Whistling Through: A Crown of Sonnets by Jeffrey Betcher
Diagnosed with a terminal cancer, poet and community activist Jeffrey Betcher spent the last months of his life crafting an extraordinary crown of sonnets. Filled with grief, humor, truth, and triumph, singing with powerful rhythms and unforgettable words, this is poetry at its best.
Jeffrey Betcher (1960-2017) was a writer, educator, advocate for the prevention of violence against women and children, and a grassroots community organizer who founded the Quesada Gardens Initiative. Jeffrey was born in rural Ohio and lived in San Francisco for 30 years, gaining national attention as a pioneer in the guerilla garden movement by turning his dangerous street in the Bayview neighborhood into an urban oasis. His writings, often centered on LGBTQ themes, include short stories, journalism, and The Fucking Seasons, Selected Poems 1986 to 2016.
Publisher: Poetry Witch Press
Publish Date: June, 2022
Pages: 31
Language: English
Whistling Through is an odyssey into the cancer machine and death itself.
Chase Dimock
From The Publisher
Published to fulfill a deathbed promise to the talented poet Jeffrey Betcher, this book is a testament to the transformational power of poetic form. Jeffrey had never written in meter before he became Annie’s student during the last year of his life. Feeling the need to write about his death process in a major work, he was enthusiastic about Annie’s suggestion of a crown of anapestic sonnets. Over the last months of his life, Annie and Jeffrey met regularly to discuss his progress on an extraordinary group of poems that developed into the unstinting testament of a courageous soul navigating illness and facing death. Now this crown of sonnets offers readers a rare poetic gift, adept and searching, shot through with honesty, wit, and courage. This memorial chapbook is the first publication of the sonnets.
Excerpt
OPENING SONNET FROM WHISTLING THROUGH
Diagnosis is terminal. Life finds its shape
A few feet from the ground as it tries to take flight
In a fog of dead air, with a load of dead weight,
And a pilot who’s just lost all feeling and sight.
I can hear the unknowable next whistling through —
— Through bright holes in a scan, through my fingers and bones,
Through the cracks in my plans — whistling right through.
It’s the sound of a song I must sing, but don’t know.
Life can syncopate: music, familiar but strange,
As the rhythm of spirit and flesh swells and fades,
Innuendo from angels that gravity waits
For this tangle of melody — death to unbraid.
In the time it takes sunrise to free the day’s light,
“It’s not good news,” can sum up the faint sounds of night.
More Information
Jeffrey and Annie discuss poetry and death in one of their last conferences