A Breathtaking Conversation with Dan Beachy-Quick

Photo Credit: Kristy Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick  is  an American poet and essayist. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa. Beachy-Quick's poetry collections include North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle's Apprentice (2011); Of Silence and Song (2017); and Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019). He is also the author of A Whaler's Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Boston Review, The New Republic, Fence, Poetry, Chicago Review, VOLT, Colorado Review, and New American Writing. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Southern Review, The Poker, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Denver Quarterly, Interim, and elsewhere. His essays have been marked "notable" in multiple collections of Best American Essays, and his poetry has been included in Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency. He has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, a finalist for The William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. In 2016 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Dan has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a professor, Assistant Chair, and Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies at  Colorado State University.

I had the pleasure and honor of asking Dan about how being an essayist changed, impacted, or influenced his role as a poet, what made him want to become a professor, and so much more.

UZOMAH: What guidance would you give a poet who wants to write a themed chapbook or collection?

DANIEL: I tend to think of chapbooks as deeply idiosyncratic projects that can’t fit easily into a book-length collection. Often these are explorations of form, of theme—as my Variations on Dawn and Dusk is: a sequence that runs parallel to Robert Irwin’s Untitled (From Dawn to Dusk) in Marfa, TX. At the same time, and my last chapbook Cantos is of this ilk, I think of a chapbook as a distillation of a full-length collection, one that can allow itself an order that thinks in a different way, a book within a book, so to speak. I guess I should admit to being leery of advice that precedes any individual poet’s poems. They are little forms of life, poems. So, if someone came to me saying they wanted to make a chapbook, I’d ask them to show me the poems. There’s just no other way that feels to me than to see what the poems themselves are, and proceed from there. But maybe it’s helpful to think of a chapbook as a foray, a test, a scouting of unknown terrain.

U: In arranging each poem in your past collections of poetry, is there a common trait that goes into the process, or does it depend upon the subject matter of each poem?

D: Each book, each chapbook, has to discover its own set of laws by which it organizes itself. Sometimes there is a project, and the project makes its demands, adhering to a form that the poems are in service to—a work of art, a work of literature. In some ways, these are easier—they seem, over time, to sort of write themselves. Other books are…otherly. I am a firm believer that the poems have to divulge their connection themselves, and the heavy work of making a book is listening to what the poems are asking, and hopefully discovering, what they have in common. Somewhere there is an undergirding, almost cosmic principle, in any book that needs to be a book, and if you can grasp those threads, that pattern, you can make the book. It’s not subject matter exactly, but ways in which the poems behave—how one opens a question another poem receives and opens further. The whole book should be a thinking, a feeling, that no single poem can accomplish by itself. The whole is more than the parts—and yet, and yet each poem is somehow more than the whole. But a book like that is a rare thing. But to me, in my mind, that’s the ideal.

U: What made you want to become a Professor?

D: Well, I didn’t want to become a professor. That’s an accident. I just wanted to write a poem, which is what I still want to do. But a path revealed itself, and I followed it. Thankfully so. & I did find I loved teaching, that teaching and writing were co-creative activities, and now there’s few things that give me more pleasure than seeing what my students do, are doing. It’s just a gift, & I don’t quite know how it happened, to get to be in poems with others, & have that a significant part of my daily life.

U: How has being an essayist changed, impacted, or influenced your role as a poet?

D: There are certain poets whose work taught me, encouraged me, that a poet is also a deep-thinking being: Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian. Certain 19th c. American precedents had hold of my mind in my twenties and now, on the cusp of fifty (two days away!): Thoreau, Emerson. I wanted to become a poet who also thought and wrote about what they thought. I didn’t want to get a PhD to think my thoughts were worth something. I wanted to think, and think in an ancient way—a phrenes, a heart-mind, a mind-heart, that says what it sees, that wants only to reveal the obvious, the simple, so hard to find. & so I did so. It’s funny, but I spend more time worrying about a sentence’s beauty than I do a line of a poem. I like how beauty frustrates logic, & then builds a new logic, a logic of its own. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but I’ve come to a place in my writing life where the role of poet, and the role of essayist, are the same role.

