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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