he was back in Memphis living with his parents.

Beaudoin, who was gay, maintained a conflicted relationship with his hometown. He also had a difficult time with his father. By contrast, his mother Ruth, or Bid as he called her, was his closest confidant. If he wasn’t entirely open about his sexuality, it doesn’t seem to have been much of a secret either. What’s most apparent is the skill with which he navigated the stultifying social mores of his time and place. Somehow, he managed to remain true to himself and his bohemian identity without ever shedding the discreteness that his existence as a gay man in the South required.

This balancing act became especially apparent when Beaudoin, a few years after moving home, took a job as a clerk with the Memphis Police Department. By night, often dressed in flower-print shirts and rubber sandals, he typed reports for the MPD’s detectives division. By day, he wrote poetry and composed his collage-like works he termed “Eye-Poems.” As far as he was concerned, it made perfect sense. “It is more interesting, more dramatic … a place where you have a glass pointed at the tabus [sic] of the locale … on the human creature under stress,” he wrote to a friend about his job.

If all this weren’t enough to secure Beaudoin’s status as “Memphis’ foremost exponent of the avant-garde,” his passion for the ancient history of the Central Mississippi Valley added yet another layer. Over the next two-and-a-half decades, even as he published essays and reviews and some two dozen small books of poetry, he became equally known as a self-taught archaeologist and rockhound. Frequently, he could be found roaming the shoreline around Presidents Island or near his Arkansas cabin. The most valuable finds he polished and gave away as prizes for the annual “Gemstones” poetry award he established. By the 1970s, Beaudoin had fully embraced his reputation as part “elder poet” and mentor, part local guru of all things related to the Mississippi River.

His story from this point forward darkens, however. Beaudoin developed diabetes, and this, combined with a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking, sent his health spiraling. In 1981, around the time he retired from the MPD, he went blind. When his mother died the following year, he was forced to seek care elsewhere. A series of strokes followed. Soon, he was bound to a wheelchair and living under the care of a friend and former actor named Cliff Middleton.

This guy was it. His command of the language, how he could take words and sentences and made you visualize in your mind what he was writing about. … You might see a little more even than what he intended. Not many writers have that gift.” — Nick Canterucci

Other than Middleton, few people seem to have remained in regular contact with Beaudoin at this stage. One exception was Nick Canterucci, an artist and writer who happened to move in next door to Middleton’s home on Tutwiler. A native of Michigan, Canterucci had long been interested in postwar countercultural history. Not only did he recognize the name of Middleton’s roommate, he deeply admired his work. Even in Beaudoin’s diminished state, Canterucci developed a rapport with the older poet that lasted until Beaudoin’s death in 1995.

Afterward, when Middleton moved to California, Canterucci salvaged what remained of Beaudoin’s late-stage papers and sent them to the University of Buffalo’s poetry collection. “I’m extremely grateful I caught him at the end,” Canterucci says, when asked about his friendship with Beaudoin. “It was like going to school. That’s how I viewed him. This guy was it. His command of the language, how he could take words and sentences and made you visualize in your mind what he was writing about. … You might see a little more even than what he intended. Not many writers have that gift.”

In 1949, shortly after he’d left New York, one of the first projects Beaudoin completed was a history of his paternal French-Canadian forebears. The text is hardly a standard genealogy. Beaudoin, in his trademark fashion, meanders into side narratives throughout. The most colorful deals with a Jesuit missionary ancestor who came to America in 1667 and traveled the frontier settlements spread between Quebec and New Orleans.

“How I envy him those trips down the untouched Mississippi,” Beaudoin writes. Later, referencing the other “forgotten members” of his family, he continues:

“Somehow I seem to think I can feel their blood and ashes in the turgid power of the Mississippi, the river down which old Jean Baudouin paddled his weary bones in his old age to fund a mission among the Chickasaws, which is now the city in which I live; Memphis, on the Chickasaw bluffs. Somehow I seem to feel their spirits in the Spring wind, for their dream — The New World — its realization, is this good land on which we live.

