ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Dan Beachy-Quick

General Questions

 

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I grew up in Colorado and poetry was not a part of the mix. I was a voracious reader, though, and my grandparents exposed me to music, painting, and plays, which left an indelible mark.


2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

A willingness to be influenced has been, of late, my greatest influence. I don't know exactly how, or by whom, that happened. I find a vast network of pulses of, nodes of, points of interest, and greatest concern isn't deciphering which is of greatest poetic interest, but how the poem can serve the widest possible purpose while still being true to my experience. Certain poets are great company in that regard. George Oppen leaps to mind. As does Dickinson, Celan, Hopkins. Susan Howe--her inquiry. Keats. Also, I find myself influenced by poets of faith--Traherne, Donne, Herbert. Outside of poetry, I've been very affected by Plato, Heidegger and Blanchot, Martin Buber, Simone Weil, Deleuze and Guattari, Wittgenstein. Marcel Duchamp strikes me as the beneficent angel of bewilderment, and his approach to art-making, the nature of process and emptiness and chance that he privileges, have aligned my own artistic compass.

 
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?

I started writing as a teenager--a far different activity than being or becoming a poet. It's only recently that my feeling of being a "poet" can be expressed without quotation marks: poet. That feeling coincides with sensing a kind of dailiness as poetry's highest achievement. I used to sneer and scowl at the thought of waking up and "finding a poem on the floor." I still do, but for different reasons. I've simply reached a point where experiencing poetry--reading as well as writing--has given my new eyes, and the only way to see, that is (to steal from Dickinson) to see that you see, is to understand
that poetry is continually revelatory, and what it reveals is the world, this world, in which I dwell.

 
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

I spent most of my college years at University of Denver--opening envelopes from the submissions turned into the Denver Quarterly. The grad poets there were very kind to me, accepted me into their conversations, let me stumble into my own words, own ways of seeing and talking about this art. In that sense it was vastly important. As far as my education goes, I think I am the English major with the fewest amount of English classes to ever leave the school. I don't know how it happened. But much of my poetic impulse has been to follow through on all the abyss I feel in my reading, and illuminate it with what understanding I can.


5.1) You are a prolific writer and reader you seem to have hit your stride as a poet what are you working on now?

I have been bizarrely prolific for a number of years. I find myself with these long, complex projects--almost as if a whole architecture is revealed in a lightning flash, and then in the ensuing dark, the structure remains in memory long enough to explore its chambers. And when such happens, I fully give in to the gift of that obsession. I do nothing else but think, and when thinking's done, write back into the thinking. Much of the stride has been a willingness to annihilate the ways in which I thought a poem should work, how I worked in the poem, what a long-project could or could not be. All the boundaries, when you near them, have these dashed borders--and no where are the sentries ordering you to stop. Such freedom is, well, addictive. I just finished a long project which I'm slowly showing to trusted friends. But I've been silent on the page for almost 10 months. One has to be as willing, I suppose, to become fluent in silence as in speaking.


6) What is your favorite food?

My grandparents osso buco.

 
7) Sports Team?

The Denver Broncos. (Watched games as a kid with my beloved Pops.)

 
8) Vacation Spot?

Anywhere Kristy and I can see the woods and walk through them.


9) Curse Word?

Shit. My mother tells me this was the first word I spoke. She quickly taught me "no."

 

10) How is the Art Institute different than other MFA programs?

I think we offer a community (unique, perhaps, in itself) in which actual experiment is encouraged. That is to say, we want people to find their voice, not to manufacture it. There are no barred realms. Having a program in which every direction is open can result in confusion--but that confusion is a true gift. It's only out of that bewilderment that a young writer can sense the necessity of his or her voice. Suddenly, certain workshop-isms become true again. The poem is a progress of discovery--more often, more importantly, that discovery usually comes in the form of a recovery, of a disclosure of what-is
more than what-could-be.

Craft Questions

 

1) How do you form a poem?
 

I'm patient. I try not to write to flex the muscle of a particular talent with language (why I'm not writing currently), but instead, wait to find the form. Poetry is the question of Form. And the question above is hard for me to answer because I can't parse out the terms from each other. But to force the form is to do a potentially great damage to the poem--one from which the poem, even the poet, can't recover. People find themselves in ruts this way, the most troubling kind--a rut that feels like freedom. Poems can deceive us as we write them--and that deception can take many forms. The key, I think, is patience. To see what is being revealed in the words--what these words only can reveal. Patience akin to wonder.
 
 

2) Do you always use Images from pop culture, music and other outside stimuli?

No. Almost never.

 

3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

Again, I don't necessarily out these at odds with one another. I tend to agree with Keats: if the poem doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree then it shouldn't come at all. But that notion of the synthetic, as it pertains to synthesis, is central to me. I do see the poem as the organic impulse of the mind to bear actual complexity--and the complexity is borne out in synthesis, in weaving that which never knew that to come to meaning it must be spoken together. And of course, one's own mind, that pattern of thought more distinct than a fingerprint, shines forth through what is combined--by the harmonies that at first glance sound cacophonous, and only by grand attention, almost innocence, become symphonic and vast.
 

 
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
 
At home or at Boost Cafe in Andersonville where I live. I prefer the mornings.

5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?

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.