Above: Marc McKee performs his poem “Columbia 77″  at Get Lost Bookshop in downtown Columbia, October 10 2011

Today we’re proud to feature the poet Marc McKee, whose first full length collection Fuse has just been released by Black Lawrence Press. McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri here in Columbia, where he currently ives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. He is the author of What Apocalypse? (2008) and he celebrated the release of Fuse this past weekend at the Columbia Art League with the poet Melissa Range.

Before he moved to Missouri:

I’m originally from East Texas. Grew up in a small town named Big Sandy about 100 miles east of Dallas. When I was 17, my parents moved us to Indiana. I went to college there — IU in Bloomington — then did my Masters at the University of Houston. My girlfriend asked me where I’d want to go if we wanted to move away, and I said the thing I’d most like to do was to go back to school and get a Ph.D. The only place I applied was here, where two of my friends – Nicky Beer and Jason Koo – had gone. We began our tenure in Missouri in the fall of 2006, about two months after we got married.

On settling into Columbia, and the nature of a college town:

I had never been here. I think the most time I’d spent in Missouri – I’d been to St. Louis before on a family vacation, and we’d seen the arch. And we’d gone to the amusement park. And I think that was it, except crossing state lines. So I didn’t have a lot of expectations. But I’ve found Columbia a fantastic place to be. It evokes strong memories of Bloomington – but while Bloomington is more developed and more obviously a blue hub in a red state, Columbia’s not as fierce as that.

But when I was first in Bloomington, I didn’t know the town, the gives and niches it had. I was part of a very specific university experience. I think a lot of kids probably have that same experience with MU. They come to a college town, they live in dorms or on the other side of town, so they’ll radiate between their house, the classes they go to, and the library. And then maybe, maybe, on Friday and Saturday, they’ll venture out to, like, Harpo’s [a local sports bar]. Sometimes in the spring, I’ll mention to my students the True/False Film Festival and ask if anyone’s interested. Not many of them know what that is, or have any plans to go to it.

But having crossed over from student to teacher, things like that have given me a sense of how much these towns have to offer. There are places you can go see music, and you don’t even know about them. And until you start venturing out, you don’t even know how arts culture works, especially in very small ways. I think that’s becoming increasingly vital. There are local bands like Believers that are amazing and play these shows you would never hear otherwise. I was introduced to this kind of culture in Bloomington, and it makes sense here – there are little hubs of grad students or people who are connected with the arts, where they mix with young people.

I don’t think Columbia is quite Bloomington status yet. The journalism school is great and that still kind of eclipses some things. And I think True / False is really big, and I think it’s going to get bigger. I think the Creative Writing program is stellar here, too. I don’t know how long it would take for Columbia to achieve a kind of indie-destination style like Bloomington, Austin or Madison. But I think the town is growing in that direction.

On the inspiration behind “Columbia 77″

Last year I was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Central Missouri, about 90 miles from Columbia in Warrensburg if you’re going toward Kansas City. It’s a smaller town; the university there is about 11,000 students. It was an opportunity to see a lot more Missouri countryside — I mean, I actually had to get off the interstate to get there. And this poem was the first in a series I wrote about my long weekend commute to and from Warrensburg.

It was really the only space that I had to kind of let my mind go and actually focus on writing poems, and it became a traveling office through the Missouri countryside. I would see these fields, tall with corn when I started my commute, and by the time I was done making that commute the fields had been cut down to corn stubble. And that’s an image I use later in the series. But the very first thing I’d see as I hit the interstate was a sign for Columbia – 77 miles away. I started with that idea, and any of the images I’d soak up, any of the dramas from the week of working with freshmen who were scared or nervous, trying to make a good impression, those would inevitably filter in. The first poem I wrote in that series ended up being a kind of “What do I tell them?” poem that’s tracking the concerns of the day and trying to find a way to be at peace with the limitations of being a teacher. And those concerns are kind of lifting out as I’m driving. And as soon as I get to that space, and we’re on the other side, it starts being about my eagerness to get home to be with my wife. The energy shifts, it starts getting looser with the moments I’ve transported from Warrensburg.

