Wonderful Investigations

Praise for Wonderful Investigations: "Dan Beachy-Quick's Wonderful Investigations juxtaposes four essays with three 'meditations' and four fable-like 'tales' to trace the tension between mind and body, between our inner and our outer lives. A poet, he is terrific with an image and relies on antecedents here from Plato to Thoreau to give his work a context and a depth." --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times "This is a book about reading. It offers the kinds of insights into the act that most of us never stop to indulge in, and for that we are eternally grateful...The idea that reading offers a dream world, a parallel one, is familiar. But Beachy-Quick takes this a step farther. Reading before sleep, reading books to children before they go to sleep, is a way to slide gently through a middle place and into forgetting...try reading Beachy-Quick, who most certainly delivers perceptual fine-tuning." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Review of Books "Wonderful Investigations is a model of intense observation, of a mind reaching out as far as it can. Always Beachy-Quick seems to write in metaphor, returning to the process of wonder, and why it's so necessary, and then to the failure of language and poetry to ever truly take us where we want to go. And while I would normally tire of this recursive sort of exploration, I cannot turn away, returning to these essays because I long to feel as intensely curious about anything as Beachy-Quick does. This is the triumph of Wonderful Investigations: his reader cannot help but feel the same desire for that hazy line--cannot help but want to reach for it as well." --Ploughshares "'There is then creative writing as well as creative reading,' wrote Emerson in 'The American Scholar.' Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick admits that this dictum is 'the touchstone of his creative life,' and it shows in his new prose collection Wonderful Investigations. An almost impossible task inspires this work: to stalk and capture states of wonder, while knowing that the quarry itself will evaporate if grasped too firmly with the tools of analysis. Literature provides the means to chart the hazy, yet distinct, border between the world of reality and the world of wonder, between hunger and mystery ... Beachy-Quick's sensitive and intimate approach to writing about writing seems an ideal antidote to the post-whateverist malaise of most literary criticism. He acknowledges theory but doesn't get weighed down by it, nor is it his primary interest ... In a landscape that at times seems overpopulated with creative writers, we need more creative readers like Beachy-Quick." -- Justin Wadland, Rain Taxi Excerpt from a profile and Q&A with Dan Beachy-Quick in The Kenyon Review: Andrew David King for Kenyon Review: You also talk with some frequency of "magic," "mystery," and "wonder" in your work. This shows up in your preface to Wonderful Investigations, too; there, you write that its essays seek "to near those ways in which wonder, magic, ritual, and initiation continue to exert a numinous presence within the work of reading." You also use a parable to conceptualize the divide between a world a knowledge and another world "where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge." But are there any pitfalls to wonder? How does one negotiate a sense of "true wonder," if you will, and escape confusing the difficult for the irreducible? Dan Beachy-Quick: Wonder has numerous pitfalls, even dangers. Wonder can so stymie the mind that it disengages from the very world that triggered it. Wonder astonishes; we can find ourselves as if made into stone by it, a kind of witness outside of an ethic. I keep thinking here of Cortez's men who came into Tenochtitlan and saw before their eyes a city as if pulled from the pages of a book, something more than real and so less than real, which allowed them, in part, to commit the atrocity they did. Whenever wonder works so as to disassociate the mind from the world, I think we find ourselves mired in a crisis we seldom see as a crisis, and imagination loses its ethical possibilities in favor of the mere pleasure--not a loving pleasure--of enjoying a world that doesn't actually exist. What concerns me most is wonder as it might reorient us back to the actual, wonder as a threshold to the real--assuming, I guess, that we are in constant need of return to the thing we are already in. KR: You begin "The Hut of Poetry," which was originally published in KR under a different title, with the following sentence: "The difficulty of being a nature poet is that nature always intervenes." Do you consider yourself a nature poet? I ask this because you go on, immediately afterward, to talk about the delayed-ness and paradoxes of perception, a constant theme in your work. "But a home is never the world--a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world--a poem is a separation from the world." The blurb on inside flap of Wonderful Investigations describes it as an exploration of "the problem of duality," but it seems, also, that there are divisions inherent in not just perceiving the world but in turning away from it to write it down. "I look up from 'sparrow' to see sparrow," you write in This Nest, after writing earlier that a poem "forms a lens on a page." From your story "A Point that Flows" (harking back to Plato's definition of the line) there's another semblance of this: "Looking down I saw up." Should poetry aspire to mimesis--"The virtue of an honest ethic, to write only what one sees..."--and is this attainable, or desirable? What are poets to make of this perceptual separation, if it does in fact exist, from the world they wish to access? DBQ: I guess I do consider myself a nature poet. I should qualify that by saying I don't know what else a poet can be. It feels to me there is a world, and we write into it to write about it. But doing so is complicated by the medium of our entry, the offering of the poem that is in itself a world, tied not only to mimesis as a primary crisis, but to the fact of the image as it doubles world to represent it. I'd want to argue for mimesis as a use of language that must attend to itself as it also attends to what it names. I might even suggest that nature knows this about the medium of language, the slippage consciousness creates between word and world as interpenetrating, not wholly embodying, realities. I think this is, in part, what Heraclitus means when he says, "Nature loves to hide." Duality isn't wholly of interest to me. But there is an inevitable arrival in basic dichotomies that poetry recognizes even as it tries to undermine them, keeping together what should fall apart, reconciling opposites. Such work is another reason why Romanticism is so deeply important to me--much of their deepest work occurs here. Praise for A Whaler's Dictionary: "This is a rich, profound, fascinating book, the kind that widens the margins of everything we read, making room for new observations, more creative relationships all around: writer/reader, person/book, literature/life." --Los Angeles Times "A supple and well-read poet with a fine ear, Beachy-Quick has long studied--some might even say he has been obsessed with--Moby-Dick...Often the whale, and the book, represent the endlessness of all quests, our enduring hunger for the right, last word. Jewish philosophy and wisdom literature (Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas), other famous modern thinkers (Wittgenstein, Derrida) and Shakespeare's King Lear also guide Beachy-Quick's thoughts, while the rhythms of not only Melville but Emerson and Thoreau guide his resonant prose." --Publishers Weekly "After immersing himself in Moby Dick for many years, poet and teacher Beachy-Quick found himself embarked on a "mad task." Following Ishmael's lead, he has created a whaler's dictionary...Beachy-Quick's lyric and philosophical dictionary is also a browser's delight, with see also lists that launch the reader on intriguing voyages into the realms of myth and archetype, the sea's blue wilderness, and the uncharted waters of the collective unconscious." --Donna Seaman, Booklist "Essayistic, inventive, and frequently brilliant." --Poetry Foundation "Wounded by a book, wounded by the force of idolatrous speech in Moby-Dick, Dan Beachy-Quick has mounted a kind of folly, a nautilus, enclosing the furtive wall of his own lyric sensibility. A Whaler's Dictionary reminds us why poets must sometimes measure their gifts against the calculus of prose, and why criticism by poets, unlike academic arguments, sometimes produces a flame which stands the test of time." --Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium and Puppet Wardrobe "This is a major work on the charged relationship that can come into being between text and reader, written by one of America's most significant young poets." --Lyn Hejinian, author of Saga/Circus and The Fatalist "A Whaler's Dictionary manages to function as an oddly ideal work of criticism, breathing new life into Moby-Dick and showing how the novel subsists as an intricately living thing." --Virginia Quarterly Review