The Daily Glance
Michelle Taransky's Barn Burned, Then seems like two overlapping books: "Burn Book" and "Bank Book," for these are the major divisions of the book. She starts the "Burn Book" with a quotation from Oppen and one from Bernstein, and it's appropriate because the influence of the Objectivists and the Language Poets is apparent in this collection. Taransky's project is fascinating, for she has written two long poems broken into individual pieces that seem to be commentaries on each other and which comment on society. In "Bank Book" the poems point to banks being under our current capitalist system but at the same time show them as being falsely under us. She doesn't do this in a theoretical way or as leftist propaganda; rather, she puts the poems into voices that speak to us/whisper to us on the way out of a burning building.
Against a figure we cannot
Figure out division
in the first place
I want you to quit
Worrying, the could haves
Meant everything
Oddly, brief sections in this book sound very similar to Olson. I'm not sure if Olson is an influence at all for Taransky, but pieces like "A Promise Is" sound like sections of The Maximus Poems. It makes me wonder how Taransky would handle the epic task that is so central and absent from U.S. poetry.
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