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10 Questions for Dan Beachy-Quick


eternity is
    different than an
hour   I you
    know this too  the
sun-bright teeth   the
    mouth's inherent
night   what is
        ours—
—from "Everydayness," Volume 64, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first poem I remember writing and thinking perhaps it was a poem, or doing a poem-like thing, was back in high school, my junior year, and much due to that rare teacher who can actually teach poetry, Becky Porter of Alameda High. We had read John Keats’s poem “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer,” and not really knowing quite what possessed me, I wrote a sonnet in response, maybe titled “Realms of Gold,” which I hear the whisper of in my ear. I remember very little of the poem, but looking back on it, or on the instinct to write it, some 33 years later, it feels uncanny how it marked my nature as a poet—to write in response, or as offering, or in weird continuation, of poems that already exist. Poem as conduit to poetry’s past; or poem as conduit that refuses to the let the past be the past; some eager effort to keep all I love in the present tense.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
John Keats—ever more so. But I feel like I’m a poet who seeks influence it’s hard to chart the main ones. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins for sense of line, the metaphysics of the image, the deeper intelligence in words which is their music. Pound in all the trouble of his instigation has been deep in me in recent years—and many of my poems of the last many years are in the troubled wake of The Cantos. Increasingly year by year, Wallace Stevens, for his insistence that imagination participates in reality. The ancients loom large in me: Sappho, Socrates, Homer, Euripides, Parmenides, Empedocles, Alcman. The ethical poesis of George Oppen has been central, as have the poets living now who introduced me to these ways of thinking: Ann Lauterbach, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian central among them.

What other professions have you worked in?
Painting houses—which still to this day may be my only actual skill. I worked for a time at a recording studio that taped audio books for the blind. It was oddly formative. I remember a revered man in the industry for years who had a book rejected for breathing too loud between sentences. I worked with him to fix the tapes. If the pause was long enough, I could simply cut out the offending moment and splice the tape back together. After a four-hour session, I looked on the floor and saw hundreds of bits of tape, each with a single breath recorded on it. I had the absurd idea to splice them all together, a single tape of taking a breath in again and again, a recording of inspiration in the most literal sense, but I never did it.

What did you want to be when you were young?
From the age of 16 on I wanted to be a poet—I didn’t really understand that is something one could be. I don’t know. I had then, as I have now, very little sense of the future—or, at least, I’ve never thought the future is something one plans for. It just comes.

What inspired you to write this piece?
As mentioned earlier, I’m trying to work through ideas in other writing. I’m with Vico when he says “You can only know what you make.” I think I write poems in hopes of reaching some understanding impossible without writing the poem. In this case, I’m working through a long, patient reading of Heidegger, just trying to understand, to make the thoughts my own.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
The most influential place for me is in upstate New York, where I spent my childhood summers, Ithaca and Brooktondale and Cayuga Lake. I spent days in woods getting lost, walking back by finding the river. My family tended a cemetery for generations, called the Quick Cemetery (amazingly enough), that I worked in as a kid. First headstone: General John Cantine, 1783. It gave me sense of wilderness and history, experiences that etched themselves in me.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
It’s altered some over the many years, though my wife, Kristy, is the constant. But I have dear friends from graduate school, and we still share work. Friends made over the years and we trade poems, too. And I’ve been at all of this long enough where now a few former students have become readers for me as I continue to be for them.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I would love to have a visual and/or material practice. For well over a decade I’ve been in long conversation and collaboration with the ceramicist/sculptor Del Harrow. Ideas open from the conversation—not poems, but poetic. I’ve been reviewing art for a few years now, and studied Art History intensely. I’d like to paint. I’d like to build. I’d like to assemble.

What are you working on currently?
I just started a translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. I’m trying to find a way to put together the last 6 or so years of poems, all titled "Canto," a book waiting to be made into a book. I think finally I can see the structure. And, you know, I’m always just trying to write a poem.

What are you reading right now?
The major study has been Jane Ellen Harrison’s A Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, which has blown my mind. I’m about to start Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets. I heard her read, and then present a related paper, at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and just found myself open-jawed. I’m desperately waiting for Ann Lauterbach’s Door to arrive at my door. I’ve returned to finally do a full and complete reading of Jack Spicer’s collected. And also, my morning hour to read, Mary Jane Rubenstein’s Strange Wonder, recommended (and rightly so!) by Bruce Beasely.
 


DAN BEACHY-QUICK is a poet, essayist, and translator. A translation of Sappho, Wind—Oak—Mountain is forthcoming from Tupelo Press, and a collection of pre-Socratic philosophy, The Thinking Root, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His work has been supported by the Manfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

 


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