Next Next Objectivists Workshop

Our next workshop is this next Thursday, 3 March 2011, 7:00pm at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park Chicago Illinois United State of Wisconsin.

We continue our Spring seminar on Objectivism in Short Fiction. This Thursday we'll meet to discuss two short stories by previous objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky. The stories may be downloaded by simply by clicking on this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7387246/Zukofsky%20Two%20Stories.pdf

All workshops are free & open to the public. The Next Objectivists is an autonomous poetry workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the OUTSIDEREAL. We approach poetry & pedagogy with a RADICALLY democratic attitude. Everyone is always welcome & you can check out your expertise at the door.

OF WOMEN & THE W(H)E(A)THER

PART I:

Edward Dorn’s “Prolegomenon”

We began with a mostly hypothetical problematic. Florence Herman Williams, wife of the famous poet, writes a reply to one of his most famous poems, “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

[etc]

What becomes of her reply? What happens to the poem if the reply—let’s suppose it’s a similar note, granting or denying the forgiveness the poet goes on to ask for, or better yet, a treatise on democratic poetic forms & domestic intimacies. What happens when the reply emerges, bringing the poem back into contact with an immediate context of its dialogic reality—the causal family conversation that the poem tears itself away from even as it reproduces one side of it?

These questions, even when regarded hypothetically, lead us to a problematic that the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” Poetry and politics share this activity general activity, Rancière argues, because both arrange and rearrange the subjects, scenes, values & textures that compose our commonsense. Artists, like politicians, show us what is to be regarded as ordinary, as extraordinary, as worthy of attention, and, by omission, as unnoticeable. In the choice and treatment of subjects the writer of poems, like the writer of speeches, decides who gets to count as a subject & what gets to count as the world.

Thus, for example, in Williams’ poem, the profoundly democratic induction of ordinary domestic life into poetry—the refrigerator note as viable poetic form & content—occurs through a kind of surgical cutting that excises Flora from the world. The poem no longer addresses her—it is, as Williams famously wrote of all his poems, “addressed to the imagination.” The ‘note to wife’ becomes ‘poem as note’ by eliminating, among other things, the wife. The note is a poem because the woman is not. The poem removes itself from the world, precisely in order to bring that worldliness into the aesthetic realm; it makes the note its object by replacing the ‘original’ subject of its address—Flora—with an (imagined) reader—the subject to whom the poem is addressed. Flora is consigned to a place beyond even objectivity—a space of non-being. In this way, Williams founds a modern democratic poetics through a process of oblivion (much the way democratic American society is founded on profoundly antidemocratic systems of genocide & slavery).

In our workshop on Thursday, 25 June, we pursued these questions by reading two poetic passages written by two poets who were unquestionably, if somewhat indirectly, ‘disciples’ of Williams. Both passages about forty years ago, in that very exciting time in American poetry & politics known as ‘the sixties’—a time when repressed subjects of American democracy returned to haunt its aesthetic and political norms.

The first passage was the “Prolegomenon” to Book IIII of Ed Dorn’s hippy/cowboy epic, Gunslinger. Published as a limited edition pamphlet by Zephyrus Image in 1975, this marvelous passage also appears in the 1989 Duke University Press publication of the complete poem. It begins with its first letter partially obscured by the printed image of a woman in tank top & bell bottoms on a bar stool, holding aloft a drink & smoking – something – in a long holder. (Is it possible that she is at a “T-Rex Friday”?) The poem follows her raised glass with its own salute to the moon:

Goddesse, excellently bright
thou that mak’st a day of night.
You tell us
men are numberless
and that Great and Mother
were once synonymous.

Immediately evident is the faux Chaucerian English that provides the “female” side of this poem’s stylistic structure. One strand of Dorn’s logopoetics (“the dance of intellect among the words”—Pound) involves the presentation of this pseudo-traditional lit speak, which we might take to mean ‘culture’ in its most ‘pure’ & corrupted form:

We are drawn beneath your fieryness
which comes down to us
on the wing of Eleusian image [. . .]

Here is the romantic moonlight, the soft terrain of poetry, which is malleable as the cultural myths that give it life. But in stark contrast to this, another kind of knowledge production emerges:

We survey the Colorado plateau.
[. . . ]

This is all water carved
the body thrust into the hydrasphere
and where the green mesas give way
to the Vulcan floor, [. . .]

