Wishbone Institute
To be abstract in art means to not represent things realistically, and so this abstract abstract will be. It will present with abstraction the contents of this thesis, probably even abstracting from those contents in its attempt to summarize art. With that, Wishbone Institute's primary study is language itself--its music and its own self-consciousness. The poems revolve around notions of opposition--light/shadow, movement/stillness, female/male--the most dominant of these being the relationship between life and death. Concerned with how life and death overlap, these poems consider existence as an embodiment of both a pre-birth memory and a foreknowledge of death. Beyond that, the words of Heather McHugh must suffice. Upon being asked what her poems are about, she responds, "They're about/ their business, and their father's business, and their/ monkey's uncle, they're about/ how nothing is about, they're not/ about about.