Michael Collier Quotations

We're still in the preliminary stages of getting information.

The (controlled) flood of 1996 in the Grand Canyon is a good example. The idea that a single flood can make a difference was new. Our thinking was: If this was valuable in the canyon, can we begin to take the tools and apply them to other rivers?

The Survey doesn't have a clue how to get this out. I've gone out of my way to give out hundreds of copies. But it's haphazard. Unfortunately, there's no economic incentive to make it available.

The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects.

Paul Otremba’s remarkable first book, The Currency, is an intriguing foray into lyric epistemology that tries to come to ter ms with the implacable, paradox-ridden nature of knowledge and experience. These are deeply felt, deeply meditated poems guided by a sensibility highly attenuated to the physical world. In their openness to friendship and love and in their fearless directness, they remind me of the work of Larry Levis and Jon Anderson. Like Levis and Anderson, Otremba promises to be an influential and important voice for his generation.

The Geological Survey is realizing it needs to project itself beyond scientific circles if it's going to get its message out, if it's going to survive as an entity. They are trying to encourage people to think about how to communicate with laymen.