This scientific regime of meaning, “affirmed” by “cold instruments,” contrasts with the “fieryness,” such that the play between these elements reveals itself to be an organizing principle of the poem. It’s a contrast between literary language—styled as feminine and aligned with imagination and passion—and technological language—styled as masculine and aligned with the technical objectivity of the surveyor’s eye. “[W]e give our inwardness / in some degree to all things / but to fire we give everything,” says the first voice, bringing intimacy into direct contact with the natural world; “it is truly a small heat / our cold instruments do affirm it,” says the second, interposing the skepticism of rational civilization.

At stake in game between contesting elements is our view of the environment—of what Dorn called “the West,” meaning both a physical landscape and the imagination which enfolds it within history and destiny: the world-view that particulars of the landscape—depending upon whether they are selected to stand in for the whole or not—come to represent. Williams referred to the dialectic of material reality & imaginative representation as “the weather”: that which is everywhere & nowhere, inescapable & yet avoidable, cyclical yet unpredictable, remarkable only when it changes, yet always changing. For the modern poet, the weather is always also a whether: what gets recorded & how & why? What stands in for ‘the world’? To become the weather is to be expelled form the world of subjects in order to become that about which subjects talk—the world as backdrop, as beautiful landscape; whether or not any particular person belongs to one or the other of these categories is a political choice exercised by the poet.

In the next several stanzas, Dorn’s poem lingers on the impossibility of one or other world-view. Looking across the Colorado basin, he observes that

not far
from Farmington and other interferences
with the perfect night
and the glittering trail
of the silent Vía Láctea
there is a civil scar
so cosmetic, one can’t see it.

The “interferences” with the “perfect night” are the lights of small cities, like Farmington, New Mexico, which compete with the “glittering trail” of the milky way. Both technological and natural forms of luminescence interfere with the moon’s light—and yet all three sources are not enough to illuminate the “civil scar” that remains known and yet unknown—‘visible’ only in its absence. It is this “cosmetic” “superimposition” that Dorn pursues in the next stanza, in which he describes this absent presence as

like the ultimate property
of the ego, an invisible claim
to a scratchy indultum
from which smoke pours forth.

“[I]ndultum” enters medieval English from the Latin, meaning indulgence—a dispensation granted by the Pope, permitting deviation from church law; here this allowance is like a secret wish—it comes to us only indirectly, through a “claim” is itself “invisible” and lost in the scratches (the Papal ink?) and smoke (hellfire?) of its own making. What is this missing element if not “property” itself—the impossible “claim” to the land that allows (Western) civilization to pour its interfering putrescence—a darker night of ink & smoke—among the plateaus?

Here the poem turns away from its own carefully balanced ambivalence, rejecting the surveyor’s eye and its egoistic claim to property rights in favor of the goddesse’s less proprietary gaze; the last stanza returns us definitely to the “olde tyme” language with which it began:

But now over the endless sagey brush

the moon makes her silvery bid
and in the cool dry air of the niht
the winde wankles across the cattle grid.

Having previously delineated the oppositional linguistic and perceptual modes, Dorn’s poem commits a political act by adopting the moon’s mode. Yet he does without denying the persistence of the other world-view. If the “winde wankles” it does so across the “cattle grid.” The term refers both to a particular physical structure, a depression in a roadway covered with bars designed to keep cattle from passing along roads that cut across pastures, and the economic and cultural world-views that give rise to such a device—the surveyor’s grid that transforms land into property. The poem’s sense of closure is very much dependent upon the rhyme of this last word with “bid”—a poetic presence which calls to mind another scene—that of the auction where cattle are bought and sold. Consequently, even the moon becomes associated with the economic principles that her light seems intended to oppose. A further ambiguity and intermingling remains even as the poem throws down with the “goddesse.”

Francis Ponge’s ‘Thing Poems’ continued

On Thursday, 9 April the Next Objectivists met at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago to continue our discussion of Francis Ponge. What a remarkable writer! We spent most of our time discussing this short but incredibly incisive poem (here translated by C. K. Williams):

The Cigarette

Let’s first create the atmosphere, at once misty, dry, and disheveled, in which the cigarette, since it itself continually creates it, is always laid athwart.

