Dan Beachy-Quick is author of two recent collaborations, Work from Memory (2012) with Matthew Goulish and Conversities (2012) with Srikanth Reddy. He is the author of such poetry collections as Spell (2004), Mulberry (2006), and Circle’s Apprentice (2011), as well as a book of essays and tales entitled Wonderful Investigations (2011), and currently teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University. Recently, Beachy-Quick spoke with Poetry Editor Michael Marberry regarding the music of poetry, as well as the influence that John Keats has had on his own work.
Michael Marberry: Dan, we’re so very excited to feature three of your poems (from Romanticisms) in this Spring issue of The Journal! And such memorable, peculiar little sound-image creatures they are! Tell me: Where in the world did these particular poems come from? What inspired them, if anything, in particular? How would you describe the larger project of which these poems are a part? Am I wrong in assuming—based on the title, the tone, and the form—that there’s an homage to the great Romantic poets at work here?
Dan Beachy-Quick: The poems are an homage—and an offering and a plea and some kind of apology and maybe a repair. Well, I think of them in odd and manifold ways.
I spent most of the past year-and-a-half working on a book on John Keats—a book that might best be described as a biography of the poetic imagination. Somehow, I couldn’t start writing that book until I wrote these sonnets—of which, in total, there are fourteen. I felt as if I must apprentice myself to the form Keats did: the sonnet. I felt I must do so according to his own principles, his own strivings, and so the sonnets became a way for me to ask permission to think about Keats’s work in the ways that felt most valid to me: not to find a distance to judge from but, as Keats says about the truth of proverbs, to prove them upon my own pulse. I wrote them so as to add myself in, to participate, to diminish the distance between my mind and his—and as audacious as it sounds, I felt it an act of humility, of seeking entrance by asking to be worthy of thinking within the work of a poet I so deeply love.
It is a trespass, thinking. And to do it, perhaps one must apologize to the one being thought about. I couldn’t write the prose until I’d finished the poems. Now all are done, and the book on Keats—A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work—will appear in the University of Iowa Press’s Muse Books Series this coming fall.
MM: What was it that compelled you to write a critical study about Keats specifically, as opposed to any other poet that you could’ve conceivably written about? In writing your study, in writing these sonnets, and in the process of, as you say, diminishing the distance between Keats’s mind and your own, what new things did you discover about this long-admired poet? And what new things did you discover about yourself as an artist?
DBQ: I encountered Keats late—not until graduate school. The experience was odd—a thrill of finding myself in the presence of a poem whose beauty felt so real as to be nearly threatening but also one that came to me without—so it felt—much hope for my understanding it. Some years later, working in Chicago, I read the letters bit by bit on the train in the morning. Those letters brought back to me that initial sense of beauty’s complications by seeing Keats’s own struggle with forming a poetics that refuses to step away from beauty as some essential quality a poem works toward or works within.
When I was asked if I might write a book for the Muse Books Series, I said, simply enough: “Yes, if Keats.” I wanted to hold myself closer to his thinking, to think through it, so to speak, for myself. What I discovered was something I suspected: a poet in the deep thrall of finding a way to write poems that is never reducible to a system and yet which must offer some explanation for its own method. There is a conversation between the audacity of the poems in the midst of their nearly palpable discovery and the letters that try to comprehend what the poems have opened—and yet, at times, the letters seem foremost, and the poems take a thread of thought and weave it back into the whole vision. It is—“it” assuming we can consider the poems and letters as a single project—the most moving, humane document I know of what it is to be involved in the making of poems.
What did I discover about myself? I had no real sense of how deeply formed I am by Keats, but I am. I feel as if I were a waxen seal that wakes up to its own shape and sees so intensely that sight becomes a feeling, what it is that had pressed down upon me and shaped my thoughts in the way they’re shaped. I suppose—strange as it is to say—that from Keats I have inherited my sensibility.
