The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question - they are One. - Herman Melville in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pittsfield, November, 1851

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Some thoughts on Michelle Taransky by Emily Pettit

Michelle Taransky's poetry!

You are here.


Here counting counting. Waiting looks different. Responsibility is a fault line. Casualties are like clouds, they're around. Think the barn burned down. Think a bank got built. Disaster has a different design here. Think theft and the thoughts that might follow and fall with it. Falling falls farther here. Fall like forgetting. Intimate instructions. Important falls. Fall like failing and placing and simply breathing. Fall like that’s a corner. The translation needs an operation. And the fall is a little funny. The fall like a proposal. The fall is the woods. Construction is a recognized objective. Think the woods are getting worked on. Instead of skipping stones, think skipping maps. Maps on water making ripples. Now measure measure. Measure the robber's thought. Think tender. Take away a hand. Safe think safe. Now say something not safe.


Paradox.


Michelle Taransky’s poems are explorations of paradox.


another reason why/you feel anxious when you mean timber


Paradox is the human condition. Intuition constantly defied. And this is good and this is bad. And this is why emotion feels like motion. The motion of emotion is what one most feels, sees, and hears in Taransky’s poems.


it is time to acknowledge a problem/is capable of being a victory


Paradox is potential. Michelle Taransky’s poems are interested in potential. Taransky’s ideas will move your ideas. And then move them back. And then to the side. And then steal them and put them to bed. Then they’ll be somewhere else. They’ll be over there. Your ideas will be doing that over there. And then these poems will move them somewhere else. These poems will move your ideas somewhere else. Move you somewhere else.


it is time/to say you are a question in the collapse


Keep questioning the business. Say something about business. Michelle Taransky’s poems are saying something about business. This is business. Necessary business is happening in our heads here and you will have to be a detective. Detective. Woodsman.