In an era defined by faceless internet anonymity and the clean-lined, isolating imperative of personal branding, the poems of Therapon emerge as a radical counterpoint. This collaborative work by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond opens itself to the messy, convoluted, and powerfully transformative experience of encountering others. It is a call to re-evaluate the possibilities of connection and the ethical responsibility embedded in every relationship we forge. Rooted in the ancient Greek concept of therapon, a figure of care, service, and companionship, the book invites readers to consider how language, collaboration, and reading can become acts of care. Through its loosely dialogic structure, Therapon blurs the boundaries between self and other, writer and reader, familiar and unfamiliar. It asks us to confront the tension between estrangement and connection, and to see poetry as a space where the unknown in ourselves and others might be embraced rather than feared.

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CJ: The title Therapon and its opening quote by Emmanuel Levinas suggest a profound, ethical responsibility in how we relate to one another. Could you speak to how this idea of care, whether through language, collaboration, or the act of reading, shaped the creation of Therapon?

 

DBQ: Bruce and I met years ago, wholly randomly at an AWP in Chicago, and have been talking off and on ever since. One of the topics that came up over the years was a mutual love of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. His Totality and Infinity is a book that altered and revealed to me my own poetic ethics and care, forces still driving my poems (I hope) today. That quote is a powerful one to me, too: “Language is not enacted within a consciousness; it comes to me from the Other and reverberates by putting it in question.” The first clause is critical—that language isn’t an inner consciousness. It counters every assumption we might make about our primary relation to language. But I do think it’s true to say that for a poet, or a poet of a certain kind, language must become a radically external material. Then a poem isn’t a divulging of one’s inner-mind, but the poem is a consciousness of its own. Language is other and of the Other—that is, I have no language that is private to myself alone. The poem is a gentle, if shocking, reminder that another’s life is a reality that isn’t just as real as my own is, but one that supersedes my own. That’s a very long-winded way to get to your question. In darkest COVID days Bruce would send me a 13-line poem, which I would read, and create a poem in response whose fundamental ethic was only to listen to what the first poem had said—a kind of care, or tending, that in Levinas’s terms, might well mean that my poem had to learn to vibrate with the consciousness of Bruce’s. The core of the collaboration, and the place where I still find myself most moved by our endeavor, is that Bruce had to treat my poem with the same ethical care with which I had tried to treat his. Sometimes I think of the book as a set of poems striving only to listen to one another.

 

BB: I love Dan’s work, so attending to his poems offered me not only the pleasures of reading them but also those of writing as a means of deepening that reading act. The art of “attention” as a mode of care implies an “attending,” aka a therapon. Such engagement models a breed of ethics wherein our sense of ourselves as autonomous “containers” becomes less tenable. What Dan says of the collaborative poem as a consciousness of its own is profound. Moreover, while a less individually circumscribed consciousness is implicit in the inter-relations that make language possible, Therapon embodies a more specific relation, a dyadic correlative to the “face to face” encounter that Levinas emphasizes as primary to the ethical. Such relations encourage a sense of the other “as” other, aka a person, versus a mere category of understanding. We are not only constituted of otherness, for reasons Dan expressed, but also summoned to the other. We are called to attend by virtue of the fact that we are creatures of language. Key to ethics is both honoring the limits of understanding and acknowledging it is not in us to avert our gaze entirely.  We can neither extricate otherness from “our nature” nor presume to occupy its space. Because, for Levinas, people and their world are infinities, not self-referring totalities, we may presume to master our subject, but that presumption is an illusion born of the will to power. Thus, Levinas makes a very useful distinction: “the good of a relation is different than the good in a relation.” The good of a relation is a construct, an idea, and, as such, it can be marketed.  The good in a relation cannot. In terms of the book, collaboration with Dan gave me a way of immersing myself, of honoring the good in a relation. To suggest, as Levinas does, where knowledge ends, love begins is to acknowledge a fundamental dissonance between love and power (however much we all need both and are called to honor those needs in others). 

 

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CJ: The collection often refers to the reader as “stranger,” evoking Levinas’s idea of the Other as fundamentally unknowable. Yet, there’s also an invitation to “cross the river” and engage with this otherness. How do you envision the reader’s role in this process of connection? Is the act of reading itself a form of care or service?

