Kirjahaku

What is it to write a poem? What work do words do when placed with care and vision into the intensely charged space of poetic effort? How to Draw a Circle does not seek to answer those questions, but to encounter them as fully and honestly as one can. The thread running through the essays is an ongoing investigation into poetry as an epistemological experiment, one which binds the imagination to the worldly, and trusts that creative endeavor is a form of participation in the ongoing creation of the world. It does so in part by focusing on thinkers, poets, writers, and literary movements where such thinking for a while prevailed, from Socrates to Melville, Mythology to Romanticism. Here the poem is approached as something deeply rooted in human consciousness, done so not to make an atavistic claim about poetry's history, but to show the ways in which oldest tradition gives us ever-new eyes. The hope this book gathers around is that poetry—poetic expression, the wild wonder of working in words—turns us back toward the world in more vibrant, more open, more ethical ways. How to Draw a Circle summons lyric powers—not an argument, but a participation in the ways poetry works in us and on us.

The poet Paul Celan noted that, in his view of language, thinking and thanking are cognate, innately connected in their roots and connotations. Elements & Offerings, a new collection of poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a book-length poetic investigation of that hope—that to think is to learn to thank; that to thank is to learn to think. The first two sections seek a way to work toward poetic origins, taking inspiration from the alphabet, first philosophy, grammar, and prophecy; the last section offers poems composed over many years, simple gifts of gratitude to teachers and friends.

Daniel is pursued by stories. His father, in thrall to a myth, has disappeared; his mother and sister, too; and Lydia, his lover, leaves him and the novel he cannot finish for quantum mechanics, the place where theory tells tales about the real. And then there is Pearl, the girl beneath the floorboards, whose adventures hum alongside Daniel's own. In this contemporary, contemplative fairy tale, the autobiographical novel takes on the cast of legend, and the uncertainty of memory leaves reality on shaky ground. Can parallel universes exist? Can a preoccupation with Moby Dick overwhelm the story unfolding before you? Where do you stand in relation to the metaphysics of your own life? Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Circle's Apprentice; two books of prose, A Whaler's Dictionary and Wonderful Investigations; as well as a number of chapbooks and two collaborations, Conversities (with Srikanth Reddy) and Work from Memory (with Matthew Goulish). He teaches in the MFA program at Colorado State University, and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife and two daughters.

Taking both form and inspiration from Ishmael's abandoned "Cetalogical Dictionary," this highly original work muses on myth, representation, language, nature, consciousness, notions of spiritual quest, and other elements of Melville's masterpiece. From "Accuracy" to "Wound," "Adam" to "Void," "Babel" to "Silence," these cross-referential, highly associative entries comprise an utterly singular work of art. A Whaler's Dictionary is the mesmerizing product of a total immersion into one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Over the course of six critically acclaimed books--including a compelling meditation on Moby-Dick--Dan Beachy-Quick has established himself as "one of America's most significant young poets" (Lyn Hejinian). In Wonderful Investigations, Beachy-Quick broaches "a hazy line, a faulty boundary" between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, Beachy-Quick participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought--the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural--and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that "wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real."

Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him through the forest of his experience, on a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life.In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces relationships and the identities through which he sees the world. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature, and guided by his studies in ancient Greek.Of Silence and Song finds its inferno—and its paradise—in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Our world’s disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine, and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery—these are the circles of hell Beachy-Quick wanders, but cannot escape. And yet he encounters redemption in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson’s Bible, and long walks with his youngest daughter, Iris. “The litany in hell is weeping, weeping,” he writes, “but there are other litanies.”Curious, earnest, and masterful, Of Silence and Song is an unforgettable exploration of the human soul.

Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this newest addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world. “We have lost our sense of thinking as the experience that keeps us in the world,” writes Beachy-Quick, and the figures rendered in The Thinking Root—Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and others—are among the first examples we have in Western civilization of thinkers who used writing as to record their impressions of a world where intuition and observation, and spirit and nature, have yet to be estranged. In these pages, we find clear-eyed ideas searching for shapes and forms with which to order the world, and to reveal our life in flux. Drawn from “words that think,” these ancient Greek texts are fresh and alive in the hands of Beachy-Quick, who translates with the empathy of one who knows that “a word is its own form of life.” In aphorisms, axioms, vignettes, and anecdotes, these first theories of the world articulate a relationship to the world that precedes our story of its making, a world where “the beginning and the end are in common.” A remarkable collection from one of our most accomplished poets, The Thinking Root renders a primary apprehension of life amidst life, a vision that echoes our gaze upon the stars.

Shields call out to the violence from which they also protect us, a paradox that belongs as well to the images etched upon them. In these poems seven shields each suffer a process, one of wounding, and of healing the wound back to song. Shards are what remain of shields, fragment words relict from the first poem. Shards become stitches, barest suture of meaning made only from what language in the shard remains. Last, built upon the stitches, keeping intact what letters and words there remain, seven songs to replace seven shields, born out of a violence they seek only to sing themselves past.

