![]() One steps into a space pre-ordained for the possibility of meaning, a hidden grammar undergirding the mind and heart that frees them both from harnessing some “authority” to speak that, in the end, neither might have. Strict form (and here it’s rhyme and syllable and line count all interwoven) creates an invisible frame that might act as does fate. Here it is that a poem’s formal life can come to such surprising liberations. I wanted to find some equivalent in words, some way to participate in the vision, to create poems that let us feel the space in which thought is possible, and maybe marvel at the miracle of such a thing. I also felt this mysterious generosity in the space of the building, this chance to see what we see by, that vision so gently was removed from being merely a means to an end, but was itself the thing being cherished, cared for, allowed to be seen and considered in ways we seldom are allowed or allow ourselves. That feeling, I realized many hours after leaving the building, felt to me the very work a poem requires, and the blank of the page isn’t wholly apart from the blank of light. It was if each square of light meant one had to learn to see by that light and in that light learn to think again. I stepped from square to square, feeling in each arrival no sequence, no consequence, but the invitation to begin again the very same consideration-though of course, in just those few feet of walking in darkness, the same consideration had already become impossible. Maybe I should begin by saying what inspired the poems-some strange almost instantaneous sense of responsibility-was walking into Robert Irwin’s “Untitled (dawn/dusk)” and seeing 18 squares of light cast down on the dark concrete floor. These poems can be described with the phrase you use about the site that inspired them they are, as you say about the physical location: a site of “profound invitation.” Yet this is also true about the poems, as you’ve noted, “the poems form their squares by certain strict procedures.” Can you discuss the interesting paradoxes and aporias organic to the truth that often “profound invitation” (and I’d add “inspired leaps of insight,” which I see in your work) arise from limitation, from strict and restricted necessities? Evanescent and beguiling, each poem’s ever-shifting surface, laced with tropes that echo and repeat, by their very poetics articulate the feeling that most have experienced-that what it is to be human is dazzlingly, tantalizingly near, and only through more acute attention to the texture of existence will we finally comprehend it.ġ …I’m delighted to be publishing another book of yours! VARIATIONS ON DAWN AND DUSK will be our second pocket series book with you. The spare, untitled poems of Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variations on Dawn and Dusk offer an extended ekphrastic meditation on the book’s cover: an image of Robert Irwin’s windows of light infinitely reflected in a dark room…These poems are about as close to music as you get on the page. These structures form a pattern, a thoughtful consistency through which we are invited to move and meditate with each variation of light. Rhythmic procedures inversely link the first and last words of the first and last lines of each poem and tie the number of lines to the number of syllables in the first line. Here, the very foundation of our vision-light-forms the vocabulary from which these poems are built.īuilding from Irwin’s use of rhythm and structure, the poems in this collection are constructed with an architectural framework. The poet’s fervent observations lead us in cycles of meditation, moving with the light that slides through the surfaces of the installation. Through this deeply engaged ekphrasis, Dan Beachy-Quick uses language to participate in the overpowering elegance of Irwin’s structure. Built on the footprint of the town’s old hospital, Irwin’s permanent installation is a remarkable structure with walls, windows, and screens that both capture and are taken over by the sun’s changing light. Acting as poetic records of light, the poems in Variations on Dawn and Dusk follow the sun as it warms, cools, colors, and shifts the space of Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in the desert of Marfa, TX. ![]()
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