The book was small, non-threatening.  I don’t think I read more than a handful of poems.  It wasn’t so much that I was moved by Oliver’s notable music and imagery; what I distinctly remember feeling is, I can do this.

I had no idea who Mary Oliver was.  My knowledge of fiction writers, whose world I wanted to enter, was only slightly less scant than my knowledge of poets.  I was twenty-four, what could generously be called an administrative assistant, a Classics graduate with vague notions of how translating Greek and Latin made me a better writer.  I had started taking fiction workshops my senior year, initially to work on an idea for a “novel.”  Two years after graduating and two rounds of fiction MFA rejections, my mother dead a year, I was undoubtedly hung-over.  It must have been a Sunday.  I was probably waiting for the bathroom or a refill or the internet PC.  And then Mary Oliver’s itching at my ear: “I thought the earth / remembered me, she / took me back so tenderly…”

Forget that I had always written poetry, that it was the poetry that had kept me interested in Classics.  My best friend in college; the guy who always won the undergraduate poetry awards—they wrote what I thought was real poetry:  highly wrought, compressed, suggestive and (to me, anyway) impenetrable genius code, uttered so confidently that I was embarrassed to admit confusion, even, I think, to myself.  My imitations were most clearly travesties.

What a relief, then, to get it suddenly, when I wasn’t looking, without even having to try, and this from a Pulitzer Prize winner.  The way I remember it, I flipped through, recognizing here, and here again, yes, and there, and there that I could do it, that I knew how.  I just hadn’t realized I was allowed to say it, that the expectations were anything less than impossible, like spending hours cleaning my room as a kid, only to look in my sibling’s bedrooms and realize I’d been doing all this unnecessary work.

Not that Twelve Moons is half-assed.  Is it?  That book begins my finding-my-calling narrative:  the lyric reclaimed, the MFA, starting to publish, finding my voice, finding a way to write about my mother, the PhD, the consistent delight of making, the sense of purpose.

Returning to Twelve Moons now, I know a little about Mary Oliver.  I’ve read several of her other books, I know what I’m supposed to say, what I’ve said.  She’s attractive to beginning writers and simpletons, she was onto something in those early poems, but now she’s a bad imitation of herself (despite apparent evidence to the contrary, i.e. her steadily prominent publications).

This go-round, I appreciate again how easy these poems are to read, and not just from a reader’s standpoint, but from a practicing poet’s.  Writing in a simple way about familiar things, even in familiar terms (and how familiar it seemed in ’79 is worth asking) still doesn’t get the job done of making words lift off the page.  It’s craft, a harmony of expression and subject, that does that in Twelve Moons.  I’ve come to see that a lot of the flak your Mary Olivers and Billy Collinses and Ted Koosers get is the result of the faulty assumption that what looks easy is.  The immediate recognition I felt and still feel is her aim.  She wants us to feel like we can do it, if we’ll just let ourselves; that we’re there with her, feeling “the perfection, the rising, the happiness.”

I am less than amazed by her overarching theme of “Entering the Kingdom” of nature.  Certainly it would be harder now—harder because of her—to get away with so many winds and moons and bones and fire and dreams, with personifying death.  The ladder she does less in her next book, her biggest hit, American Primitive. Here, it seems, she hasn’t quite purged (or subsumed) the Whitman O: “…O holy / Protein, o hallowed lime, / O precious clay!”—or the Bard’s certain variety of hopeful inclusion, bending even grammar: “I too love oblivion why not it is full / of second chances.”

A similar optimism, but less expected and mystical, animates the one moment in Twelve Moons where I’m truly surprised.  Up to the penultimate stanza, the speaker in “The Black Snake” can’t keep herself from dragging around the intractable reality of the word “death,” chained to the image of the run-over snake—until she uncovers “a brighter fire, which the bones / have always preferred.”  Not new terms, by any means, but what’s she getting at?  “It is the story of endless good fortune. / It says to oblivion: not me! / It is the light at the center of every cell. / It is what sent the snake…through the green leaves before / he came to the road.”  Unlike the other epiphanies, this notion isn’t passive; it doesn’t long to easefully disappear into the loam.  Here I like the speaker’s active celebration of what amounts to a flaw, a lie, but which is nevertheless the truest thing we know.

