By Renee Angle

Renee Angle: I've heard your writing described as: "a re-reading," "a reading through," "a creative reading." How do you envision your reading process? How is it different from your writing? Or, is it?

Dan Beachy-Quick: There is the basic difference between reading and writing that the former is receptive and the latter expressive. But that opposition isn’t a rigid one, but a complicated one—complicated, I suppose, in the way a wasp and an orchid whose flower mimics the wasp are complicated. One of the deepest areas of interest to me as someone involved in poetry is to find myself located in the impossible place in which the work of reception is creative, and the work of expression is receptive—these opposites that do not cancel but co-exist. I do feel that reading is the primary activity for me, a kind of practicing attention whose end is to think for myself those thoughts another has struggled to think, and in doing so, not merely making them my own, but complicating that notion of self, of knowledge, of the easy myth of the singular voice. It is from that confounding—in the most literal sense—that the work of writing emerges for me. It is also true, or feels true, that writing a poem increases my ability, and my need, to read. It alters—because it transforms—one’s sensibility.

Renee: How is the word different when it is read (seen) than when it is written (seen)?

Dan: To read is to enter a word already open, a door of sorts set in motion and opened by another. To write is to try and open again that door for oneself—not a selfish work, but a work one does in the absurd hope another might find entrance (to word, to work).

I think that we can see a word as hiding in itself a kind of pivot, a sort of revolving door spinning inside it, in which the same motion allows one in and casts one out. Reading and writing seem to me to share in this motion, or the two-fold exploration of its promises and its consequences. To read is to enter a word already open, a door of sorts set in motion and opened by another. To write is to try and open again that door for oneself—not a selfish work, but a work one does in the absurd hope another might find entrance (to word, to work). It also feels to me that reading releases from the word the intentional momentum the written word contains. It is a nervous motion—as of a nerve—that allows meaning to continue to be meaningful.

Renee: When you talk about the reading that goes on in Moby-Dick as a part of your book A Whaler's Dictionary you observe that the book is "a depth that presents itself as a surface." How is the dimensionality of the book (and with it language and our reading process) changing? Is the book, like a whaling boat, soon to be docked, retired, refashioned or politically incorrect?

Dan: There is a drowning quality to the work of reading that fascinates me. A first page hides underneath it in a very literal sense the depths of those pages to come, and to read a book is to sink into that depth, finding above oneself the pages already read but abandoned, something that in a different guise we might call experience. We see still that which has come before, we remember it, but it is no longer ours. What is ours is what we do not know but what is coming, a kind of fate inscribed ahead of time, at which we can guess, sometimes very accurately, but which still occurs to us—and in us—with an almost classical sense of irony. How is this changing? I don’t fully know. The book for me is a kind of archetypal image, but I do not know to what degree I am alone in feeling so. If it is for others what is for me, I don’t think the book as a symbolic quality loses its force, it changes its manifestations. There are as profound metaphors to be found in hypertext and in virtual books as there are in material ones. As for political correctness, a book does require the destruction of trees, I suppose. But so do the technologies that make possible virtual books require metals mined in atrocious social conditions. This is simply to suggest that one is always morally culpable in the most uncomfortable of ways, and it’s not that what we read should find a way to remove us from this guilt, so much as make us aware that we are involved always in the most intricate forms of consequence. Moby-Dick is a moral book in just such a way, it is Ishmael’s great vision—our "universal cannibalism."

Renee: In A Whaler's Dictionary you observe, "A breath is silent but all words are borne on breath." What do you hear (think about) when you read your work aloud?

Dan: I do my best not to think when I read, but trust the words themselves contain the thinking for themselves. I just try to give voice to the page and to otherwise disappear. Sometimes, when a reading is going well, I can feel in the language a rhythm, a pattern of syllables, of sounds and pauses, and I read so as to stick to that score, that music. The music that is the thinking.

R.A.: Which would you rather read: a platypus, the North Pole, or Gandhi? Why?

Dan: The North Pole, I suppose. The delicacy it would take to read a white text against a white page appeals to me. That is an impossibility of attention that I feel a strange kinship to—the need to read what cannot be read.