We've asked Joel Arthur to introduce Dan.
Some of you were at Joel's shoptalk on Dan Beachy-Quick
last week.
Joel is a graduate of the MFA program,
a good friend of the center.
He's a front desk volunteer.
And welcome him to the podium.
[APPLAUSE]
I think Gail and I are of similar heights.
Maybe not.
Is this good?
From 2003 to 2009, Dan Beachy-Quick
has published four books of verse, North True South
Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and his latest, This Nest, Swift
Passerine.
This is in addition to his book of essays,
the Whaler's Dictionary, which was
part of the process I believe for his second book
Spell, which takes as its inspiration
the text of Moby Dick.
So what we're working with today is a poet
who works with found text.
This poet has found another text,
voices who seek to contextualize one's relative relationship
between what I can see is the inherent symbolism
of natural elements and the repercussions
of our interactions with these elements.
Green, rose, worms, oil, various birds
are used to challenge our awareness of our interactions
within these interactions.
The idea of being aware of the process we're
in while we're aware of it is mostly
applied to human discourse and human interactions.
However, Dan Beachy-Quick wants to enliven our dialogue
with the nature and urges us to be aware of how we're
interacting it in the context.
We are treated to this as readers as the poet moves
from image to image, not from cause to effect necessarily
or from if to then, but from images
that what some would call map out the life of the mind.
A postmodern mind?
I was asked this-- is he postmodern?
I'd have to know the definition, wouldn't I?
Is he a romantic?
I'd probably have to know the definition.
When we say postmodern, we think of the idea of process
more than the solution.
We think of the answers are never
coming, because they're never supposed to.
We're always engaged in it.
Romantic, because perhaps some people seen as work
a affection for the intuitive over the pragmatic,
over the theoretical, over the abstractions of rhetoric
and some of the language that we get to probe our psyche.
We get this through images.
But if this helps, we are not only
invited to participate in the intimacy of one's dynamic
within a natural environment, but also
to participate in the ethereal space created by its effects.
We get tropes throughout his collections
of Spell, light, dark, and the metaphysical record
keeping many have attempted.
In these found texts that Dan Beachy-Quick has used
he often selects precolonial works.
Works of, for example, Thomas Harriot of 1588.
His document, I believe, A Brief Something
of the New Found Land.
It seems to have skipped my page in my mind.
But the reason I find this so exciting
is because he uses text in which people are
exploring their environment.
And through that he has found his own way
to explore his context.
So not only does the idea of metaphysical record keeping
becomes important.
But this recording of events becomes increasingly important
as tropes associated to the materials of writing
begin to occur throughout his work, ink,
blank pages, the importance of one's
writing papers and utensils.
With that being said, I won't keep this too long,
because I'm excited to hear him more than me.
But I would like to read a selection
of a poem that meant a lot to me when I first read it.
In fact, it meant so much to me.
I decided I only wanted to buy this book
at the right bookstore.
And I waited until I went to San Francisco,
was about three months.
In hindsight I lost three months of great poetry.
But at the time, it seemed like a great idea.
This is from Mulberry.
And the inspiration for this text
was William Byrd II's The Secret Diary
of William Byrd of Westover 1790-1720.
"With ink my red lips blush more red outward unsaid.
Words I will not say.
The darkly, I must write."
With that I humbly introduce Dan Beachy-Quick.