 

DBQ: To answer this question, I want to go back to so something Bruce spoke of earlier, the “face to face” ethic essential to Levinas. The point, reading any Levinas, holds absolutely true—and yet, over the past few years and for reasons I can’t explain to myself, I’ve wondered how possible it is to look at the other directly in the face. One wants to, for reasons of love and ethics both, but there is an abashed instinct to also look aside that feels important to me. Maybe it comes from all the years of translating ancient Greek, where “shame” is a more complicated emotion than you figure it for ourselves—a shameless man is nearly the worst man one can imagine (a truth it feels we’re living now). In a very odd way, perhaps wholly fallacious, I’ve come to think of the poem as a sort of veil. Many things here are on my mind: Helen of Troy running to the Scaean Gates at Priam’s request, a thin white shawl pressed back against her face as she runs; Rilke’s insistence our relation to our beloved should be to preserve their mystery, not to enter into it; Dickinson writing “the thought beneath so thin a film / is more distinctly seen;” Keats’s “Penetralium,” and the veils behind which the ark of the covenant was hidden. All of which is to say, I think of the poem sometimes as the veil which obscures just enough the face of the other to let that face be seen. If it’s so, then I think the poem functions for the reader, any reader, as it does for the poet—it lets the mystery the poem obscures gain presence enough to be not only described, but love-able, but capable of ethical demand and ethical care. Not only is reading an act of care or service, it’s an act of utmost vitality, lending back to words dead on the page the blood and breath they need to live again. Ethics feels the work of the living, and the ethical instrument must itself be alive, must call us to life, as I believe poems do.

 

BB: I love that, how Dan’s aesthetics of veils likewise articulates an ethics, as suggested by his examples of the degenerate nature of the shameless and, in contrast, the virtue in preserving the mystery of the beloved.  I am intrigued by a related sense of beauty as charitable. Certainly beauty, understood as humanely complex and engaged, constitutes a gift. Or the sister notion, how an act of kindness can be beautiful. I find Breton useful, his singular criterion for beauty: the marvel. What he honors in his first manifesto is an aesthetics of shadows, roots, wells, closets, occult spaces of the day to day. The marvel suggests an interior, in both poem and reader, and so a quality of attention drawn down some narrowing path into the woods.  What the beautiful and the good have in common is that quality of care they inspire, a reverence for the unknowable, how it calls upon us to give up some measure of control. Or to see such control as an illusion. To write as Dan’s reader took an act of care, or, as you say, “service,” but truth is, at the time, it felt less altruistic. More like play, a coming together, a letting go. With every email from Dan, a new box of toys. As for some ideal associated with “the reader’s role in this process,” I can only speak for myself as reader. I never thought to conceive Dan’s role, perhaps because I had confidence in him. To expect his care begs another question: care of what? That question of whether Dan “heard me” or took adequate care never crossed my mind.  I was more interested in where Dan wanted to go. My trust in Dan never wavered. When it comes to readers beyond Dan, I do not recall ever thinking about them. To the degree that such thoughts activate a writer’s ego, they feel contrary to priorities that make a poem a poem, a curative space as opposed to a performative surface. This said, all language is ghosted by a sense of a reader, a listener, a desire for exchange. Moreover, as a writer, I am entrusted with a level of care while attending to the alterities of history and culture that make words possible. In light of this, all writing is, to some degree, a collaboration. 

 

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CJ: The poems in Therapon often feel like a therapeutic dialogue, not just between voices within the text but also between the text and the reader. Lines like, “The voice will carry a spoon/ & the medicine will heal what’s in me” (":9," p. 18), further suggest a therapeutic quality to this language. Did writing these poems feel like a kind of “talking cure” for you? Do you hope readers might experience a similar effect?

 

BB: No doubt, writing, when humanized by the imagination, can be therapeutic. Writing provides a means of walking through the walls that divide us from ourselves. Like a toy that way, a symbol, a dream. But also, I find something healing in the care taken just to make something. It could be a chair, a joke, a conversation. We need first to listen, to get to know our materials. To make is to participate in that “call to life” that Dan mentions. It also helps us feel, in the depth of our solitude, less alone. Sure, I hope readers will connect to Therapon, but so much of that is beyond my control.  If it happens, it’s a gift.  Indeed, such gifts can make one feel less isolated.  But the actual making of the poem retains it solitary mystery. What I can do, immersed in the process, is to try to infuse language with what I personally value, then the poems wander off like kids who never write home. A writer’s relation to a generalized conception of readers is not, of course, a genuine relation. It can never be reciprocal. Nor is what one writes equivalent to a self. But these and the many other failures of language are what gives birth to poetry and its eros, its call to life. We do not love what we possess. To cherish is to turn outward and inward at the same time. The poems I admire do that. In a failure to grasp and master, they occupy the space of myth: they give imagination the means to negotiate questions and anxieties that defy the powers of reason to resolve. They are love letters to the unknown as a realm within us and beyond.