Notwithstanding the nostalgia (and possible creative license) involved in his ancestor’s rendering, the passage reveals just how deeply Beaudoin had absorbed the Mississippi River’s creative powers upon his return to Memphis. He began to pour enormous energy into visiting archaeologically significant sites. He often traveled with his mother (with Ruth apparently driving since her son never learned). The trips inspired his poetry. But they also encompassed genuine field work.

“[Beaudoin] points a finger toward a sacramentalized way of life, a vision of life made holy, rather than toward any blueprint of social or political organization. [His] rememberings of things past and his vision of the future are as valid for the North as for the South, for America and for the world.” — Lawrence Lipton

In 1950, Beaudoin self-published a comprehensive survey of a neglected site near Marked Tree, Arkansas, called the Warren Mounds. He subsequently wrote two small books translating into poetry Native American myths. One of these, The Papao Genesis, and Two Other Legends of Origin, was described by a reviewer as “one of the most fascinating little books I have had the pleasure of coming across … .”

By 1954, well into this “new period,” Beaudoin had fully fused his poetic explorations of the Central Mississippi Valley with his practical archaeological pursuits. He became instrumental in founding the Memphis Archaeological and Geological Society, the Nodena Foundation in Wilson, Arkansas, and led some of the earliest digs at what would become Chucalissa. He wrote essays such as “An Adventure into the Prehistory of the Memphis Area,” and “Note on the Uncovering of a Disturbed Burial at the Big Eddy Site in St. Francis County, Arkansas.”

His best-known work from this period was “Bayou Gayoso,” a haunting, long-form poem that reimagined the storied tributary running beneath the streets of Memphis. Reviewing the poem, the novelist and Beat poet Lawrence Lipton described Beaudoin as a “pro-spiritual and anti-material” writer whose “closest kin in style as well as content” was William Carlos Williams. Beaudoin, he continued, “points a finger toward a sacramentalized way of life, a vision of life made holy, rather than toward any blueprint of social or political organization. [His] rememberings of things past and his vision of the future are as valid for the North as for the South, for America and for the world.”

As Lipton’s review suggests, Beaudoin was more than a regional Southern poet. For all of his concerns with the local, and as relatively provincial as his existence may have been on the surface, Beaudoin maintained throughout his life a thrillingly expansive imagination. His commitment to explore the “new spiritual landscape” of mid-century America is what led him to constantly push boundaries in both his lifestyle and art. At the same time, he remained extraordinarily attuned to going inside ordinary moments — to the “apotheosis of the immediate,” as he called it. “I am a creature of now — this transient, living, pulsing now,” he once wrote.

Nowhere brought him closer to the “pulsing now” than his “little studio on the other side of the River.” He’d acquired the cabin and small plot of land it sat on around 1960; he named it Innisfree (after Yeats’ famous poem). The place was primitive in the extreme. It lacked plumbing. The only heat came from a wood-burning stove. Despite being elevated on stilts and set back from the river, it flooded in high water.

Regardless, Beaudoin loved it. In a 1961 letter to Williams, he described it as “just a little fisherman’s shack” situated on a “rather wonderful little piece of land that goes back to a Spanish land grant.” All around him were “old twisted trees that have been through so many high waters they are not even straight.” Inviting the famous older poet to visit, he told him, “I have a good cook stove and I’ll bake you a chicken.” Toward the letter’s end, Beaudoin mentioned something else as well: There in his house by the river he’d started to write a new group of poems he called Mississippi River Suite.

Beaudoin would work on these poems for the next decade and a half. He published most of them in a three-part “River Cycle” series that appeared in his award-winning 1970 book, Selected Poems and Eye-Poems, 1940-1970. “River Cycle #4” appeared in 1975 as a separate small book, the cover of which featured a grinning Beaudoin wading in a flood-stage Mississippi. It is here, in the meditative bursts of the “River Cycle” poems, that Beaudoin brought his singular perceptions into sharpest focus.

