With great conviction, I believe Michaux is one of the unsung 20th Century poets in America. Tent Posts is a compass for the human experience. Michaux's tone is direct, conversational and guided by a quality of both insistence and studied reflection. There is a visceral impact to his lines: they are full of the immediacy of a man who has traveled far, and how he found his way. Tent Posts is a distilled work. The lines are terse arrows of intention: focused, they hit their mark. Michaux published this work three years before he died, and the reader is left with a strong feeling that the lines within were written as a goad for the author's personal interest in one topic: understanding the nature of change and the symbolic presentation of this understanding. Unencumbered by dogma and written in a direct, vernacular style, Michaux's lines constantly point to unknown territory. This "no-man's-land" of the heart is all he speaks to in this work, and we should be glad it is. Tent Posts makes clear that Michaux's earlier works are not nonsensical or fantastic musings of a chaotic world, as some have said. Instead, his works are glimpses into the ephemera of experience, which adhere to a logic we see reflected everywhere in the evanescence of the days.
