Poetry Reading: Dan Beachy-Quick
The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and Changing Hands proudly present a poetry reading with Dan Beachy-Quick, in which he will read selections from his latest collection, "Of Silence and Song" (Milkweed Editions), along with new and other work.
While RSVPs are encouraged, they are purely for the purpose of attendance monitoring and gauging interest. You do not need to bring your registration or RSVP to the event. You do not need to register or RSVP to attend. This event is open to the public and free. To learn more, visit the event's Facebook page.
At Work in Sound and Vision: A Poetry Workshop with Dan Beachy-Quick will take place the following day on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018, at the Piper Writers House. To learn more and register, you can visit the class page.
For more talks, readings and other literary events, visit our website at http://piper.asu.edu/events.
About the Book
Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. "Of Silence and Song" follows him through the forest of his experience, on a classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life.
In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing and poetry, Beachy-Quick traces relationships and the identities through which he sees the world. As father and husband. As teacher and student. As citizen and scholar. And as poet and reader, wondering at the potential and limits of literature, and guided by his studies in ancient Greek.
"Of Silence and Song" finds its inferno — and its paradise — in moments both historically vast and nakedly intimate. Our world’s disappearing bees, James Eagan Holmes, Columbine and the persistent, unforgivable crime of slavery — these are the circles of hell Beachy-Quick wanders, but cannot escape. And yet he encounters redemption in the art of Marcel Duchamp, the pressed flowers in Emily Dickinson’s Bible and long walks with his youngest daughter, Iris. “The litany in hell is weeping, weeping,” he writes, “but there are other litanies.”
Curious, earnest and masterful, "Of Silence and Song" is an unforgettable exploration of the human soul.
About Dan Beachy-Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick is the author, most recently, of a collection of essays, fragments and poems, "Of Silence and Song" (Milkweed, 2017). He has written six books of poetry, "gentlessness," "Circle’s Apprentice," "North True South Bright," "Spell," "Mulberry" and "This Nest, Swift Passerine"; six chapbooks, "Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs," "Apology for the Book of Creatures," "Overtakelesness," "Heroisms," "Canto" and "Mobius Crowns" (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy); a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, "A Whaler’s Dictionary"; as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, "Wonderful Investigations." Reddy and Beachy-Quick’s collaboration has recently been released as a full-length collection, "Conversities," and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on "Work From Memory." In 2013, University of Iowa Press published a monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series edited by Robert D. Richardson titled "A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work," and Coffee House Press published his first novel, "An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky." He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space and West Branch. After graduating from the University of Denver, he attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has taught at Grinnell College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and taught as visiting faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in spring 2010. He was one of two Monfort Professors at CSU between 2013 and 2015, and his work has been supported by the Guggenheim Fellow and by a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University.