So I’ve come back around to Twelve Moons, but not all the way.  I still prefer, by way of comparison, the gristle and grit, the unforgiving cruelty and suffering embodied in the muscular, explosive nature lyrics of Ted Hughes or Galway Kinnell.  It’s the difference, I guess, between Oliver, in “Hunter’s Moon—Eating the Bear,” calling the beast “Good Friend” and “holding a piece of [his] life on a knife-tip,” vs. Kinnell, in “The Bear,” saying, “…I bend down…at a turd sopped in blood… and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down, / and rise / and go on running.”

About the readers:

Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston, and is completing his PhD at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, The Journal, Pleiades, and others; recent work appears in Barn Owl Review and Handsome and is forthcoming from Copper Nickel. His chapbook, What Apocalypse?, is available from New Michigan Press, and his full length debut, Fuse, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize (C&R Press, 2009) and a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. He was born in New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent. He lives in Brooklyn.

1. Lear

[amazonify]074348276X[/amazonify]My sophomore year in college I was cast as Cordelia in King Lear.  A sophomore in every respect, I was disappointed that the director thought me more ingénue than villain.  Goneril and Regan have better lines and one dies on stage.  They spin their “oily art” while Cordelia, daddy’s favorite, sweetly declines to flatter her father with blandishments of love.  For her refusal to outdo her sisters’ hyperbolic flattery, she is disowned and banished from the kingdom.  She doesn’t make another appearance on stage until the closing act, which meant hanging out in the greenroom for two hours while Lear blusters on to his fool about his bad decision to abdicate his throne. 

Other than my lines, I didn’t even read the play, and if I had, I doubt that I would have appreciated Shakespeare’s wisdom about death and loneliness. 

What I did understand was the danger of relinquishing power, both political and personal.  Each night as Lear divided his kingdom among his two “favored” daughters, I wanted to shout, “Don’t do it.”  In fact, instead of refusing her father a verbal demonstration of her love, Cordelia should have warned him off early retirement. 

The next semester I was in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (someone in the theater department was preoccupied with kingship).  Rather than willingly give up his control, King Berenger’s kingdom and his power has slowly dimmed.  The king must die by the end of the play, but he doesn’t want to.  Both plays lament mortality as they portray the “lion in winter.”  In the end, neither Lear nor Berenger goes gently and their rage against the “dying of the light” is full of pathos and poetry.  Twenty years after playing in them, I understand these plays and rank them among my favorites. –Kris Somerville

2. Big Brother

[amazonify]0452284236[/amazonify]I’ll go with an obvious one: Big Brother – really a valid “literary politician/ political figure” or “literary monster” despite his arguable existence in the first place.  I remember my first and only reading of 1984 with mixed emotion.  In my 9th grade english class, the reading of 1984 was the one month out of the year students would wipe the drool off their desks and actually care about reading.  For some reason Orwell was the one guy everybody dug.  Of course, for the few of us who stayed awake, that meant we had to do more to get an A than go through the motions – meaning the teacher would ask and let linger in the air until the silence became awkward for everyone (while the teacher lost their focus wondering why the ever signed up to “Teach for America” in the first place), followed by the chime-in, last-minute save.

Anyway, Big Brother.  I was too naive to feel haunted by Big Brother.  Maybe it was because I read it well after the Cold War…with no real understanding of the Cold War.  I guess by then we had pretty much been full of the idea that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, to paraphrase Neil Postman.  How many people would buy a television if they knew it stared back at them?  If they were on sale, probably more than you’d think.  I did like the idea of fighting the system.  I was very into handing out socialist pamphlets during high school, but I really did it for the George Washington University socialist group parties.  Hoards of pseudo-Marxists would get drunk in one bedroom apartments and throw books at each other.  Most of the parties were called something like “the communal struggle (of getting sober).” 