U: What is your favorite literary device you tend to use the most?

D: I’m not sure I have a favorite literary device or one I tend to use most. I think I have a slightly skeptical approach to craft, and am distrustful of the use of craft that precedes the poem’s own necessities. I’m often thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s suggestion that philosophy is a leaky boat you must repair while on sea, and consider poetry a similar vessel, and craft is what you have to repair the leaky craft (so to speak). Each poem has a different necessity, and so a different approach, a different use of craft. That said, I have noticed over the decades of writing poems that certain things repeat: rhyme, refrain, and working strictly or loosely in received forms, the sonnet in particular.

U: How do you interact with readers and your students who reach out to discuss your work?

D: With students, I try to make sure the conversation is about their work, which feels most right to me. They’re working with me to become the poets they can become, which might, in the end, have little to do with the poet I am. When I’m lucky enough for someone to reach out about my poems and who is more simply a reader of them, I’m grateful and express that, and then answer their questions, ask after their own lives, their own work, offer to see some if it makes sense to do so. Over the years, friendships have emerged out of these interactions, rare as they are.

U: How does writing help you find authenticity in your life?

D: In some ways, the answer to the question above feels deeply tied to this question. I’ve come to think of poetry as working within cosmic forces, working within the cosmos in the oldest, Greek sense of that word: order, pattern, world, universe, adornment, ornament. If so, then a poem is an experiment in both what the world is and how to be in it. It reveals that you are yourself part of the pattern you seek. It feels like a very sentimental thing to say, and yet I think it’s true, that poem by poem, if the poems are doing the work of poetry and not merely the work of the self who wants to write poems, those poems help you become a more decent person. I don’t know if that makes you more authentic exactly. Maybe so. Maybe poetry rushes like a flash flood through the system of slot canyons which any one of us is, leaving the intricate pattern of our persons, our personalities, more revealed. The force reveals the form. & I’m with Elizabeth Sewell: “Poetry is a form of power.”

U: What is the most crucial part of a poem?

D: I’m a poet obsessed with beginnings. I’ve come to think that a first line written honestly has folded within every other line of the poem entire, and most of writing is learning how to listen to those lines who haven’t yet spoken themselves into being, but are inherent, immanent, in the syllables first marked down. In this way, I tend to think of poems as little tests of fate. What world does a single line hold within it? What must the poet do to work in service to that world?

U: Having written eight poetry collections, how has your writing process evolved?

D: It’s gotten slower, much slower. It’s gotten much less about me: my hopes, my ambitions, my ideas, my anxieties. I’m less compelled to write a poem simply because I can—in fact, that doesn’t compel me at all. I’m interested in the moment when a line comes to mind, to ear, to tongue. If the line sticks around long enough, I write it down. Then over days, weeks, and often months, I work line by line trying to hear in one what makes the next line possible, work by poem’s own trajectories, until what’s possible still is past my hearing, and then the poem ends, which might make me amend my answer above. It’s not just love a poet most needs, but patience to go with it.

U: Can you describe the essential trait that every writer must have?

D: I was going to say, “It depends on the poet,” and then a whole host of things came to mind: curiosity, doggedness, an intellect that is capable of undermining itself, a heart that thinks, a mind that pulses. But for some reason, this morning, up in the mountains celebrating my 50th birthday, I think I might just say love. A tendency to love, to step toward love, to be in the difficulty loves is, to be in the revelation love is, and to find out how to dwell there. To make a poem an act of love. To be prolific: to be for life. & Thoreau: “The only remedy for love is to love more.” So, there’s always the need for the next poem.

For more information about Dan’s books, please visit one of the titles: North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004), Mulberry (2006)  This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle's Apprentice (2011); Of Silence and Song (2017); and Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019). He is also the author of A Whaler's Dictionary (2008).