Answers Fumbling Through a Wind Tunnel

"Megan Moriarty, who a year ago showed us how everything’s connected in 'Jointed Autumn' — not just the skeletal concerns of knee bones and shinbones and ulnas (although there was plenty of that, too), but also the amorphous experiences of memory, sensation, and reasoning — returns with 'Answers Blowing through a Wind-Tunnel,' a multiple choice test with distinct poetic overtones (and undertones, of course, as well as side- and back-tones). Here Moriarty approaches the inter-actor on several fronts. The piece has the structure of one of those ubiquitous Facebook or MySpace tests that ostensibly rate anything from your mental age to your date-ability. And on one level, that’s exactly what 'Answers Blowing through a Wind-Tunnel' is: a whimsy test or maybe a personality meter. But on another level, like with Bigelow’s piece ['This is Not a Poem'], we are constructing a poem. We are given parts of a line, and our choices reveal to us the sort of poem we choose to read and how closely we choose to read it. 'Answers Blowing through a Wind-Tunnel' could be easily dismissed as mere trickery or fancifulness, except that certain choices and pairings allow for so many diverse meanings, and choosing to see each line as fanciful is to ignore all of the possibilities that 'looking back from a moving train' contains. There are possibilities of horror and sadness and timidity and longing and peacefulness and joy. By handing the controls to the inter-actor, Moriarty has made us something like poem-testers or perhaps test-poets." -- From The New River Journal