How to Draw a Circle: On Reading and Writing

What is it to write a poem? What work do words do when placed with care and vision into the intensely charged space of poetic effort? How to Draw a Circle does not seek to answer those questions, but to encounter them as fully and honestly as one can. The thread running through the essays is an ongoing investigation into poetry as an epistemological experiment, one which binds the imagination to the worldly, and trusts that creative endeavor is a form of participation in the ongoing creation of the world. It does so in part by focusing on thinkers, poets, writers, and literary movements where such thinking for a while prevailed, from Socrates to Melville, Mythology to Romanticism. Here the poem is approached as something deeply rooted in human consciousness, done so not to make an atavistic claim about poetry’s history, but to show the ways in which oldest tradition gives us ever-new eyes. The hope this book gathers around is that poetry--poetic expression, the wild wonder of working in words--turns us back toward the world in more vibrant, more open, more ethical ways. How to Draw a Circle summons lyric powers--not an argument, but a participation in the ways poetry works in us and on us.

Dan Beachy-Quick is University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Colorado State University. His books of poetry include, Circle’s Apprentice (2011, Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry), gentlessness (2015), Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019) and Arrows (2020). In 2016 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.