Then its person: a little torch, much less luminous than fragrant, from which in a rhythm yet to be determined a measurable number of little lumps of ash detach themselves and fall away.

Finally, its passion: that fiery bud, flaking off into silver dandruff, held by a sleeve immediately formed by the most recent of them.

We might begin with the most basic structuring elements of Ponge’s approach to this object: the poem is split into three parts, which are ordered temporally in terms of an act of creation: “first,” “then,” “finally.” This temporal structure refers, through the verb “create” and through the order of its parts, to the order in which the poem exists for the reader. That is, it is the temporal mode of an arrangement for the writer and a perceptual experience for the reader. Ponge is by no means providing us with a record of immediate sensory experience of the object—on the contrary, pains are taken to call our attention to the art and craft of creating the poem in precisely this way.

The arrangement is next determined by three thematic elements of the cigarette: “the atmosphere,” “its person” and “its passion.” These elements proceed from the specific and factual, to the abstract and metaphorical. The cigarettes’ atmosphere is, on a first instance at least, the smoke that it produces. It is therefore a commonplace, ordinary element of the cigarette to observe. “Person” (in the French, “personne”) make a striking metaphorical leap, because while we might ordinarily think of a cigarette as having an atmosphere (indeed, as Ponge says, of creating one), it is not customary to speak of the “person” of a cigarette as one might speak of its “filter” or “ember.” A similar leap is made when we move in the last line from “person” to “passion.” Here a kind of pathetic fallacy is generated: the cigarette is endowed with a human (or perhaps animal) trait—it is given an affective life.

This thematic ordering carries with it yet another dimension of relations: from the outside toward the inside. “Atmosphere” signifies an element that is physically outside of and surrounding the cigarette, whereas “passion” suggests something internal. Between them is “person,” which like a person’s body mediates between their external spatial surroundings and their internal feelings.

Passion, of course, indicates not just any feelings, but those which are particularly intense—one thinks, for example, of Christ’s passion, or of ‘a single night of passion.’ In the context of a passionate encounter, the phrase “fiery bud” suggests male or female genitalia and we are reminded of the importance of the cigarette to popular romance scenes and narratives. The atmosphere is not just a smoky one, but now also one of flirtation as this becomes a poem about getting closer to the hot object of desire.

Yet, remarkably, it remains always and foremost a poem about an object and about the words that describe—or, better, “create”—this object. Each of the three lines goes on to describe what Ponge clearly deems to be the core or constitutive feature of the object: its burning. The minute developments at the immediate site of the carbonization are taken up in detail: we are asked to notice how the cigarette “continually creates” its “misty, dry, and disheveled” smoke; how “little lumps” of ash “detach themselves” from the burning end in “measurable” quantities and at a “determinable” rate (if not yet determined) rate; and how the flakes of ash are “held by a sleeve immediately formed by one of them.”

The detailed, almost microscopic observation carries with it a charge of objectivity which counteracts the obviously subjective elements that emerge in the narrative about passion. As a result, the space of first-person authorial experience is evacuated, leaving a gap between the object and the words used to describe it. The words develop circuits of referential meaning which belong to the field of language, rather than to the cigarette. At the same time, the cigarette appears to exist in its objectivity—as a thing which is in no way dependent upon the words that describe it.

The ability to maintain this separation between word and thing is perhaps Ponge’s greatest contribution to the practice of Poetry from the Outside. In his essays on objectivist poetry in Poetry magazine, Louis Zukofsky writes of the ‘balance’ which gives the poem its objectivism. Such a balance is achieved in Ponge’s three-line poem. It’s a balance that comes about from the radical separation of subject and object within a few dozen words which intertwine both the impenetrable ‘thatness’ of the object’s being and the self-sustaining circuits of passionate intent which ‘translate’ the object without ever quite containing it or matching up with it….

This coming Thursday, 23 April, we will meet to continue to build our Time Line and World Map of POETRY from the OUTSIDE. We do this in order to compile poems and practices of writing we may wish to study in the future, and in order to begin to recognize the tremendous range of writing that suggests itself when we think broadly about ‘objectivism’ in verse and what it means to write poetry from outside the I-self

Our focus for this Thursday’s class is next objectivist poetry from around the world: please join us and bring a passage of poetry that seems to be written from the outside and which was not written in the United States. English translations are appreciated but not required! Bring copies of a short passage and some information about the writer’s outsider practices if possible!

