A Quote by Dan Beachy-Quick
The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
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They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.
Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.
Our first and true home was Paradise: a land that is both perfect and eternal. So the yearning for that type of life is a part of our being. The problem is that we try to find that here. And so we create ageless creams and cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold on-in an attempt to mold this world into what it is not, and will never be.
The human animal is a fascinating beast. Watching people and trying to learn how and why they do things, and to engage in the somewhat futile attempt to explain them...it's my reason for living I guess...to ask 'why?'. I don't know what else to do with myself. In some strange way it's probably an attempt to understand myself and my own relationship to the world.
A huge part of my career and how I want to participate in the world is being unapologetically myself and being honest and vulnerable.
It is better to understand a part of truth and apply it to our lives than to understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce the mystery of existence.
Art is an attempt to understand, yielding pleasure in the attempt whether or not we understand.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
Comedy is a very delicate business, especially comedies that sort of attempt to do things in an honest way and in a very naturalistic way the way that 'No Strings Attached' is.
I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe.
My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.
If attachment then carries forward in a way that's not healthy, we need to let it be there without making it wrong and bring as compassionate and honest attention to it as possible. Honor that this is part of being human, but it's important to know when it's getting in the way.
It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.
So far I have been speaking of theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world. Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from the first, and has continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men's thoughts.
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