An Interview with Dan Beachy-Quick
Addison Delgado
In his newest work, Elements & Offerings, Dan Beachy-Quick explores the relationship between thinking and thanking, entangling thought and gratitude with the natural world. Beachy-Quick divides his collection into three sections, creating a new, innovative way for his readers to interact with his poems. The first two sections explore the very origins of language and poetic voice, titled “An archive” and “A braid of.” “An archive” is inspired by the alphabet, prompting readers to rethink how they approach the poems. Rather than reading alphabetically, readers can create an interactive experience by reading the poems to spell words, such as “LOVE,” “THANK,” or other combinations. In “A braid of,” the poems take inspiration from philosophy, grammar, and prophecy, shifting the collection’s focus to a new way of exploring poetic origins. Finally, the third section, titled “& offerings,” is composed of poems of gratitude to the poet’s teachers and friends, focusing readers on the theme of gratitude that is at the center of this collection.
In this interview, I ask Beachy-Quick about his newest collection, poetry’s relationship with the natural world, and his work as a poet and a translator. Elements & Offerings can be purchased here.
Addison Delgado: What was your process with Elements & Offerings? How and why did you decide to explore gratitude, thinking, and language, and the relationship between these?
Dan Beachy-Quick: The process by which Elements & Offerings came together felt different than any other book I’ve written. The poems that comprise it were written over the past dozen years, each a discrete poetic project—the abecedarian imagining each letter of the alphabet as a strange archive, “Elemental” working through the poetic implication of Heraclitus’s philosophy; “Inf-, Inf-” harboring down in the possibilities of a single syllable, from infancy to infinite, infrared to infantry; “Auricle” trying to catch the prophetic tune of ancient lyric practice; and then all the dedicatory poems, a long practice of a poem as offering back to family, friends, teachers. I simply could not understand for many years how all these disparate works could fit together—at least, not until I remembered Paul Celan’s suggestion that “thinking” & “thanking” are cognate. I wouldn’t say I’d ever made a decision to write within that question, that concern (honestly, I’m not sure I ever make such decisions, the decisions seem to make me), I just realized that what might bind the poems into a book was that overarching care and question. Once I felt that as true, I was able to figure out how the book could be assembled, especially in twining together the three serial poems of the middle section—a work that required the cutting of many poems written in the individual series.
AD: Do you think your own perceptions of gratitude shifted after you finished the collection? And/or in the process of writing?
DB-Q: One of the nice and unexpected things about these poems slowly forming on their own over the past decade or more is how geological the poetic changes have been. Maybe that’s what’s nice about having no “project” per se—my mind is adjusting to the poems, instead of the poem to my mind. What that amounts to is something less than a describable shift in my own perceptions, and something more like the eye adjusting to the light—learning to see, and so learning to think (and hopefully, in that order). I suppose my sense of gratitude has altered from a sense of debt—thanks as something due to one who has done a kindness—to a way of being in the world, being among others. The potency of “thinking” and “thanking” being cognate is that a proper gratitude is an epistemology, is an ethic, so much more than a propriety. I love this hope that thankfulness can be think-full-ness, and that the work of thinking (which is the hardest work I know) can draw one into a truer, more decent relation with the world. If so, poems of such gratitude, of such offering, avoid the real danger of cloying sentiment, or sycophancy, or treacly sweetness. They become clarities.
I suppose my sense of gratitude has altered from a sense of debt—thanks as something due to one who has done a kindness—to a way of being in the world, being among others. The potency of “thinking” and “thanking” being cognate is that a proper gratitude is an epistemology, is an ethic, so much more than a propriety.
AD: How do you see your collection, Elements & Offerings, within your larger body of work? Is there a specific place it holds in relation to your other works? Do you think you went on a journey to explore form, tone, or themes in this collection?
DB-Q: Certain themes, certain ways of making, continue to persist. This instinct I’ve had since I started writing poems thirty-five years ago, to write a poem as offering back to another poem. Sometimes I feel as if I write a poem only to invoke the voice of poet long-gone or long-distant, a means of conversation that can be had in no other way. I continue to have this urge, as in “Library of—” and my previous Variations on Dawn and Dusk, to write poems that parallel the logic of other art: Roni Horn’s “Library of Water,” and Robert Irwin’s “Untitled (Dawn to Dusk)” respectively. But I also feel that this book is a culmination of sorts, the end of a way of writing I’ve been immersed in for the last many books, lyrics in the minor key, succinct in form, using traditional prosody but torquing it toward experimental ends. The new work, all of which has sprung from the experience of these poems, is wilder, weirder, weedier, vaulting toward an ambition I haven’t let myself feel since I was a much younger poet, and too dim in the art to know to be abashed. The poems in Elements & Offerings feel cast in a voice I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully return to.
AD: In Elements & Offerings and your other works, you often engage with nature imagery. How do you decide which natural elements best convey the story of a poem?