Welcome Guest Objectivists Christopher Alexander and Kristen Gallagher!

The Next Objectivist Workshop is delighted to welcome two of the most insightful and hardworking experimentalists in poetry today:

KRISTEN GALLAGHER

&

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

This THURSDAY (2/26), at 7:00 pm and SATURDAY (2/28) at 4:00 pm, Chris & Kristen will visit the Next Objectivist Workshop at the Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago.

Both poets are graduates of the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, where they trained with many of the best contemporary writers in the objectivist tradition (including Robert Creeley, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein). As writers, publishers, designers and visual artists (both are also members of the CAfF Collective, a shadowy organization that sometimes describes itself as 'a radical experiment in aesthetic democracy'), Kristen & Chris continually create new forms of artistic, intellectual, and practical possibility. They live in Brooklyn, New York.

On Thursday, they will lead a discussion of work by the Oulipian writer and film maker, Georges Perec and teach us how to see the world in new ways. On Saturday, we will read and discuss some of their most recent experiments in poetic doing & making.

Here is a brief preview of the some of the exciting word we have to look forward to!

From Kristen Gallagher's Reading A Map:

---------------------
We’re facing this way. We came down. We just came from here so this is that -- what is that? This is that and and this is that – OH! – ok wait – what is that? This is that Am I wrong? I just don’t know! well, yeah. I thought we were coming from here – we are - but then that would be there then – oh – and this would be that – we did just come over that though, so we must have not gone this way at the right time? Yeah, I don’t remember june beetle bridge...mm-mmm, so I guess we came this way. That’s ok, whatever, here we are. This way? This way? I dunno. This way? Yeah, you’re right. This way.

I was forgetting that we were meant to come.

The forest is ending.

Oh, it’s Cars.


"Haiku Super Explosion"
by Christopher Alexander

1 plastic measle, 6 glasses of cola & absolutely no sleep
46 Beanie Babies, all mint with tags apart
a devil doll on stick legs in fascista leather
gray distressed Converse sneakers,
big flapping horse’s ears & crap film acting
El rey de los Monstruos contra el Rey de Skull Island
no tag chubby free celebrity porn video
Enough rubber to make even the Michelin Man blush

SEE YOU at the NEXT OBJECTIVISTS!

Next Objectivists Recent Meetings & Latest Work

The Next Objectivist Workshop meet twice this last week. On Thursday, 12 February Guest Objectivist Michelle Taransky, visiting from Philly, led us in a discussion of Louis Zukofsky’s “Mantis.” Much was learned, or at least it felt that way to me. I was particularly thankful to the group for helping me to see what gets done in the poem through the “thoughts’ torsion” produced by juxtaposed fragments of speech in lines like these:

“Banks, ‘it is harmless,’ he says moving on—You?”

“Call spectre, strawberry, by turns; a stone”

“And hands, faked flower, —the myth is: dead, bones, it

Was assembled, apes wing in wind: On stone,”

In the context of the sentences in which they occur, the meaning of these words is colloquial, relatively straightforward, and subject to no more than the usual amount of poetic compression and metaphorical thought. Nor is the subject or form particularly “difficult.” Both the form (a sestina) and the poet’s subject—a preying mantis on the encountered on the steps of a subway are entirely conventional.

But within these conventions, Zukofsky allows a whole second universe to reveal itself because he insists upon thinking objectively. He allows his thoughts to flow along patterns of meaning that do not reside in the I-self, but extend its being into chains of eventuality—halos of metaphor as we find them out there. Language at play in fields of experience. The imagination.

My experience of the poem began with our observation of the sestina’s simple form. Six words end the first stanza: “leaves,” “poor,” “it,” “you,” “lost” and “stone.” These are repeated as the final word of each stanza according to a pattern of substitutions. The sestina’s particular form of attention—its formal calling as it were, where calling is a calling out—asks us to notice the last word of each line.

In Zukofsky’s version, this formal urgency we encounter in the last word of each line spreads through the rest of the line, producing lines full of single word phrases: “spectre, strawberry,” “stone,” “hands,” “flower,” “dead, bones, it” etc. It is of course this interest in the singularity of words that Zukofsky declares when he gives his epic poem the ultimate one-word title: “A.”