The poems are stripped down and infused with a touch of Eastern mysticism. One reviewer praised the author for writing with the “strength and delicacy comparable to a Japanese brushstroke.” As Beaudoin reflects on the floods and lightning storms and changing seasons he observed at Innisfree — and simultaneously, the changes within his own body and spirit as he declined — he crystallizes the sensory-driven moments of his poems’ creations in ways that startle the reader. The poems are ultimately about mortality. They are also, in my opinion, the closest he got to that “apotheosis of the immediate” he was always chasing.

The “River Cycle” poems are on the whole melancholy in tone. Yet Beaudoin was no reclusive monk or abstinent Thoreau. When he writes of the “gay parties on the sand” and the “summer children” who gathered in evenings “full of song,” he is hinting at the thing that I heard most consistently in my interviews with the few remaining voices who knew him well: Innisfree, along with being a creative refuge, was a hell of a lot of fun.

The poet Richard Tillinghast, who called Beaudoin a “most extraordinary man,” remembers coming to Innisfree in the 1960s and “lazing on the riverbank” while reading Rimbaud’s Illuminations. “He had things figured out and one of the best things he did was to acquire his shack,” Tillinghast says. “[It was] really a fun place to hang out.” Others who immediately brought up the subject of Beaudoin’s river gatherings include the writer James Conaway, the Memphis historian Douglas Cupples, and Francis Cowden, a poet who called Innisfree “a special place.” Crosthwait, of course, was also a fan — so much so that after that first psychedelic-infused afternoon he rented a cabin of his own for the summer in a nearby field. “It was completely unique from almost anything I’d seen,” Crosthwait says of Beaudoin’s retreat.

But perhaps the best surviving glimpse into Innisfree’s revelry can be seen today in the form of a bronze fountain sculpture that rests in the backyard of the esteemed Memphis artist John McIntire. The sculpture, which McIntire completed during the pandemic and named River Man, depicts a nude man happily swilling a beer at the same time he urinates. He drew his inspiration from his memory of visiting Innisfree for the first time and witnessing the “Dean of Memphis Poets” performing that very act. McIntire and Beaudoin subsequently formed a close friendship grounded in their shared bohemian lifestyles. “We had parties over there,” recalls the now 90-year-old McIntire. “There were Christmas lights hanging in the trees, everybody drinking beer, laughing, a lot of other writers.”

In 2023, when McIntire showcased River Man at the New Art Dealers Alliance fair in Miami, he kept mum on the full backstory. The piece’s narrative merely described a “well-known poet” whose act represented “eternal consumption and expulsion that is both comical and melancholic.” Soon though, as McIntire fielded more interest in River Man, he opened up about Beaudoin. Two of McIntire’s younger artist friends, Matt Ducklo and Dale McNeil, already knew of Beaudoin but began to grow increasingly fascinated. Of particular interest were the thousands of Eye-Poems that Beaudoin had produced and haphazardly given away over the course of his life. The result, in late 2024, was an exhibition of Eye-Poems that opened at Ducklo’s Tops Gallery, in the basement of a downtown building. The show, “In the Hands of a Poet,” was accompanied by a printed catalogue of the same name produced by McNeil.

When I reached Ducklo and McNeil to let them know that I too had been pulled into the rabbit hole of Beaudoin’s unlikely story, both artists were initially a bit taken aback. Yet the more we talked and shared, it didn’t seem so surprising. And that’s because the trail that Beaudoin left behind, however hazy it might be 30 years after his death, is one that could only have been blazed by a true original — by an artist who’d committed, for better or worse, and in a soul-deep kind of way, to what William Carlos Williams once described as a “meticulous devotion to … keep writing on the new path.”

Andrew Ross is a Mississippi native (and former Memphian) who currently works as the exhibitions director for Humanities Texas. His book, The Realms of Oblivion: An Excavation of the Davies Manor Historic Site’s Omitted Stories, received the 2024 Tennessee History Book Award.