Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin

A sculpture and a fountain, River Man by the local artist John McIntire stands in the contrapposto pose simultaneously drinking a beer and peeing, the 2022 piece depicting a friend’s party-trick from the 1960s — that of the “human fountain.” The sculpture has been shown in Matt Ducklo’s Tops Gallery, a cheeky little thing, but even he didn’t know the source of McIntire’s inspiration at first. “He didn’t want to say it at the time,” Ducklo says. “But it’s based on [Kenneth Lawrence] Beaudoin.”

Ducklo has been interested in Beaudoin for a decade or so, the poet who’s been called “Forgotten ‘Poet-Laureate of the Mid-South.’” “ I started to think about him more after McIntire made that sculpture,” he says. And, now, as of December 2024, Beaudoin’s work — his poetry combining the visual with the literary — is on display in Tops’ “In the Hands of a Poet,” co-curated with artist Dale McNeil.

Like McIntire, Beaudoin was big in the counterculture scene in Memphis during the mid-20th century. He hosted literary salons out of his own home, created the Gem Stone Awards for poetry, and was one of the founders of the Poetry Society of Tennessee. He knew writers like Tennessee Williams, Jonathan Williams, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Randall Jarrell, and Ezra Pound. By day, Beaudoin was a clerk for the Memphis Police Department for nearly three decades. “My police job kept me close to human beings in tense situations,” he once told The Commercial Appeal. “From a poet’s point of view, it was perhaps the most important job I could have had.”

It was at his clerk’s desk — and his home — that he worked on his “eye poems,” collages of words and images from magazine cut-outs. “He would just sit in the middle of piles of magazines and books, cutting, gluing, and smoking,” McIntire said in a press release.

The result is something, as Ducklo says, “meant for the eye as much as they’re meant for the head.” The poems themselves are succinct, their visual pleasure subverting the capitalist and consumerist trends promoted in these magazines — magazines Beaudoin sliced and rearranged for his own purposes, an act itself another subversion.

Beaudoin created thousands of these eye poems and frequently gave them to friends and peers. Many of them — and other forms of his poetry — were widely published in small journals in his lifetime. Today, though, his poetry is out of print, including even his most comprehensive work, Selected Poems and Eye Poems 1940-1970.

This exhibit, in a way, serves as a reintroduction to the largely forgotten poet. After 10 years wanting to show Beaudoin’s work, Ducklo found someone wanting to sell their Beaudoin collection and, with his co-curator Dale McNeil’s Beaudoin poems, had enough for this show. Together, they also created a book that is currently available for purchase at the gallery. (You can also purchase it here.)

Beaudoin stopped creating his eye poems after going blind in the 1980s. He died in 1995.

“In the Hands of a Poet” is on display through March 1st.

Tops Gallery is located in the basement of 400 South Front St. The entrance is on Huling. The gallery’s hours are noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and by appointment.

John Fahey’s 1968 guitar ballad “Voice of the Turtle” is a classic piece of Vietnam-era musical Americana. The song’s train-like rhythms draw out a melody that is as mournful as an empty boxcar but as defiantly optimistic as the all-American promise of something greater down the line. “Voice of the Turtle” is a kind of frontier hymn colored by the psychedelic urge to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

This past Saturday night, TOPS Gallery opened an exhibition called “Voice of the Turtle” in honor of the late Fahey. The show features a small, abstract tempera work by the guitarist who took up painting in the years before his death in 2001. Fahey’s painting is shown at TOPS alongside work by eight Memphis artists, many with a similar interdisciplinary bent. The show includes sculpture and drawing by Fahey’s friend and 1960s Memphis scene-maker John McIntire, alongside drawings by William Eggleston, Guy Church, and Jonathan Payne, sculpture by Terri Phillips and Jim Buchman, collage by Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, and painting by Peter Bowman.

Fahey’s small painting at TOPS is nothing to write home about, at least in light of his talent as a musician. Painting was a secondary art form for Fahey, but that isn’t a bad thing. Plenty of artists, including Bob Dylan, David Lynch, and Eggleston, have exploratory painting practices that often meet with undue critical disdain. TOPS’ “Voice of the Turtle” is an exhibition that celebrates these practices, and references a time when the interdisciplinary (art as a multi-hued journey of personal discovery, rather than as a specialized niche practice) was more celebrated than it is today.

A marble “game” sculpture by McIntire occupies the center of the gallery. To clarify: It is a sculpture made from white marble, but it is also a game of marbles. Viewers are invited to drop a marble into one of the sculpture’s many holes connected to a network of tunnels, and assumably, see where the marble emerges. At Saturday’s opening, no one had any marbles (perhaps having misplaced them in the ’60s? ba dum ching…), but not much was lost. McIntire’s sculpture is still beautiful and playful — the sort of thing you’d expect a favorite uncle to have stashed in his attic.

John McIntire’s portrait of John Fahey

McIntire also contributed a small drawing on yellow legal paper of Fahey, sitting in profile, wearing sunglasses. A cigarette hangs out of Fahey’s mouth. The drawing feels like a dashed note, a quick record of a lost conversation. Between this drawing, McIntire’s sculpture, and Fahey’s painting, there is a kind of friendly history — a warm context that makes room for the other featured artists’ work.

Eggleston’s squiggly, colorful drawings are each about five inches tall. There is not much to say about them except that they are really fun, and that every artist should probably make a squiggly drawing once in their lives. Beaudoin’s cut-and-paste collages are assembled from old magazines. They are at once personal and alienated by the material’s faded gloss. Buchman contributed two roughly hewn abstract ceramic works with an understated drama.

The works that pack the most punch are four expertly stippled drawings by self-taught artist Church, whose genre scenes seem drawn from an otherworldly forest. The characters that inhabit this realm are likewise magical; their exaggerated proportions seeming all too natural in Church’s constructions. “Voice of the Turtle” is worth going to see if only for Church’s work.

Another high point in the exhibition is a small drawing by Payne. His elaborate, obsessive mark-making, navigated through hundreds of undulating lines, is quietly done without seeming restrained or restricted. Payne is also the youngest artist in the exhibition, and his presence in “Voice of the Turtle” shows a kind of artistic heritage — a generational relationship between artists that is as open-ended and bravely optimistic as Fahey’s eponymous song.