Welcome to the Libido Café, where monkeys are welcome, the piano has been drinking, and the coffee is always perfect. In his second collection, Marck L. Beggs explores a wide range of poetic forms and subjects. From the formal structure of the sonnet to invented forms and linguistic experiments, from the vulgar to the salubrious, from the humorous to the offensive, the poet brings a new voice and a fresh sense of urgency to each poem. The result is a book which crosses genres and schools of poetry. Beggs's poems veer from the immediately accessible to the obscure; in a word: eclectic.

Marck L. Beggs earned his Ph.D. from the University of Denver and his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. He teaches writing and literature at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where he also serves as Dean of the Graduate School. The editor of the Arkansas Literary Forum, Beggs's first collection, Godworm, was published by Mellen Poetry in 1995. His poems have won numerous awards, including a 1997 Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, and have been widely published in journals, including Adirondack Review, Arkansas Review, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and Poet Lore.

Our Tendency To Trust Strangers

Someone knocks at my door. Lifting me
out of a dream where someone was knocking
at my door. I had answered to a man
with brown cloth covering his face, holding
a pistol so clean I could see
starlight flicker along its barrel.
I mumbled "excuse me" and closed the door. Again,
a knock and, again, the cloth face
and twinkling gun which he lifted as if only
to show me. I stepped closer, taking the barrel
into my mouth. A hand unwrapped
the brown cloth, exposing a mirror behind.
Another hand pulled the trigger.

What I trusted in dreams, I would trust
now. Always did: the man asking me into his car
out of childhood, and me taking his hand
like candy. I want him here now, to explain
between the hard barrel facing my door
and the soft bullets pelting my tonsils. Unfolded
from the leather wings of his back seat,
it doesn't matter that he took a child beyond
reason. All I care is that, child
or not, he trusted me like a lover in deep night.

When finally I answer the door, whoever
was there is gone. Leaving me to wind
blowing words back down my throat:
to my wife, punching me awake
from her own dreams. And to this future
I admire so much, curved out of sight
or recognition, moving toward me.

Libido Café by Marck L. Beggs, Reviewed by Terry Wright for The Arkansas Review, April 2005

Marck L. Beggs' second collection of poetry, Libido Café, further positions him as one of Arkansas' most compelling contemporary poets. Beggs smoothly juggles tone, sound, and form without one drop. His insights cut through common experiences and social hypocrisies like a serrated edge. He will have you laughing before you notice the hint of a bitter aftertaste. There is beauty and wonder around the edges of these poems, and your famished senses will not thirst at this cafŽ. Drink up.

Part of the book reproduces selections from his first collection, Godworm. His dog, Kilty Sue, a "slightly retarded devil-dog," bites interlopers and wails "as a drunken soprano" but her shrillness masks her genuine love and protective nature. Ever aware, Beggs understands there are worse creatures that bite -- like the love bug. In "A Vision of Love," an adolescent crush turns increasingly nasty as the persona is beat up by schoolgirls, but Beggs saves the worst beating for himself. Love is a perpetual knockdown and recovery with subsequent pangs of failure -- a cycle that repeats into adulthood. One day, the fight will be institutionalized. You will settle down, marry a "woman who swears / she loves you" before

she tugs open your underpants
and shoves a wild, screeching kitten
among your softest parts.

Even when addressing you point-black with a startling directness, Beggs can show a softer side. Sometimes, he'll seem almost shy, as in the befitting "Victorian Erotic," where the "gift of my tongue" speaks volumes more than any "stupid, bloated / asphyxiated words / with which I try to reach you." In another poem, "My Daughter's Books," the traditional dark stories undergo a transformation. Witches can "swim" and each metaphor is a bird with the gift of liberating flight. A good oral reading augments magic in stories and creates a world where

   Éthe heroine shakes open
   her wings as her suitor stands tall to crow.

   All I know of reading Ð to mean it well
   as a matter of course Ð is to hear the bird in the bell.

Beggs also enjoys insightful jokes. He is at ease with playful experimentation and biting social criticism. In "Personality Type: Smoker," Beggs collages a found poem from a Camel cigarette pack producing a combination of Keats and wild surrealism:

   Warning. The camel is a surgeon.
   The sky casts a golden cancerÉ

Elsewhere, Beggs picks off targets as effortlessly as shooting skeet. "The National Endowment of the Arts: A Parable" is a teaching fable of Philistines ("loosely translated as Republicans") putting the screws to an early cave-painting artist. In "Vulgarity 101", the readers get a detailed lesson (including history and entomology) in the art of the snappy comeback. Finally, in "Speak Up for My Opinions," the persona brazenly blurts out talk radio-like proclamations that sting with irony. Listen up, because

   I think that anyone who kills anyone should be killed, and then
   that killer should be killed.

Beggs pushes buttons by design to help us see human follies and social insincerity. But he can just as easily make us catch our breath with a candid statement or arresting turn of phrase. With Libido Café, Beggs provides a nourishing stop for readers who will find its rewards never close.

Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tuesday, 04 January, 2005

Marck Beggs teaches writing and literature at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, where he also edits the online "small magazine" Arkansas Literary Forum. (Disclosure: I occasionally contribute to ALF.) He's also one of the undersung cultural heroes of the state, being widely viewed as one of the few who can serve as an acceptable intermediary between the various belle-lettrist cliques that have sprung up.

But never mind that; he's also a poet, and while that's not always the sort of thing that speaks well of a person -- what with the idea of poetry having become polluted by exposure to undisciplined ranters, precious cat collectors, professional obscurists and generally seen as the least resistant road to artistic credibility by no-talent dilettantes -- Beggs is the real thing, working with form and word flavor as well as the cruel and flashing blade of unsettling insight. His latest book, Libido Cafe, is published by Salmon Poetry, a small but influential Irish house. It is available in local bookstores and, failing that, through Salmon's Web site (salmonpoetry.com).

While it is difficult to write about the evocative arts without sounding like a jackass, Beggs' work is keen and strong and sometimes awash in sorrow. Sometimes they are funny. And a vein of bitter truth runs through them all. PHILIP MARTIN