DB-Q: At some point, fairly early on in this life spent learning how to write a poem, I realized that we only have the world by which to imagine the world. It sounds like a riddle, I know, but the riddle feels true to me, truer than any answer could feel. We have only the world by which to imagine the world. In an odd way, such a thought means there is no way not to be a nature poet—if our mind is built by the senses that usher the world into us, and language is the vehicle that the mind uses to match the inner sense to the outer reality, if the sky within me is the same sky as the blue over the western mountains, or not, or if it’s another blue…. Such questioning, what Gertrude Stein called the “torment of inners and outers,” is the condition from which my poems arrive, or so I hope. Again, not much in such spaces occurs as decision—one simply surrenders to what must be, to what is, as a leaf is coaxed open by the heat of the sun. Somewhere deep in a poem is the necessity of its being writer—a thinking in the progressive active and not a thought in the past tense, something so vital and alive it resists almost completely the language that would express it. I think of that space as more real than reality, a symbolic reality, and the only way poet or reader has any access to it, is from the images that offer glimpse, or open as threshold, to that world. Paul Eluard supposedly once said, “There is another world; it’s inside this one.” The world that’s within the world of the poem, and the world that makes the poem possible—matter and meaning in constant braid. All of which is to say, I hope the image makes the decision for itself, and I just follow obediently behind what the poem seems to demand.
Such questioning, what Gertrude Stein called the “torment of inners and outers,” is the condition from which my poems arrive, or so I hope.
AD: How do you balance the tangible, natural world with abstract themes in your poetry, so one does not overpower the other?
DB-Q: Much of my answer here derives from what I just said. If my sense is right, that an image unfolds from a symbolic reality hidden silently deep within a poem, then the division you rightly ask about—between accurate image and abstract thought—is no division at all. The leaf is an abstract of all that a leaf might suggest, from an oak-leaf’s visual echo of a human hand, to Henry David Thoreau’s realization that in all of nature, there is but one patented form, the leaf. The hand unfurls from the arm, the lips dehisce the mouth. The abstract requires a form to be felt, to enter into its actual potency—as the stone in July bears the sun’s heat long into the cooler night. The accurate image bears the evidence of the cosmic order, and so the abstract takes on an older meaning, one nearly lost to us now—not an ambiguity or fogginess, but a distillation, an essence.
AD: Besides your own work as a poet, you create translations. How does your work as a translator shape your work as a poet? In what ways does engaging deeply with other languages, rhythms, and structures inform the way you craft meaning in your own works?
DB-Q: I’d initially been attracted to Ancient Greek as a way to get as close as possible to the roots of my own mind—one, for better and worse, formed in the Western Tradition. I started 15 years ago, self-taught through two textbooks, and when I’d finished those, I realized the only way to continue my study was to translate the work I loved the most. It’s been the primary education of middle age, though all what I’ve learned is hard to say. Perhaps the most immediate impact on my own poems comes from a permission Ancient Greek offers. It’s a language that isn’t syntactic in the way English is—there’s no set pattern by which subject relates to direct object through the threshold-work of the verb. Every line is a labyrinth of how thought and feeling interact, places of emphasis often initiating the line, and the mind of the remaining grammar tries to catch up. It feels like a language of lyric consciousness, one unable, and uninterested, into teasing thought away from feeling. It’s a profound lesson for a lyric poet in English, a permission to weird our own syntax in ways that complicate the relentless desire-mechanism of our own grammar, where subject gets what it wants, verb promising the possession of the object. A grammar is an ethic, though we seldom realize it. Translation helps me understand the power of that thought, and promises the lesson—as enacted in the writing of new poem—continues to be an education in how to be more decently in the world and with each other.
Perhaps the most immediate impact on my own poems comes from a permission Ancient Greek offers. It’s a language that isn’t syntactic in the way English is—there’s no set pattern by which subject relates to direct object through the threshold-work of the verb.
AD: When translating, how do you balance staying true to the original poem's musicality with exercising creative freedom?
DB-Q: The musicality can be hard to match, or at least it is for me. But there are times when the homonymic can help—either a word from Ancient Greek that continues to exist meaningfully in English (and there are many such), but also homonyms in Ancient Greek, a way in which the ear can guide us to a proper confusion. One example I often come to is how the words for “shame,” “song,” and “always” sound much the same in Ancient Greek, and so I can begin to feel how a lyric poem might be abashed at its own eternity. I love translating to make those possibilities felt places, felt thoughts. More than a musical rendering, I try hard to follow the logic of the image and let the image guide my translation work. I do so for many of the reasons mentioned earlier—and I have this suspicion that the lyric holds in common across the millennia via image more so than it does musically. I fear we’ve become deaf to the ritual, magical potency of sound and rhythm as it exists for the ancient Greeks, but the image we can still see.
AD: As you look ahead to future projects, what themes or creative directions do you want to explore next? What can readers look forward to in your upcoming projects?
DB-Q: I’m two years into translating Homer’s Iliad—at line 232 of Book 7 as of yesterday. I wake up early and translate as the sun rises, maybe too in love with Thoreau calling the Iliad a book of the morning. I also think it is—a book of the dawn, an ever-morning, a book that made the minds that came to read it, including my own. There’s something about the work, the ageless anonymity of writing out all the Greek by hand, that makes me feel as if I were a scribe in the Great Library of Alexandria. It also makes me feel I am myself one of the nameless Homeroi, those rhapsodes who would memorize the epic, and recite for others. And so I’m also working on a version of the Iliad that is my own, sung from my own mouth, filled with error and odd emphasis. I imagine it as a shadow-text, scrawling down the shadows left by the light of the original text. It’s called The Shadow War, and is slow, slow going. At my current rate, I have six more years of work before both have a hope to be done. But I like the patience. It reminds me of one of the refrains echoing throughout the troubled, astonishing book, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: “Slowness is beauty.”
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator whose most recent book, Elements & Offerings, is now out from LSU Press. 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.
Addison Delgado is a senior at Florida State University studying to earn her BA in English-Literature, Media, and Culture and Media/Communication. After graduating, she plans to pursue graduate studies and become an English professor. Outside of classes, she is a journalist. Besides writing, Addison loves to read.