Dan Beachy-Quick
“This is where I work every morning, typically on translation, looking up often at the blue spruce and the rabbits that cross warily by. Now it’s the season that I’m up before the sun, and so I also watch the sky lighten. It takes so long to know if the sky is gray or blue. Mostly I read in a chair behind the desk, but the place I imagine as the primary place of work and thought, is here.”
Readings
First poem you remember loving
John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbiding Mourning” (c. 1611-12)
The first poem I remember loving is also the first poem that taught me something about love: John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I believe it was my junior year in high school, in Becky Porter’s AP British Literature class. She did that most patient thing a teacher can do, moving stanza by stanza, working through image into the metaphoric complexity of the work, and did so in a way where the brilliance of the poem wasn’t a demonstration of intelligence, but deepest need—need to something accurate and honest. That honest search ends with the great image of the compass, the fixed foot and the wandering one, the circle being made just. I think then I understood something that genuinely changed my life. That the difficulty of a poem isn’t its abstraction, but its accuracy.
A poet or a book of poetry from the early 20th century
H.D., Sea Garden (Constable and Company Ltd., 1916)
Though I discovered it somewhat late, I think H.D.’s Sea Garden is as fine a first book of poems as the last century produced, equal in beauty and importance with Wallace Steven’s Harmonium. I hardly know what to say about it. There is a quality of thought and feeling, of actual vision in the midst of allegorizing itself, a sense that the hour is equally eternity, and eternity equally an hour, that just shatters me. I find in it, poem after poem, an example of what it is to be thrown into the world and have nothing else to teach you how to live in that condition but the world itself. The pear in the heat of summer. The sea rose and sea violet. The new, ancient sun.
A book or poem you like to teach
Inger Christensen, alphabet (trans. Susanna Nied, New Directions, 2000; originally published in Danish as alfabet, Glydendal, 1981)
I love teaching—and have done so many times—Inger Christensen’s alphabet. It is a book that holds to two formal limitations: a Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . .) and an abecedarian. One formal logic is infinite, the other finite. “apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist” is the first line—a breach of the silence of the page that affirms the fact of existence as primary form of praise. That instinct follows through the whole, but complicates itself as it moves into the elemental, the atomic and the consequences of what, in some way, the alphabet as techne makes possible—knowledge, which in mimicking cosmic forces, say the fusion of the sun, can accept beauty (the apricot) or make horror (the atomic bomb). The book is also a profound lesson on surrendering to the formal principles, logics that exceed the poem, or precede the poem, but to which the poem can learn to be honest, and to form itself around, making the invisible laws palpable in the lines themselves.
Writings
Archive, Academy, Library
(An Epitome: Assurbanipal’s Library, Plato’s Old Academy, The Great Library of Alexandria)
—for H.L. Hix
The archive begins a ledger-book
Mud tablets kept in holes a honeycomb
the economy omens drone
On a low bench in another room scribes
copy what can be known
The series known as Battle the series
known as Their Blood
And the remaining ones those tablets
In the Battle the Spear Shall Not Come Near
To Rest in the Wilderness and Again to Sleep
And any tablet suitable for the palace
Examine, take possession, send it to me
Rituals, prayers, the omen stones
entrails, stars, grain, medicine, dreams
abnormalities, exorcism, epics
The sad marvels what can be known
Discard the lyric valuables
worldless lists of words names
on dried mud names on
ceramic jugs, bowls, amulets
The earliest economy
Abandoned outside the Great Temple
Abandoned in lots
Used as fill for the foundation of new buildings
Fragments of the complex whole
*
Outside the city walls, a grove
A public park, a gymnasium, a shrine
to the Muses
Plato not yet
an old man
Left the tyrant’s son untutored to live
Life is asking questions beneath the leaves
The public sun, the private shade
Religious connexions of the common life
Walking is a philosophy a mile outside Athens
Cult practice in a garden the gate
reads Let no one ignorant of
Geometry enter
Wine mixed modestly and more questions
Through the night the Graces arrive later
Plato an old man young men follow
Plato lives in a house that is a single room
but if the number is finite
how far does it go
Aristotle deliberately obtuse
The student sits in the sunlight grass
Mocking his teacher behind his back
But the old man knows all a man does is know
Stays inside his single room and will not see
shameful idea
infinite forms repeat
absurd to use the same word twice
Dies on the same day he was born
On a klinidion his small bed
dies and dies
again all this time
A young Thracian girl plays the flute
*
Near the black water that quiets thirst
Near the salt water that doesn’t
A breeze blows cool through the mind
Alexander slept with Homer in his bed
Came to Egypt with a book and a knife
a kind of marriage
a kind of husband and wife
Imagining a city he walked the streets
A soldier behind him marking the lines
In flour other soldiers gave him
Western Gate to Canobic Gate
Gate of the Sun to Gate of the Moon
necropolis, hippodrome, paneium
a hill carved into a pine cone
you will ascend by a spiral road up into the sacred
grove, groove, grave
In white lines the invisible whole already built
When from the sky the white gray cloud falls
The gulls swallow the city and fly away
Of the birds what is it that is known
The Library is built anyway
A palace, a museum, a shrine overseen by a priest
Scholars who eat together from a single plate
live salaried, tax free
Empty classroom sometimes full sometimes
called upon to teach
even the king wants to know
what There is
No royal road to Geometry Euclid makes a point
40,000 or 400,000 or 700,000 all are true
to the hand that wrote down this truth
Scrolls stored on shelves in covered walkways
so the sun couldn’t read
shadowy hypotheses of other suns
Benches in nearby passages to study conquering
Knowledge translates strange tongues into music
Music knows how to silence those tongues
Some song like a hoof steps down from heaven
it fits perfectly in
the stranger’s mouth
The Library pregnant with too much knowing
gave birth to a library
scholars call Daughter
The Mother burned down some say not
Some say the Mother and Daughter died together
on the same day
Some say a warehouse near the wharf
is what burned
Where books stolen off boats waited scribes
copying the
original never
returned
Callimachus wrote the Pinakes a lost bibliography
Catalog in 120 volumes
More books than a life can read what’s the point
Sheer number burdens the mind dumb
Better to wander endlessly through one word
than countless woods
Or the Mother died but the Daughter survived
the Serapeum
long centuries
of slow ruin
John the Grammarian asked after the books
Of wisdom the caliph Omar denied him wisdom
Burned the books the Daughter held
To fuel the baths
It took six months to burn the books
Only Aristotle survived
hobbled out somehow
alive
The rest left behind in the cooling ash
Forgotten names in cold water
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator, author most recently of Arrows (Tupelo Press, 2020) and a collection of lyric poetry from the Ancient Greek, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions, 2020). He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.