Dan Beachy-Quick teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has two books: North True South Bright, and Spell, just out from Ahsahta Press. Buy his books here. See some work here, here here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first poem I loved was the first poem I understood—ever since, those two terms in my mind have remained inextricably linked. Not that one understands what one loves, but that understanding is some requisite threshold. That poem was Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” An extraordinary English teacher at my high school assigned it to us—the class my girlfriend (now my wife) was also in—and spent an hour showing us (literally, at times) how the poem worked. I had never encountered the notion that poetry and metaphor were thinking of almost surgical precision, that immense feeling and immense thought were not always and forever abstract, but became honed, at times, to a graspable though sharp edge. And I also, though only now, 14 years later, am coming to terms with it, that poetry of the highest order, was as humble as my own life. And, of course, I read the poem, heard it read, went through the work of understanding of it, and then looking up saw Kristy a row over and 4 seats ahead of me, and thought, “So, this is it. I get it.” 2. What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I read the sports pages almost religiously—even before the headlines. And worse, actually look forward to Sunday’s paper in which I can peruse the Automotive Section, and read reviews about new cars. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Ever more so. Over the last few years I’ve come to think of poetry and philosophy as doing a very similar, even complicit, kind of work. I’m still struggling to know what I mean by this, what I think. The great drama for me in philosophy is how the effort to understand how a self functions in the world—which is to say thinks, lives, acts, loves, speaks—doesn’t clarify the world, but complicates it. There has never felt like there is solace in philosophy, but rather, a difficult effort at what is actually difficult. Philosophy doesn’t give answers except, I guess, when you abuse it in such a way that it does so—or where the nature of the inquiry suddenly turns back to solid ground once it senses the abyss. Pascal has a passage (and I’ll misquote it, I’m afraid) about how we rush headlong to the precipice when something obstructs our vision, and we believe it isn’t there. Poetry, it seems to me, can do the work of pulling down that obstruction and simultaneously rush to the edge; and over the edge. What philosophy bares and cannot bear, poetry also sees, also thinks and witnesses, but somehow allows one a velocity, an audacity, a courage—for it is only by the speed the voice carries that one can manage the actual leap. Also, poetry feels like it uses language more humanely in its negotiation of thought and experience. It allows itself a nebulous form; it doesn't shy away from fact or object, but also need not prove them. Keats is in here: poetry is the medium that can bear the burden of mystery, not by casting a light to dispel some mist, but by participating in it, by becoming it—and we who read it, who write it, find ourselves doing the same. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Paul Celan, certainly. W.G. Sebald, too. Though I guess both might be drawn into the rubric the question is trying to divert me from. Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor meant much to me when I first encountered it, though I don’t find myself returning to it. Japanese Fiction, especially Kenzaburo Oe. Also: Borges. I don’t think my love for them resides in their being non-Anglo-American, but rather the intricacies of their minds, a result which can’t be, of course, separated from the historical and cultural conditions they grew up in, but also, certainly not limited to them. Another influence, though quite different, was in studying the Blues tradition in America, from slaves’ field hollers to juke joints of the Mississippi Delta to the City Blues of Chicago. I love the way in which one musician would hear another play, take a lyric or a lick from him, and incorporate that into another song. That expanding voice of Anonymity unfolding in each individual mouth moves me greatly, and seems, in my mind, to parallel how tradition functions in poetry. This ties back, actually, to the question about philosophy—for it’s just as Seneca said when writing letters to his young Stoic. He’d often end a letter with a quote from his philosophic nemesis Epicurus, and say something to the effect of: “You ask me why I mention his words? Because what is true is everyone’s.” 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Well, I don’t know what “a lot” is, but I doubt I qualify. What I do read though is terribly important to my writing, for reasons, really, mentioned just above. It often feels to me that people read with the same intention and pleasure as a kid putting the same poles of two magnets together—to feel the repulsive force—and by careening off of that experience, so to speak, find out not so much what is theirs to write, but what voice can be put to their writing that will be “unique,” be “theirs.” I’m far more interested in the opposite experience, being drawn into the gravity of another’s work, another’s consideration, and seeing how far influence can bend my voice to a more necessary thinking than what is merely mine, even though ultimately, inevitably, if I must speak it, it will be mine. Not as a possession, but a condition. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've read but haven't? Why haven't you? I’m afraid the list could be so long as to take on the tone of a confession . . . I guess, most glaring in my mind, when I think about the ways I feel my reading is so inadequate as to make opening my mouth a bit questionable, would be not reading either Hegel or Kant. Why haven’t I? My pace through philosophy is about 10 pages an hour, with, you know, a 10% comprehension rate. Well, maybe not that low—but you get the picture. So, for the past few years I read one philosopher throughout the summer—and I choose by bliss more than duty. But I’ll get there—before senility, I hope. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’d keep in my mind Oppen’s line, written to a friend at the birth of his friend’s child: “What do you think, Max, she will make of this world of which she’s made.” A fancy way to say what I myself think a poem is: A way of seeing the world. Then I’d give your child my bird-watching binoculars, ask him or her to look through one end, and watch the world come incredibly close, and then flip them over to watch the world fly away, and say: See? That’s just a how a poem works. It does both at the same time. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I do. I feel so naïve as I write all this, above and below, but I do. I think the poem reveals the world—no more or less. And the poet must learn enough humility to allow that to happen in an honest way, for a dishonest poem does just as much work as an honest one does, maybe even more, and it’s noise to general din that thrives on calamity and misunderstanding. I don’t think a poem can save the world, nor the poet writing them. But I think serious work and real thought, actual love in words, increase the sum of understanding in the world. In a sense, we’ve greatly misunderstood Pound’s “Make it new.” It isn’t a cry or call to any mode/fashion of poetic expression. I think it speaks to the work the poem itself must do. The “it” refers not to the poem, but through the poem—and it’s only through the it-form of the poem that what must be renewed is renewed. Such is why also, I think, reading is as important a work is writing is. [Pound’s dictum] is more meaningful as a command of how to read than it is of how to write. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Day Chiseled**Edge I**Faultline Of**Angle Form**Necessity 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Intimate. I think of the page and the body as very similar terms. But also, I think we experience text, experience the book, as physically as we do a lover, as we do breathing, as we do the everydayness of our own lives. I don’t simply mean of the nerves, but I mean complexly of the nerves. I mean in the way that the mind itself experiences thought—that this is a physical process. And just like the book, the mind suffers margins, suffers ruptures, can’t speak past certain edges and yet is impelled to do so. The dangers of the body and the text seem similar; but then, thankfully, so do the pleasures.