In “Mantis” Zukofsky’s interest in the singular focuses attention on the production of ideology within ordinary experience. Each word is like a mantis on the subway stone—phenomenal to the extent that one attends to it. You can either notice the mantis or not notice it; if you do, the longer you meditate upon it the more it reveals.

In the first of the above-quoted lines, the singularity of experience is contrasted to the commercial flow that incites transformation from one object to the next. Flowing through the line we find a question about the material connectedness between objects produced by money: Watching the hustle and bustle of the crowded masses, Zukofksy observes that

“Even the newsboy who now see knows it

No use, papers make money, makes stone, stone,

Banks, ‘it is harmless,’ he says moving on—You?

Where will he put you? There are no safe leaves

To put you back in here, here’s news! too poor

Like all the separate poor to save the lost.”

Paper makes money, money makes stone, stone makes banks, the poet reasons, following the torsions of thought one finds in “rock/paper/scissors.” Everything is contained within everything else because the flow of money links quarry (or farm, as Michelle does in her poems) to bank.

And these linkages occur in the dimension of ordinary experience, too: the selling of papers makes money for the newsboy, bringing him into direct contact with the “banks” of stone against which he leans. And there is nothing but stone around him—no leaves into which one might “put” the mantis “back in here.” That which brings us together—the banks of stone and the commercial banks—leave us without shelter; bewildered in our humanity, we lack the resources to bear the collective pain each carries for all within all.

And this, in Zukofsky’s view, is common knowledge—“Even the newsboy” understands this. The problem is not one of understanding, but of attending to what one understands to happening. The problem is deciding what counts as news. For the newsboy, the mantis is not news: “‘it is harmless,’ he says, moving on.”

Here is the structure of alienation for Zukofsky: we are caught up in that set of particulars that makes up the news of the marketplace, unwilling to step out of our roles in the drama of the day. It is a conventional poetic theme: a cosmos in the grain. There is nothing but this world of particulars, and there is nothing to be done but rearrange what one pays attention to. The mantis is most often the “You” that occurs regularly at the ends of lines. In the above passage, it also refers to the reader. “it is harmless,” the newsboy says, and then, with a dramatic dash—“You?” The poem is asking us—what do you think?

Its not hard to decide not to pay too much attention, despite what one knows. & so ultimately it comes back to the “You” who might “build the new world in your eyes, Save it!”

After a very insightful discussion of these and many other topics, we began construction of our own objectivist sestina. The first draft (the Next Objectivists do not regard any of our work as finished; poems are on-going experiments for us) appears here:

DUSK INTERRUPTED BY A FULL MOON

Dollar crumbles off, the city lights that

Kill the shadow—it’s necessary so

By sunrise certainly this dusk will end.

It’s shadowed, dusty, musty, fussed over as they tower . . .

High tide. Pratt Beach spits. Rock. Paper. Bone.

Bones that flow under the sweat of her.

Specifically, our family ate bones & bones are sweaters.

So the sweater stumbles, ignores the thermostat—

Carved ivory crescent, smiling cat, striated bone

That obliterates the obvious. Keep always what you sew.

Lights swallows attention. The Tower

Complainer, artificer, all that’s left at day’s end.

Start is the line, broken at end

Unraveling like yarn—dust the sweater.

Three pyramids: fever climbs the tower:

One for water. One for milk. At that

The city sweats tickets, beggar tries to sow

There where the tower held bone.

It plays over the radio. We heard bone—

Bone or stone. Who could tell in the end

& so you say—it ends—sew & sew

Although its chill absorbs all philosophies, he, still naked, becomes blind by it—he as sweater—

That same measure of waste that

Finest contrail split by a tower.

The Mayor coveted the salt tower

Fighting for new marrow in the bone

Breezing along the bone-lit path, the phrase of that

Happenstance that falls down at the end.

It was a family sort of Cosby sweater

Haze on haze split plush—full moon dusk—so.

While the walls were being built just so

Great lakes turn matter into tower

And lights embered the space and on the bench a sweater.

Malnourished—yes the sky was, you see it’s bone.

Your eyes can’t will it, or change that.

And in the end it was the end.

Chicago’s moon as brittle as bone.

Chicago’s dusk-covered moon is that.

Next time sober so this interruption won’t end.

