Song by Dan Beachy-Quick

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 25, 2014   Song   Dan Beachy-Quick

The wars are everywhere, o even within. Drawn in poor bee by the dance loud hum Of some other tribe, poor bee. Even the center, even the heart, Keeps a sting sharp: art stings thought, thought stings art. Petty realm of the long known. Are there other ways to learn to sing? Clash of long dead blades in the fallow fields And the wind that blows truce for an hour whistles loud the rash Martial tune. Some scribe handles himself. “Use it,” sings the song.              Copyright © 2014 by Dan Beachy-Quick. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This ‘Song’ comes from a chapbook, to be published by Omnidawn next April, titled Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs. It’s deeply concerned with the ways in which poetry, like a shield, often becomes a token of the violence it means most to avert. Seven ‘shield’ poems suffer a damage via erasure to become ‘shards,’ the shards are again acted against to leave the barest sense of ‘stitches’ in hope that the sutured wound could allow the healing that becomes ‘songs.’ This ‘Song’ is the final result of one shield altering through the entire process—a way, I hope, not to sing simply against the impossibly large human history of war, but to sing through it.” –Dan Beachy-Quick   Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo Press, 2011). He is a Monfort Professor in Colorado State University’s MFA creative writing program and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Most Recent Book by Beachy-Quick   Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo Press, 2011) "Light (an Ars Poetica)" by Michael Cirelli "Why Poetry Can Be Hard for Most People" by Dorothea Lasky "Dawn" by James Laughlin Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038