The itch to write attacks me whenever I read Dan Beachy-Quick. Today, I came across an essay where he says that becoming a poet means accepting the debt of others as one’s own, and working to repay it so that the dead can be freed from their own debts of bondage. The work, here, involves forgetting the poems one has loved in order to be able to write one’s own.

He looks at a psalm, noticing how reading transforms each word from anticipation to memory.

Of Menelaus’ wife, he says: “A cloud is just dirt holding its breath.”

Of Augustine, he says forgetting is an awareness of “absence being present.”

Of betrayal, he says one the poet betrays the poem by desiring “quiet in words” or “silence in music.”

Of Greek verbs, he admires their middle voice as the space “when the verb acts upon itself.”

Beachy-Quick wrote his undergraduate thesis on Czeslaw Milosz and eschatology because he was curious about the end of time as a beginning. “Each memory has its own life,” he says, even though it pretends to be a replay of our own lives. Each memory makes its separate demands of us. I thought of the ghost who demands too much of its host — how this ghost is named a vampire, or one who sucks life from the veins of the living.

I use his essays as prompts. For example, this page which lists “Titles of Forgotten Books” makes me think of Anne Carson’s short lectures, and tiny prose poems that speak obliquely to a subject, leaning into a Dickinsonian slant. One might pick three titles from this list and use them as titles of short lectures, borrowing the form from Carson or Mary Ruefle.

DBQ teaches me to play with etymology continuously, unceasingly, as a monk prays atop a mountain which cannot be the peak of any world. Take a word you love — oracle, shell, carapace— and then do two things to it. Stain it and strain it. The difference between staining a word, where stain is to “tinge with color other than the natural one”, and strain is “to draw tight”, can illuminate how a word bounces inside its modifiers and context. A question to consider during edits, when eyeing a phrase or word: Do I want to stain this word or strain it? Why?