 

DBQ: Thinking both of Bruce’s framing here of the gift, and the quote in the question, that image of the sick kid getting his medicine by the teaspoon, I remember how many of the core images in Therapon have a child-like quality to them. I remember in the back-and-forth play of collaborating with Bruce feeling that I’d never written as closely to my own childhood as I was doing in these poems. I used to scoff at the notion of poetry as therapeutic in nature, thinking (in some youthful arrogance) that poetry didn’t heal or comfort, that it had some higher purpose. That sort of foolish pride has been dismantled in me, and I’ve come to love and cherish poetry’s kindness, its promise to love all in us we might fear is unlovable, its inherent need to honor but not judge, and to do so, in part, by taking upon or within itself the burdens we ourselves have been carrying, often without knowing we are—not until we’ve written the poem, that is. It’s there in the very word therapon, which deep in its meaning suggests a substitute for the self (as Patroclus put on Achilles’ armor and went to battle in place of the sulking hero)—the poem puts on aspects of our own life, to free us for a little while from the difficulty of living it.

 

 

CJ: The idea of collaboration seems central to Therapon, not just in the sense of co-creation but also in the way the poems invite the reader to participate. How do you see collaboration (whether with other writers, the reader, or even the text itself) shaping the ethical and emotional dimensions of the work? Will you be collaborating like this again?

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DBQ: In many ways, I’m simply inclined to quote what Bruce said earlier, that “all writing is, to some degree, a collaboration.” I do have a sense of the poem as a form of radical trust that there is a you who is capable of finding it, reading it, and so—in a profound sense—co-creating the work. That relation to that mystery of you is one of nuanced ethics. I agree with Bruce, that a poem written to a sense of some specific audience is somehow outside the bounds of how I know how to imagine what my poems want or do. To put it back in the terms of Levinas, so central to this conversation, a poem that prefigures its reader, a poem that assumes it knows what its reader wants, is a poem that puts the reader in service of it rather than the ethical opposite. A poem shouldn’t define the reader, but open itself to the reader, and so doing, open the reader more honestly to themselves. I also have a keen and humble sense of the material language is—that every syllable I speak has been lived by countless others, and every word bears within it a realm of experience, joys and loves and terrors and fears, that exceed the limit of my own life. Language is shared, or it wouldn’t work as language. In this sense, too, I feel the work of poetry is always a shared, collaborative work.

 

BB: I love this notion of Dan’s that a poem should open-to versus define a reader. So too a collaborator. For collaboration to work, one needs to welcome the enlargement of imaginative resources that come with letting go. The implied imperative in Dan’s insight also describes a way of being more realistic. Insofar as we have readers, we give our poems away. One of the satisfactions of my work with Dan was the immediacy of a back-and forth, something distinct from what we mean by collaboration with a generalized sense of “readers” or the “text itself.” For ethics in Levinas to prove useful, we need to be realistic about what his ethical relation cannot be. It cannot depend upon a symmetry of engagement. To suggest as much would likewise define a reader. I heard recently a critique of Levinas that questioned the notion of being able to have an ethical, face-to-face relation with a monster, aka a Nazi. I think that critique is confused. His ethical relation is not Buberian. Levinas articulates no expectation of reciprocity. His high standard of alterity is rare, that’s true. Aside from legitimate reservations about the fullness or efficacy of his ethics, Levinas articulates a beautiful reality: there is a wilderness in kindness. A love of the darkness when the movie ends. I find that personally useful. Naturally, I hope a reader feels invited to participate in “the play” of meaning. But that imaginary reader is one of those movies. As for your final question about collaborating with Dan again, no idea. Probably a new project would need a fresh catalyst, but I must say, working with Dan is a rare honor and a pleasure.

 

 

CJ: The recurring image of “the boat in the barn” feels deeply tied to a kind of diaspora of self, an existential otherness that both estranges and compels us toward connection. How did you navigate this tension within your collaboration? How did you effectively perform otherness for each other? Was there anything about the process that deepened or perhaps even threatened your personal connection to each other?