MM: I’m absolutely fascinated by the aural elements of your poems in our spring issue, their undeniable and captivating sense of “voice”—which, to my mind, is a defining characteristic of your work going all the way back to Spell. And your recordings of the poems only increase my appreciation for their sonics and the care that has seemingly gone into each and every line. But I wonder: Just how important is sound and voice to you as you’re writing? Are these aspects that you focus on deliberately, or do you find them to be intuitive byproducts of your process? How important is it for us to hear these poems (or any poems) as we read them?
DBQ: Essential, I think, to read so as to hear them—and perhaps so of any poem or almost any. Gerard Manley Hopkins broke my sense apart and taught me that the music of a poem is in itself a philosophic work, a kind of faith, a trust the poem makes its own meaning, inscribed within the words of the poem but not attributable merely to any lexical sense.
I feel sometimes as if the words of the poem are only there to allow access to a kind of music that the words in their certain pattern reveal, and that the mind is distracted by these words so that the music can play itself within the mind, unfettered by reason’s rigor. Poems come to meaning in such dark ways, almost occult. They trick the intelligence with itself so another work can happen in the blind spot.
For me, music is that other work. I might call it the unconscious of the poem, informing the words it is also not reducible to. It is, I think, some quality of Keats’s “fine excess,” for the music in the poem is what exceeds the language of it, and that to me is a primary aspect of poetry’s beauty: that it exceeds itself, over-brims its own fullness, and in doing so, leaves us with the wondrous remnants in mind.
As for my own process, I write when I can hear the music in the lines—a music of ear and a music of thought—and when I can’t hear it, I don’t write. The same holds true for prose, for it has its music too.
MM: It’s very interesting to hear your thoughts about the musicality of both poetry and prose and how your own creative process is often guided and dictated by how well you can hear that music at any particular point in time. One thing that I love about your work is how it often challenges my expectations of what a poem or prose-piece can (or should) be/do and, moreover, what a poem or a prose-piece can (or should) sound like.
To what extent does the music of poetry and prose sound similar and/or different to you? In the spirit of Keats and Hopkins (two wonderful examples), who are some contemporary poets and prose writers whose music you particularly admire? Lastly, as someone who often blurs those expectations surrounding poetry and prose, at what point in your creative process do you know whether what you’re writing is (or ought to be) poetry or prose?
DBQ: In perhaps a too-quick way, I hope not glib, I want to say that poetry has a music of feeling that becomes thoughtful, and prose has a music of thought that becomes feeling. There is a kind of agonized frustration I hope each art opens up to, a point at which certainty and uncertainty confound one another and intermix. Each music, I hope, allows a reader to clarify complexity without reducing it and, in doing so, gives us not the habit of thinking but the music that complicates that habit back into actual experience.
What is the experience of the page? This question matters to me, and it matters to me that one could ask that question reading a poem or an essay I worked on. Of contemporaries, I think few poets have captured this music in the way I’m trying to describe as has Susan Howe. Lyn Hejinian’s efforts have long been a model for the joys that thinking opens. And I think poets such as Brian Teare and Pam Rehm possess a lyric sensibility of deep, genuine reach.
As for the last question, the only time intent seems to keep hold of its nature is in that distinction between poetry and prose. I seem to know which I’m working on before I sit down to begin the work—as if, I guess, the work has decided for itself what it will be.
MM: The natural world and humanity’s relationship with that natural world seem to play such a strong part in much of your work, these poems included. Would you care to comment on the role that nature (or “Nature” perhaps) plays in your poetry—thematically, philosophically, creatively?
DBQ: At the most basic level, I cannot help but feel that the world is all we have by which to imagine the world. For many years, I’ve been quite taken with Emerson’s thought that the Delphic Oracle’s know thyself was the same as the Stoic principle to study nature. Adding mystery to the equation is Heraclitus: “Nature loves to hide.”
I feel deeply this work of self-investigation as worldly discovery and vice-versa—am convinced, perhaps in naïve ways, that the microcosm and the macrocosm maintain a connection, and that perhaps the poem is one of the places in which that collision of opposites maintains its difficult integrity. In this way, I don’t know how a poem can be other than a nature poem. It’s just that nature has a different boundary than we normally accept—a boundary as hazy and inter-penetrable as any concept, a place of drift and gesture. What is there? I ask myself. There is the world.