[Wgcp-whc] 1st session--on Dan Beachy-Quick, 10/1

[Richard Deming]

 Dear Poeticians,

Before announcing our upcoming sessions, I wanted to make mention of the sad news that the poet C. K. Williams died this week.  Members of the WGCP will recall that Williams joined us in the fall of 2013 so that we could discuss his volume Writers Writing Dying.  He was warm and generous and it was a very memorable session.  He was a terrific talent and will be sorely missed.

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The new semester is up and running and we’ll soon have our first session of the WGCP.  Our first session will be on 10/2 from 3 PM - 5 PM in the Whitney Humanities Center.  The focus of our first session will the most recent collection of poem’s by Dan Beachy-Quick, gentlessness. Copies of this book are available in rm 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  This copies are free and available to interested participants.  The number of copies is limited. We  ask that you only take a copy if you plan to make at least one of the two sessions devoted to Beach-’Quick’s collection.  Also, they go very quickly, so don’t hesitate in going to get one.

 The second session will be on 10/16 from 3 PM - 5 PM. For that discussion, the poet himself will join us.

Here is DB-Q’s official bio:

 Author or co-author of fourteen books of poetry, exploratory prose, and fiction, Dan Beachy-Quick’s previous Tupelo volumes are Mulberry (2006), This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), and Circle’s Apprentice (2011). His work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, and he has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family. 


Here is a recent micro-review of gentlessness published in The Boston Review.  




Gentlessness
by Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press, <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.tupelopress.org_books_gentlessness&d=AwIFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=Wv-FChPIYozrmvMKRuHmxQEBEWCLmKc9M2L_LdpEOUI&m=YPJzKJLt4d34VWjJrR1OYcxFTKVsE_NRclSkMJnymTM&s=sYZ6HV9t7flo8QYEQhnyRtgujU17csIQbuuwOdKUmnY&e= > 
 
 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.tupelopress.org_books_gentlessness&d=AwIFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=Wv-FChPIYozrmvMKRuHmxQEBEWCLmKc9M2L_LdpEOUI&m=YPJzKJLt4d34VWjJrR1OYcxFTKVsE_NRclSkMJnymTM&s=sYZ6HV9t7flo8QYEQhnyRtgujU17csIQbuuwOdKUmnY&e= >With the assertion “that that what is is an all / * / all filled with what fills it,” Dan Beachy-Quick’s gentlessness begins with a logic of latent catch-all-ness, using repetition that resembles the terms of a syllogism. Interlocking and propelling themselves like gears, tautologies such as these lines are especially present in “monadism: a proem,” the book’s first section, where Beachy-Quick probes two taproot poetic structures: the fragment and the aphorism, both memorable, pithy, and chiastic. The fragment “soul so simple a sense,” for example, opens the heady idea of “sense” (which Keats called the literacy of a child) into a spiritual range. Beachy-Quick’s sense of soul is as varied as a bookshelf: gentlessness’s seven sections tour the lyric’s roots in song, prayer, and diaristic confession, then offer resounding sonnets of “romanticisms” and portraits of “modernisms.” While Beachy-Quick proves to be a unique neologist and aphorist in his own right, he harmonizes with a chronicle of influences. In “Heroisms,” the section that takes up the unsound, phallocentric, and desirous fallacies of an epic hero, the poet demonstrates that “There is a way to think that asks no questions / But divides every question in two.” Gazing through soulful influence turns the poet inward, where poetry’s extensions mirror its source: “Myself is a word to describe / this field that I cannot see / the end of, this field I tend, / burying the dead in rows, // burying the sea, burying seeds. / If there is another horizon / I have not seen it.” —Sean Zhuraw


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 And as ever:

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets several Fridays over the course of the semester at 3.00 PM in  the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.  We meet to discuss problems and issues of contemporary lyric poetry. All are welcome to attend.

 

We look forward to seeing you all soon.

 Richard Deming, Coordinator

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