Dan Beachy-Quick 'A Whaler's Dictionary'

Dan Beachy-Quick's 'A Whaler's Dictionary' is a rich, densely written, alphabetically-organized analysis of the themes and tropes in Melville's classic 'Moby Dick'. It is earnest, provocative, and possessed of singular intellectual purpose and integrity. But it is as a poet that B-Q has made his name, and it is disappointing to discover in this volume his preference for philosophical investigation over what might be called the phenomenon of revealed truth in literature, especially given that his central concern is to interrogate language and the way in which it can be said to navigate the chasm between known and unknown. B-Q has published three or four books of poetry and is, by some accounts, approaching 'greatness' as a poet, but he displays in this work remarkably little fealty to his craft. His thought is steeped in theory, and it is through the strong lens of ethically-minded interlocutors that he focuses on the core or message of Moby Dick, as if Melville's language were only an outer garment or vehicle for the 'meaning' within.

This is a curious position for a poet to take up, and it doesn't much incline me toward his poetry. He shows himself to be a thinker of great acuity, but his theories are dualistic, aiming at essences, absolutes; his delivery is solemn, Hebraic - the book seems more a work of biblical exegesis than of literary analysis, saturated with reverence, liturgical, profound. His short, aphoristic sentences are prophetic in tone, and what an anti-creative, inorganic message they convey! Language as 'prison', language as pure surface, a mask; signifier may never actually connect with signified, or, if it does, the event is cataclysmic, chaotic, and most of all, UNFORMED, form being but the calcification of uncreated essence - a "pasteboard mask", to use Melville's term. And if Melville believed as much himself, that is besides the point, because it is as a stunning poetic achievement that Moby Dick has secured its fame, and not as a philosophical treatise. Its poetic diction alone belies the theory that those dark roots of our sunlit world are forever inaccessible. They are inaccessible to the instruments of analysis, perhaps, but surely not to revelation. Truly creative work partakes of this rootbed and is no stranger to its darkness, but its moments of paradoxical illumination are achieved unexpectedly, indirectly. The poetic image speaks to an angle of the self which is hitherto unknown; it speaks that angle into being by virtue of its sensual qualities, its texture and its sonic percussions, which are in some essential way identical with its meaning.
In his 'Preoccupations' Seamus Heaney refers to the poet's music as derived "not from the literate parts of his mind, but from its illiterate parts, dependent not upon what Jacques Maritain called his 'intellectual baggage' but what I might call his instinctual ballast", and he later refers to ways in which a poet might "go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate". This is the approach to language I would have thought natural for a poet to consider when he/she meditates upon its value, but B-Q seeks, like Ahab himself, to penetrate his submarine world directly and, like Ahab, cannot do so without betraying somewhat his oeuvre.

To this reader's mind, truths such as discussed in 'A Whaler's Dictionary' do not readily open to thought, but sometimes come whole to poets who do not presume to know what they might be ahead of time. Moby Dick's treatment of the theme is ambiguous; its prolific reference to language continually underscores the limits, rather than the scope, of the written word's potential, but does not the language of the sharks, of the white wake of the ship upon the ocean, of the flaming mastheads and ghostly apparitions speak a different route to our mysterious depths, (a route which does not lead to the unknown but begins there), and is not this the cherished function of poetic language generally, its capacity for surprise, its unconditioned openness? So that from one perspective it might fail to connect with our 'truth' but from another redefine what that truth is and so show us the limit of our method, the error located at last not in language but in the questions we ask of it, which questions have only to do with oppositions, limits, barriers, and impossibilities?