The artist Roni Horn's permanent installation in Iceland, Library of Water, consists of floor-to-ceiling cylinders filled with water-melted ice from all of Iceland's twenty-four glaciers. These poems are inspired by this simultaneous act of attention to crisis and preservation against it. The "library" of these poems imagines each letter of the alphabet as its own peculiar archive, part deeply personal, part radically in common. Each poem seeks to catalog a set of associations embedded in the memories, experiences, and curious resonances each letter evokes. The urgency underlying the project-not exactly ecological, but not exactly not-lurks in that vague but omnipresent sense of oblivion's inevitability. This is tied to the ancient Greek sense of ἀλήθεια, truth as that which shines out of actual being, and the λήθη hidden in that same word, that oblivion, that forgetting-that melting away as of ice into water and water into air-that abides in what truth we know. Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His most recent books include Arrows (Tupelo 2020) and a translation of ancient Greek lyric poetry, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions 2020). His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

One of America’s most acclaimed younger poets entwines original and scavenged texts, lyric fragment and lyric song, to make a new form—this book—from wild metaphor. A passerine is a bird of the taxonomic order Passeriformes, often called “songbirds” or “perching birds.” The passerines are among the most diverse of terrestrial vertebrates, and in his book-length canticle—both aria and elegy—the poet sings like a modern-day St. Francis to the wonder of creation in its splendor and peril.

Dan Beachy-Quick has produced six collections of solo or collaborative poetry and a unique prose companion to Moby Dick. In the process, this amazingly productive writer has become recognized as one of the nation’s most exciting dramatists of the mind in ferment, and of our urgent and ongoing connections with a tradition that extends back to the origins of literature.After a series of book-length poems, Beachy-Quick’s new volume is as carefully structured as a suite of chamber music pieces, yet made of distinctly individual poems. Building upon the visceral and conceptual fascinations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” these poems trace patterned tensions to connections in existence on many levels, from molecular to millennial.“Dan Beachy-Quick’s splendid new collection reveals the echoes between the measure of verse and the measure of time. If it is true, as Thoreau suggests, that the poem of creation is ongoing, this ambitious and prolific poet shows us that learning to listen for that music of daily life involves a lifetime. Circle’s Apprentice vividly reminds us that all our human life may be marked by ritual but is returned to us through song. ‘The minute gears mutely whir. / To put your ear / against it is to put your ear inside it.’”—Susan Howe

Describing his new book as “an intimate primer to a history of literary epochs,” Dan Beachy-Quick summons his belief that tradition and experiment are mutually embracing, and his curiosity about humble forms of song and rhyme as figures of enchantment that induce the most primal modes of perception. gentlessness is the work of a poetic archaeologist who finds relict layers of meaning still alive in traditional measures and forms.

Dan Beachy-Quick writes, “There are depths within the denotative life of Greek words that English seldom allows readers in translation to access. At some basic level, I wanted to offer a translation that traced out some of those complexities into an apprehendable substance in the poems themselves—sometimes by allowing an image to unfold more fully than is the norm, at other times by giving some sense of a word’s complicated life, the compound nature of the Greek language, or by translating the same line in multiple ways. The hope, far-fetched as it might be, is to give a reader in English some semblance of how an ancient Greek listener might hear these songs. I’ve also veered away from the various traditions of ordering the poems. I’ve clustered them into groups that seem to loosely trace the entirety of life, from childhood to older age, from the birth of desire to the fear of no longer being desirable. In a quiet way, I mean the book to read as a kind novel, a bildungsroman, so that a larger sense of the life—the poem of the life—becomes palpable. “

The Romantic poet John Keats, considered by many as one of the greatest poets in the English language, has long been the subject of attention from scholars who seek to understand him and poets who seek to emulate him. Bridging these impulses, A Brighter Word Than Bright is neither historical biography nor scholarly study, but instead a biography of Keats’s poetic imagination. Here the noted poet Dan Beachy-Quick enters into Keats’s writing—both his letters and his poems—not to critique or judge, not to claim or argue, but to embrace the passion and quickness of his poetry and engage the aesthetic difficulties with which Keats grappled. Combining a set of biographical portraits that place symbolic pressure on key moments in Keats’s life with a chronological examination of the development of Keats-as-poet through his poems and letters, Beachy-Quick explores the growth of the young man’s poetic imagination during the years of his writing life, from 1816 to 1820. A Brighter Word Than Bright aims to enter the poems and the mind that wrote them, to explore and mine Keats’s poetic concerns and ambitions. It is a mimetic tribute to the poet’s life and work, a brilliant enactment that is also a thoughtful consideration.