 

BB: I love how you picked up on a diaspora of self. Odd, how an inbred sense of exile becomes existential, once it feels essential, that is, a defining feature of who we are. In existential terms, the fact that we are. All of us in that Twilight Zone where the man goes back to his childhood in his adult body and meets himself as a kid who, in turn, is creeped out a little. Primarily, for me, I am an exile not only from the past, but from what I thought a self could be. Identity is an ever-shifting description crucial to everyone’s well-being, yes, and too often taken for granted, but consciousness is always bigger. Infinite, Levinas says. A surplus gives life to everything we love. That idea can be reassuring, if not liberating.  Moreover, because the self is not a container, it can never be extricated from otherness. We are other. Poems put you in touch with that. The process with Dan was so smooth, I just fell into a trance and went with it. We’ll always be friends. 

 

DBQ: That image—and maybe this goes back to a realization that let me write about my own childhood experience in ways I never thought before to try—comes directly from my long-ago summers. I’d spend them in upstate New York with my father and grandparents, in the house my grandmother was born in, and there was a large barn in a fairly significant state of disrepair. On the main floor where stable and hay used to be kept was a sailboat—it must have been some 25 feet long. As a kid, though I was strictly told not to go into the barn (so many dangers, including a rotting floor), I’d sneak in and stare at it, run my hands along its white hull, look up at mast to the rafters, sunlight sneaking in and making beams in the dust. It felt like magic to me—an image that sunk deep down in my unconscious. I hadn’t thought of it as an image of self. To be honest, I’m not yet sure what that image means to me, the symbol of it is so large, so—as Bruce says—in surplus of myself. And just as Bruce says, I felt no tension at all in the collaboration, no threat to self or connection to one another. Far the opposite—the collaboration felt like a permission I could not grant myself, to write with a kind of otherly care and trusting ease I seldom feel when writing poems.

 

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CJ: Finally, Therapon feels like a book for our current moment, one that challenges us to rethink how we relate to one another in an increasingly isolated world. The lines, “I know. The mind a museum. Standing in front/ Of the display where I think about the display” embody this absurdity in a way that challenges both the performance of self and the institutions that actively inculcate this mentality. In what ways do you hope readers will respond to this collection, especially in terms of how we might approach connection, care, and change in our own lives?

 

DBQ: The museum is such a strange figure in these poems and in my mind. It seems like such a minor thing to say, though it bewilders me, that a museum is of the Muses, and the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, Memory herself. I remember the magic of the Natural History Museum, standing before those dioramas freezing a moment of life into some eternal now—it felt even then like some kind of lesson. Now I feel how deeply all our use of language is tied to memory, long chains of lived association that cling to every word we say or write, the Museum that is the mind. All of this is to say that I hope we can see such places not as institutions that inculcate such absurdity (though often they are just that), but spaces of another nature, sacred in their way, that initiate us back into our capacity for love not as a museum relic, but as what is ethically demanded of us when we walk out the museum, close memory’s doors, and step toward others, alive as we are ourselves, in the world.

 

BB: Certainly the image of the mind standing in front of a display suggests the intimate distance we feel in the presence of the past: not “history” as that which has passed but rather as the story of its passing. Critical to the uncanny sense of a diorama: it cannot look back. You become the darkness in the glass eye of a stranger, as indeed we are in the eyes of past spirits come to visit. Not unlike the darkness in the eyes of the images online, including those of one’s self. I agree that the themes of the book as a whole resonate strongly in our cultural moment, not only because of a current epidemic of alienation, but because that alienation seeks connection in something other than genuine relation. Technological mediation divides that which it connects, in part because it promises more than it can realistically deliver. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han once wrote, “Smartphones make us lonely.” One reason: viewers occupy a unilateral position of power as they scroll and vet countless images and texts as illusions of otherness. Furthermore, the sheer volume and velocity of daily images and words, aside from their content, exacerbates habits of reduction, distraction, and exhibitionism in an attention economy that infantilizes us. When one is scrolling though a feed online, the quality of care to any one “speaker” atrophies. A poverty of genuine relations spawns a host of attention addicts and lonely narcissists, compulsive in the sense that one’s attempts to resolve the problem deepen the bad faith at root. In light of all this, I am drawn to poems that model more credibly the “capacity for love” that Dan mentions—that is, they encourage us to slow down, interrogate, go inward and outward, trust, marvel, value, linger, see. They stand before a display and see themselves standing. Poetic meaning arrives from no mere past, but a reflection upon it, however unconscious, a self-reflexive wisdom as the pretext of human kindness.

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