1984. All I can think is, with that much oppression, the sex must have been great. –Seth Graves

3. Thomas Gradgrind

[amazonify]0451530993[/amazonify]If I had to describe why, when I think of memorarble literary politicians, I immediately go to Thomas Gradgrind of Hard Times, it would probably be that he starts the novel as the manifestation of everything a person in the literary arts should despise and fear.  He believes in nothing other than fact, standardization, and viewing the world from a mathmatical/scientific standpoint, and goes so far as to raise his own children under this same belief.  As a result, his own daughter is emotionally dead inside and his son becomes a criminal with no remorse for simply being one of his father’s statistics.  The reason I love his character though, despite all the terrible things his doctrines bring about, is that at the end of the novel he comes to see the error of his own ways and realizes that there may be more to the world than cold hard fact, and everytime I read this ending I can’t help but wonder if it has a good message for a country like ours where schools seem more and more focused on standardization and memorizing facts. –Nick Quijas

4. Brother Jack

[amazonify]0679732764[/amazonify]Struggling to survive in 1930′s Harlem, the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is discovered by and offered employment with an organization known as “the Brotherhood,” a thinly veiled signifier for the Communist Party.

Sporting a mane of bright red hair, Brother Jack, the charismatic leader of the Brotherhood, initially appears in the novel as a compassionate and intelligent individual. He explains to the narrator that his organization defends the rights of the socially oppressed, those “dispossessed of their heritage,” to build “a better world for all people.” The narrator is swept up by Brother Jack’s ideological optimism.

But as the novel progresses, the narrator realizes that Brother Jack exhibits his own brand of racial prejudice that objectifies the narrator as a mere tool – an invisible man – as invisible to Jack as the rest of white American society.

In an epiphanic moment of high drama and symbolic potency, the narrator discovers that Jack has a glass eye: “Suddenly something seemed to erupt from his face….  A glass eye.  A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays….  I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage.  His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw redness showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost its command.”

Ellison’s portrait of this political figure reveals a man blinded by his single-minded commitment to an abstract ideology, one that blinds him to the actual plight of African Americans in Harlem.

Deprived of his charm and intellectual jargon, Brother Jack reveals his base and arrogant motives when he tells the narrator, “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!”

Initially inspirational, but ultimately close-minded and blind, Brother Jack is a Ralph Ellison’s absurdist version of every politician who has lifted our hopes only to let them fall and shatter into pieces. –Eric Thomas

5. Lysistrata

[amazonify]0452007178[/amazonify]The ancient Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes has left us with a whole rogues gallery of satirically drawn politicial characters, from Pisthetairos of The Birds, who helps found a utopia (“Cloudcuckooland”) only to become its tyrant, to Dikaiopolis of The Acharnians, who brokers his own private peace with Sparta. But the eponymous heroine of Lysistrata is perhaps the most striking, an enterprising ancient lobbyist for peace. Fed up with the tribulations of the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata leads the women of the Greek city-states in a massive boycott of sex: no nooky for the men of Greece until they end to fighting (a plan that she find just as difficult to hold the women to).  –Patrick Lane

Who are your favorite politicians from literature? Let us know in the comments below!

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JK: When did you begin writing poems?

DM: Well, my earliest “poems” probably date back to a high school creative writing assignment. I composed some garish ode to my pet dachshund (Rudy) or the NASA space shuttle. I was always more of a visual kid (the class artist, later the photographer) who wrote well enough to get by in class or do a little student journalism. Occasionally I’d combine the two in cartoons, and even did a little work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Still, it wasn’t until a summer writing camp at Denison University, The Jonathan Reynolds Young Writers’ Workshop, that I realized just what a poem really was and was simply swept off my feet. It was there that I met David Baker, Ann Townsend, and Alison Stine. I distinctly remember how difficult it was to write a poem, and my own stubbornness compelled me to keep at it till there was some music in the lines. There’s probably a lot of that pig-headedness in my approach today.

