a mazing Dan Beachy-Quick

"My latest work uses perhaps more found language than my own. The poem is the story of its sources (at one level) that I try to stitch together into my own inquiry. This feels the only honest way I can approach the endeavor of the poem, the onus of it. I love the chance for a given work to diamond itself into self and then undo that construction into depth, width. I sometimes gain this sense of the work of poetry the autobiography of Anonymous--each of us saying "I" at once, the fluidity of tradition which, in order to continue, must be breathed out with our own breath. Speaking others mouths in our mouths, and the inevitable being yourself--Hopkins's "self-taste." That agony, now, for me, is poetry."

Dan Beachy-Quick from an interview with Ray Bianchi on Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com


At a panel discussion at the UA Poetry Center on the topic of contemporary poetry the young and preternaturally articulate poet Dan Beachy-Quick made (through a series of answers to various questions) the outline of a case for a poetry that is not ironic and not shining with glittering surface. One in which not only the word, but the world is paramount. He noted that these days “plastic intelligence is valued over a wounded heart, and that breaks my heart.” By plastic he meant sculptural, active, technically sophisticated, talented. He also talked about the need to “rescue wit from cleverness,” and talked about valuing poetry where “something more than words is at stake.” He quoted Emerson in stating that “all language is vehicular,” implying that poetry is investigation, discovery and process, not product, and certainly not end product. When asked where he might fit in within the contemporary scene, he whimsically and attractively quipped “I have no idea.” Mr. Beachy-Quick's own poetry is completely lacking in that most ubiquitous of contemporary vehicles, “irony” and almost completely disregards the twentieth century, involving itself with the likes of Thomas Hariot, Thomas Traherne. with mystical psalms and charms and most recently in his new book Spel, with Moby Dick. The poems in his first book, North True South Bright, are quite wonderfully mysterious and anachronistic. This book and Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, were I think, the two most promising starts of 2003. Here is the first stanza of one Dan Beachy-Quick pome, “Stanzas (Disclosed in Time)":

“One black leaf into the forest blooms
And scrapes the windows of the living-room,
Scrapes the windows in the living-room
To say, Its me who's thinning you. . .”

The risky repetition of living room, the leaf blooming 'into” the forest, and the eerie saying of the leaf are all small successfully weird and individual touches which give his poetry and special and particular quality.