Liz’s Weekend Poetry Series: Dan Beachy-Quick

September 16, 2011 in Montana

by lizard

Saying Dan Beachy-Quick is the contemporary poet to watch is like predicting the Super Bowl Champ in September, but after picking up his latest collection, Circle’s Apprentice, I’m convinced Dan has the potential to create a lasting impact in the small world of American poetry.

The world I speak of is the academic world of MFA/adjunct/professorial reign/and mighty tenure, where the game of poetry carries the weight of big words and grand theories behind it. For example, I found this article by B.K. Fischer in the Boston Review that had things like this to say about Beachy-Quick:

Beachy-Quick is adept at the classic Derridean move: identifying the simultaneity of irreconcilable contraries that, upon analysis, depend upon and collapse into one another. His book, a collection of lyrical prose meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, resounds with collapsed binaries and aporetic splits, contradictions that reciprocally create themselves, terms that imply and give rise to their opposites: interior/exterior, circumference/center, poison/antidote.

What? You might be saying. I know. Let me try and put it this way:

Dan’s work is sound and wordplay circling above then spiraling in like twin hawks taking a double helix nose dive toward some center they will never quite reach; some elusive prey their talons will just barely miss before…