Pine Island, Minnesota, is the setting for a famously confounding poem by James Wright. It’s also the future home of a Google-owned data center that will use more energy than the town’s 3,800 residents, along with the rest of the state’s households. In this beautifully idiosyncratic essay, Thomas John Weber brings copies of Wright’s poem to Pine Island’s front doors and spots bars, to ask locals for their thoughts on home, the looming data-center development, and what a “wasted life” really means.
The Pine Islanders I spoke to were generally unaware of Wright’s poem, which perhaps isn’t surprising. After all, the town is merely a setting for a meditation on a series of images; the poem is not necessarily representative of its population, and certainly not of its twenty-first-century identity crisis. But Wright didn’t drop Pine Island’s name into the poem’s long, hyperspecific title for no reason. As the critic Sven Birkerts wrote in the literary magazine AGNI, “the precise location is given not to inform, but to memorialize a place and a time. The title is raised over the body of the poem like a marking stone.”
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“At a very young age, I learned a lot about how life can go wrong. It put things into perspective, even if that perspective was a little warped.”
Balthazar, 1997
“The noise between the world in which we had known each other and the world I occupied now went silent, or maybe only hushed.”
Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing
“They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home.”
Car Talk
“I’d kept up my license, but now I needed a car. What kind of car? As in the usual run of things—a congenital tilt towards irreality, an obdurate wistfulness—I pined for something that did not exist: the car at the end of the mind.”
The Man in the New Boots
“Maybe it’s that it’s goddamned insane to ride a bull, and America is full of crazy people who for no earthly reason see that sort of thing and want to try it themselves.”
Horseshoe Crab Diary
“They inspired the same fear and delight that walking in the woods once did when I was a child: the fear and delight of discovery.”