The following Saturday evening, 14 February, the Next Objectivists met to read and discuss Michelle’s work. Michelle read from her new manuscript, “Barn Burned Then,” a beautiful collection of lyrics that move along lines of metaphor between two poles: “Barn” and “Bank.” The figurative connections between Barn and Bank construct a story with an eternally displaced center, to create a kind of secret history—a family trauma, but one belonging to no single family, although iterated always in particulars. In this way, Michelle’s poems responded to the crises of our new depression as it began to unfold in and around Iowa City, where she lived during the latter days of the books’ composition.

Here is an all-too brief selection of Michelle's poems:

Barn Burning, An Eclogue

For those who say it is enough
Of the farmstead, not falling

Rain come last to bed and tearing
White sheets into small armies of animals

Where this keeper’s concern meets
Old thrasher in the shed

Its keyhole patterned
After a breast and the calling

A lake we had built
Filled with response

A response then

Respond, respond with a weed to
The flames stopped to

Track a doe

I don’t know how
Barn is like grave

Matter and matters
Like a silo missing its torso the
Barn’s reading rooms

Forgetting-weeds mirror what
Was kept in the safe, same as others
Have divorced a few apple trees with no ideas

About red
As if it has two mother

Languages— they are the bad pruners
The unhorse
Crediting the no

(Previously published in Denver Quarterly)


Building the Bank, Asking

Who called the bank

The bank of

Grave the bank

You asked for praying

Mantis



When she handed us the bill her hands were
Hands of a farmhand



It’s good to have the image in mind.
At the bank.
Farmed stoppages
Selling a model townscape
Confrontation of milk and made
Never less resistance
To read the entire deed at once
Left for the vultures
Crime seen by one-
Eyed barn owl I caught
To keep the farmscene
Unlike a name
Changing to tender

(Previously published in 88)


Bank Branch

State of fall
I mean fall
Leaves

Saying a season
Is not an only answer

Probability of rotting
That permits

Door-keeper as well
As the door he left

A teller never their
Worries about

The red horse &
Confession
Folded into threshold

Glass statement
Promising I won’t see you anymore
A likeness

Here fixing causes that dream
To be about a bank

A blood-like retreat
From root
For trust

Going to war

Changing brother is

Going to get there

(Previously published in 88)

Michelle explained the origins of many of her poems. While working and reworking the relations between barn and bank, she used her poetry to collect and generate emotional textures. "and the calling / / A lake we had built / Filled with response," Michelle writes; in these lines, reminiscent of Michael Palmer's work, the search for meaning--a finding and a making--is the poem's "calling." The poem is a scenic, calm, ordinary place--a idyll lake--that reflects (or, potentially, loses within itself) responses the work.

Michelle explained how she developed poems the responded to traumas that were not ‘her own,’ which caused some distress among her classmates and teachers over the years. Michelle used the experiences that occasioned by responses to the poems to create dramas that appear within the poems. For example, she described a number of the lyrics as “revenge poems,” explaining that they contain semi-secret “replies” to various fakers she’s encountered. (Michelle told us who she was arguing with and why.)

In these poems, as in Zukofksky's, many words are "pivotal" or "hinge" words in the sense that their meanings are multiple and interlocking. Syntax rotates along the axis of meaning, bifurcating and looping back upon itself, so that multiple connotations resonate at once. This is what Pound called the "dance of the intellect" among words; in Michelle's work its often signaled by dense patterns of repetition:

Who called the bank

The bank of

Grave the bank

You asked for . . .

or:

When she handed us the bill her hands were
Hands of a farmhand

In each passage, the repetition of one word puts that much more weight on the others, such that, for example, "Grave" responds to the field of meanings generated by the banks that surround it--the bank of the grave is the edge of the dread pit, and "grave" also describes perhaps the most commonly imagined tonal register of the Midwestern bank (a sober, even somber place), but we hear also "gave the bank [what] you asked for." The grave that takes becomes the gave that gives.

Similarly, in lines like "From root / For trust" the ear, trained in the subtle shifts in meaning that Michelle's writing calls to our attention, gets "From root / For rust" as well. And in that little shift--the subtraction of a "t"--the cherished story of economic collapse in the heartland is encapsulated. Once the repository of the nation's "trust", the bread basket of America has become a rust belt. That story is also in these poems, as they explore the ocean that resides between BArn and BAnk.

Thank you Michelle Taransky! The Next Objectivists salute you!