JK: What were those cartoons like that you drew for The Plain Dealer?

DM: My comic strip for The Plain Dealer was called “The Armpit Epiphany,” a name that captured both my burgeoning misuse of literary terms and my continued fondness for scatological and/or bodily humor. There were no characters per se, save an adolescent kid who wore a bowler hat and looked a lot like me. Targets of the satire included Carl Monday (local Cleveland exposé reporter/parasite), homophobia, and the kids who egged my house over Christmas.

JK: What was it like growing up in Cleveland?

DM: Well, I should state both my fondness for the town and my comfortable distance from it (which very well might account for the fondness). Like many folks “from” Cleveland, I in fact grew up in a suburb called Brecksville, due south of I-77. Frequent trips were made into the city for concerts, the art museum, theatre, Little Italy, etc., but my parents lived (until recently) in a very tame, very cloistered suburb. Still, after leaving Northeast Ohio I found myself claiming something of Cleveland’s mopey defeatism, its hunched-shoulders and lazy gait. This was the city where the river burned—I suppose I want some of that tragicomedy to background my life, whether my right to it is authentic or not.

JK: Who have been your most influential teachers?

DM: There are probably too many to name, and I’ll feel awful slighting someone if I don’t, but certainly Ann Townsend, David Baker, and Ben Doyle at Denison University, where I took my undergraduate degree. I also met with a poet named John Miller, an emeritus professor living in Granville who had been Ann’s teacher and essentially built the DU writing program with his colleague (and fellow poet), Paul Bennett. The whole writing community there was (and is!) rich and supportive—I consider myself very lucky to have been a part of it for those four years. I try to contribute my small share by working at the Reynolds Writing Workshop in the summer. Here at Michigan I’ve been blessed to work with folks like Khaled Mattawa, Lorna Goodison, Larry Goldstein, and Linda Gregerson as well as the English Department’s gifted scholars: Yopie Prins, John Whittier-Ferguson. If there’s one thing I’ve taken from all these folks (different as they are) it’s the nobility and necessity of writing poems…a fact one needs reminding of on a daily basis.

JK: I like that you use the word “nobility” to describe the work of the poet. Could you say a little more about what you mean by that? Do you think there exists a certain anxiety about the “nobility” of the poet’s calling within a democratic society?

DM: I do believe poetry’s a noble calling, though I feel little right (again) to claim such distinction for either myself or my work. I’ve been lucky; for the past few years I’ve had great teachers, amazing funding, and an environment so very conducive to a writer. I suppose real nobility, or at least the nobility of poetry in our society today, involves a certain sacrifice, financial or otherwise. God knows, those of us still glowing from MFA-land know little of that world. There is, though, the role poets play in discussing issues the country’s disinclined to address: mortality, language, the influence of the past. In this way, all can be called noble.

Thank you to all of those who stopped by our bookfair table at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ (AWP) Conference in Austin, Texas, earlier this month. We gave away several hundred copies of the magazine, temporary tattoos, mini-notebooks, and an iPod Shuffle. The winner of the iPod Shuffle? Brian Evans of Wichita, Kansas. Congratulations, Brian.

Greg Michaelson, Unbridled Books; Richard Sowienski; David Hamilton, Iowa Review; Speer Morgan, Howard Junker, Zyzzyva

The Missouri Review was well represented at the conference. Speer Morgan participated in a panel on the question of a renaissance among literary journals, a panel that also included Bret Lott from the Southern Review, T.R. Hummer from the Georgia Review, Ted Genoways from the Virginia Quarterly Review, and David Lynn from the Kenyon Review. TMR alum Anthony Varallo and current TMR intern Emily Rosko shared the stage as well, at a reading celebrating this past year’s winners of the Iowa Awards from University of Iowa Press. Varallo read from his collection of short stories, This Day in History, while Rosko read from her debut-collection of poetry, Raw Goods Inventory.

