Best 12 quotes of Dan Beachy-quick on MyQuotes

Poetry challenges you. Much of its importance is that it's one of the few places left in culture that makes things difficult-it asks you to think, to perceive and not to take for granted what we think about the world.

The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.

[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see-thoughtfully.

Antique Foundation Here I built the ruin in My voice on either side of me In the temple the ocean could Not be a crowd I mined The shore with fog the sun dries These bricks I built the vision in The cinder block that is the city Wall this grave Tone I speak with a picture Of myself in my wallet • Don’t be fooled by grass and these words Grass whispers Because they are real they are Ruinous Here, the gossip is in the dust Not the sea cloud enters the open Child’s window dimming the silver Flute’s sheen Where is he Who hears inside the brick those notes? There is a rumor in the city we’ll exist If he plays his song no one knows • Follow that shadow don’t tell me it’s mine Here there is no being alone Here are my hands which tore the leaves so Quietly in the temple the god Emerging from marble points at the chisel At the base of his stone Did I tell you Where I’m going? To the old man Who sings the margin Where on wave-tip swords turn edge over edge Wound us and the shore with foam • My face on either side of my face I tore My picture in half to show the gate You must climb inside your breath to leave As fog the wind will bear you— If you’re lovely—away In the spare clouds The children’s chorus Do you hear?— Where were you, and where are you going? Here I built the ruin in the stone-crushed Sage leaves my hands scented as long ago When I liked to press the desert against my head to think

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

Lines The lightning struck him and left a scar. The wind stopped blowing and the wheat stood up. Self-tensed self, who is this I that says I ? I had a scar in the shape of  lightning That split in half when I opened my mouth. The sun  just a circle of  heat in the sky Throwing absence in the shape of clouds Down on the field. Another life placed In the middle of  the life I called my own. A lesser god commanded the front: return. A little god knocked about in the germ. The third person put me outside my own sphere. A small god chanting lightning in the synapse. Wind blows the wheat down. He calls it prayer.

Poem (Internal Scene) To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes— No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow? No damns them, damns them, and so they cry. What shape can I swallow to make me whole? Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted wood That fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box? The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? Loud Knock when the shape won’t unlock any locks. I hear it through the static in the baby’s room When the monitor clicks on and off, sound Of sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks, Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives down Past sight, down there dark with the other blocks? It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse, This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.

Ritual Version —for Kate Middleton humself, shamself, hymnself, shameself—. lameself, lambself, numbself, unself—. sing anger, goddess, of—. many devices—. sing anger godless—. tell me who—. sacred in the sea suffered so many woes—. bookshelf, doubtshelf, debtshelf, riftshelf—. driftshelf, truthshelf, foolshelf, rueshelf—. sing less the many souls sent—. they perished—. sing spoils for the dogs—. who swallowed down the foolish song—. the soul and its companions—. nounself, nonceself, nonself, lashself—. ashself, lawself, thoughtself, aughtself—. tell me, muse, from any point—. and birds—. sing less the wrath of—. a man’s cleverness—. tell also us—. of recklessness—. of home—.

Some Consequences of the Made Thing The End. Above these words the sky closes. It closes by turning white. Not The white of all clouds or being within a cloud. White of worldless light. The End. Feel a silence there that reminds you of a scent. Crushed grass the hooves galloped through Or is it the binder’s glue? Some silence never not real finally can be Heard. Silence before the first words. Precedent chaos. Or marrow work. Or just the sound of the throat opening to speak. Like those scholars of pure water Who rode through mountains and meadows To drink from each fresh spring a glass And then with brush and ink wrote poems On the differences of sameness, You too feel yourself taste the silent page Of the end and the silent page of beginning. They taste so much of whiteness never more White than white that’s been lost. You have some sense of the book Altering, page sewn secretly next to page, Last page stitched to first. O, earth— It rolls around the solar scroll Turning nothing into years and years into Nothing. At The End you’re a witness to this work That wears the witness away. And who are you Anyway. Pronoun of the 2nd person. Lover, Stranger, God. Student, Child, Shade. Something similar gathers in you. Another way of saying I in a poem— Of saying I in a poem that realizes at the end That I am just a distance from myself. And so are you. That same distance.

The Cricket and the Grasshopper The senseless leaf   in the fevered hand Grows hot, near blood-heat, but never grows Green. Weeks ago the dove’s last cooing strain Settled silent in the nest to brood slow Absence from song. The dropped leaf cools On the uncut grass, supple still, still green, Twining still these fingers as they listless pull The tangle straight until the tangle tightens And the hand is caught, another fallen leaf. The poetry of the earth never ceases Ceasing — one blade of grass denies belief Until its mere thread bears the grasshopper’s Whole weight, and the black cricket sings unseen, Desire living in a hole beneath the tangle’s green.

Totality of Spheres excerpt : Far-night comes our consummation in time star shapes in separate lakes the you-sheen : Rag to wipe down the child’s mercury brow blood-heat doesn’t end it begins our work : Egret at pond’s edge of mind vague regret of venus holding an apple holding her breath : Lust wants what wound it can find heals the harm by balming the blade : Himself he says to himself the trembling king creates a cloud to hide away the hours : Rhyme in a ring undoes into child’s song time’s titan rule a no-atom-bell resounding : Obit of the discarded orders or truth suffers into oblivion or the fact wears a shroud : Lain down at long last the bones beauty wore inside herself on ocean bed lovely : Sings in the outermost undergrove shadowwaste soulspent worldwant some form or art : Your word some angel I guess some cherub embroidered on the veil that note : Word sewn on the love veil solar sail star primer tone tome tomb the readerless name