Much of my curiosity about this earliest philosophy is its refusal to demarcate between—what are now for us—different modes of knowing. Here philosophy, poetry, theology, natural science, astrology, history, and myth all keep their wondrous tangle together. I wanted to recapture something of wonder—that wonder where the deep spring of our intellectual lives still has its source. To offer some semblance of reading as a first encounter, I decided to strip the fragments from their academic garments—no list of sources—and to hedge away from any received sense of ordering. The hope was to create a poem anew from the fragments remaining, to build around root images, to let themes twine together, to create an order that felt a natural extension of the perceptive mind that first glimpsed the possibility of such thinking. I hoped to be faithful to the original language without being merely devout—that is, to stay true to the words themselves, and yet excavate the riches of certain etymologies, to make sure something of the thick texture of a vital word could be felt, and to unfold the insinuations of images to the greatest extent I could manage. The result, or so I hope it to be, is a strange poem of an ongoing lyric now, not timeless exactly, but ongoing in our most human present tense.
Read the poem this note is about, “On Nature.”
Poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick was born in Chicago and raised in Colorado and upstate New York. He was educated at Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the University of Iowa.
Beachy-Quick's poetry collections include North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle's...