Stephanie Carpenter; Michael Kardos; Anthony Varallo

Various TMR staff members and interns helped to take care of business at the bookfair table, including Speer Morgan, Kris Somerville, Evelyn Somers, Dedra Earl, Jason Koo, Scott Kaukonen, Michael Kardos, Michael Piafsky, Stephanie Carpenter, and Jessica Garratt. We had the opportunity to meet many of you, to chat with our authors, and to touch base with some of our own alumni including Hoa Ngo, Tina Hall, and John Tait. We look forward to seeing everyone again next year in Atlanta.

Koo writes, “I love the title of this book, but it could easily be retitled, In Defense of Daydreaming. Bachelard argues for a certain kind of reading (one that poetry encourages) that continues on from the page, that is unhurried, relaxed, slow. He says we need to live the images on the page, let them expand in us. The poetic image creates a space that lifts off from the page, and the poetry occurs when we allow ourselves to drift into that space.”

Koo, a Ph.D. student in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, earned his M.F.A. from the University of Houston. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Verse, Bellingham Review, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Hanging Loose, Atlanta Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a book that has had my name written all over it for the past four of five years—during which time I was somehow not reading it, to my extreme detriment. How does one not read this book? One does things like watching Extreme Dating and eating Bagel Bites instead.

I was sitting at Country Kitchen last night, recording all the passages marked in the latest chapter into my notebook. My hand grew heavy; I felt I was quoting the whole book. There are books like this, where one wants to quote the whole thing. And that is, of course, because one wants to have written it.

Bachelard’s book is the most eloquent defense of poetry that I know. And it is a defense of poetry as daydream, which is a particularly daring approach. Most people associate daydreaming with laziness. Bachelard says, Ho, ho, daydreaming is important.

I love the title of this book, but it could easily be retitled, In Defense of Daydreaming. Bachelard argues for a certain kind of reading (one that poetry encourages) that continues on from the page, that is unhurried, relaxed, slow. He says we need to live the images on the page, let them expand in us. The poetic image creates a space that lifts off from the page, and the poetry occurs when we allow ourselves to drift into that space.

“…the unhurried reader—I personally hope for no others—undoubtedly enters into this miniaturizing daydream. Indeed, this leisurely reader has often indulged in daydreams of this kind himself, but he would never have dared to write them down. Now the poet has given them literary dignity. It is my ambition to give them philosophical dignity. For in fact, the poet is right, he has just discovered an entire world.”

“…we should have to learn how to meditate very slowly, to experience the inner poetry of the word, the inner immensity of a word. All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit.”

Literature is slowness. It slows everything down, takes us out of the world while at the same time taking us deeply into it. And we should accept this slowness. Why read quickly? We do everything quickly. I do not understand people who criticize certain books (In Search of Lost Time, Moby Dick, etc.) for moving too slowly. The slowness is the point. There is infinity in that slowness.

What’s a quick pleasure to a slow pleasure? When we are experiencing pleasure, we like to slow down. This, of course, to make it last longer. Who runs through a museum? Fastforwards through a film? Wants to make love in under a minute?

Everyone likes a slow dance.

Bachelard argues for slowness, and his book moves at that great pace as well. Every page embarks on its own little boat of revery.

“Incidentally, I should like to point out the power that an adjective acquires, as soon as it is applied to life. A gloomy life, or a gloomy person, marks an entire universe with more than just a pervading coloration. Even things become crystallizations of sadness, regret or nostalgia. And when a philosopher looks to poets…for lessons in how to individualize the world, he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.”

I love the music, the mischief, of these two sentences:

“A bath taken in the abode of such a mollusk must be very mollifying indeed.”

“Thus we see a poet take the hollow road of a piece of molding in order to reach his hut in the corner of a cornice.”

Bachelard points out that when a poet fully sees an object, he is not just going into the object, but around it. The action of plumbing the depths of the object simultaneously expands it into space. “To give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity; or, better still, it is following the expansion of its intimate space.”

Bachelard’s book goes further and further in and out with each page. And I think this is what all great literature does, creates a sense of movement both in and out, a feeling of depth and immensity. We need to stay with this movement for as long as possible, because it enlarges our being.