Melissa Kwasny:: Lost Pictograph

“The light darkened, stained to the thin color of Chinese tea, then lost its muscle and unraveled. Dust covering the shine we lost on surfaces. We lost, too, some will, never our strong suit. Disturbing, the children who, once we have mentioned the word “grenade,” cannot think about anything else…”

Laura Mullen:: Bride of the Bayou

“She is drained—that’s her word. She takes care of other people’s needs all day long, never thinking of herself, but employing the various time saving devices developed to expand each task until it approaches the horizon of the impossible. An entire ecology damaged, possibly irreparable: where there were birds no bird, and so forth, the grim countdown of what should be visible. Sticky mud and silence, a tour boat tilted up against the bank below the reopened bar because there’s no longer a reason to teach anyone anything about this disappearing world…”

Kelli Anne Noftle:: What We’re Making: Replication

“No one believed I could do it. I wasn’t even sure myself. The trick is beginning from the outside and working your way toward the middle. The paint thickens as you approach the center, where the real trouble happens. When I was a kid I hated fireworks. Every July I hid under my bed with our cat and stuffed toilet paper in my ears…”

Craig Santos Perez:: Juan Malo Explains What a “Guam” Is

“Guam is virtually nonexistent, just a little island, a little fly-speck in the Pacific, far, far away from everything. Guam is three and a half hours. Guam is a travel hub to other Micronesian Islands and America’s gateway to the West Pacific and Asia. Guam is one of the few remaining colonies of the world. Guam is a duty-free port. Guam is a United States citizen at birth…”

Chris Shipman:: Death Writes Home

“Dear mother, I have found a home
in the world and won’t be returning
to the darkness save holidays.

Tell Life she can have my room.
She always wanted it anyway…”

William Stobb:: A Natural History

”                                                                                          Canceled by virtue
of its own best qualities, the desert produced its idea. Stretch mark faulting. Salt
dome rising. A pleasured region arches its back. One day the Snake River
Canyon burst and five hundred valleys filled like kiddie pools.
                                                                                                           Or are we
just having a bad weekend here? Everything’s a joke?…”

As winter and holiday season approach, many journals and magazines and newspapers come out with various “best of” lists. We find these a little silly, not because they aren’t fun to peruse, but because of the presumptuous idea that one can, in such a short time span, create some sort of hierarchy. However, the one thing these lists do accomplish that we approve of is helping guide readers to new books, to exciting books, to books that deserve readers. We already, every month, select two books to highlight in our store. For the holiday season, we are expanding our suggestions in two ways: we are listing nine books and we are listing books outside of the realm of poetry, including prose and fiction selections as well.

We hope that you are also excited by some of these books and choose to read them. For those of you who have enjoyed the content that this journal has provided over the course of the year, we encourage you to purchase the below books and all of your holiday shopping by beginning through our own links to Amazon. We receive a small percentage of each sale, which funds the journal and allows us to continue to bring you vibrant literary offerings each week. Any item, be it book, DVD, or silver plated serving dish, that you purchase after clicking on one of our links passes that small percentage on to us. Without further delay, we present a suggested holiday reading list:

Poetry	Fiction	Prose
Julie Carr:: Of Fragments and Lines	Alissa Nutting:: Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls	Sir Thomas Browne:: Urn Burial
Paul Legault:: The Madeleine Poems	Emilio Lascano Tegui:: On Elegance While Sleeping	Abelfattah Kilito:: The Clash of Images
Danielle Pafunda:: Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies	Two Lines:: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal	Marjorie Perloff:: Unoriginal Genius

Check out past books of the month.

My Chicken, Obsidian

Best of the Web 2011 Nominees

Alexander Long:: Photograph: Poet on Dust Jacket, Richmond, Virginia 1996

“All I’m doing is gazing into a gaze. His gaze, the gaze of a dead man. I want my vertigo to be symbiotic, but I never met—and never will meet—Larry Levis.”

Jennifer Sweeney:: Old Town Square

I have never been quite sure what ‘epistemological’ means, and even after a short foray in search of a definition on the internet, now I think I am less sure. But the word comes to mind when reading Jennifer Sweeney’s poems, “Preface” and “Old Town Square.” The poet’s work questions the limits of knowing, yet somehow seems so sure of those limits. Sweeney’s work forces the conditional to become concrete, but only for a moment, until that concrete again dissolves into the sea, undulations, threads, and strings. Imagine holding a cinderblock, if every piece of sand and glass were visible and it weighed almost nothing.

Christopher Schaberg & Mark Yakich:: Real Poetry from The Airplane Reader

It may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard that pilots and surgeons have similar psychological profiles—they are aggressive, self-assured, contain a store of vast technical knowledge, intimidating. And whether or not it is factually true, the comparison does make sense. These are people we give great, blind trust to every day, unflinchingly. Our lives are literally in their hands, and very rarely do we even remember their names after the procedure or flight. It takes a certain amount of ego to name a piece “Real Poetry”, and Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich earn that cheekiness as they constantly dazzle us through this piece’s pure expanse and its technical dexterity. The reader is constantly confronted with all of these aforementioned traits—traits that can be extended to the essayist and poet. “Real Poetry” is a collaboration in aviation that doesn’t ask for your trust because it doesn’t need it. It knows exactly what it’s doing. Relax—you’re in good, capable hands.

A performance of theory, a performance of postmodern elegy, a performance of text.

This experiment was first presented in March 2010 at the Conference on Literature, Language & Culture at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette. It has been re-visioned for The Offending Adam.

En la memoria de Mario Ramos Esponda, 1967-2009.

A Bow-Wow Production
Athens, Georgia, USA
August 2010

A Conversation with Michelle Taransky

Interviewed by Sarah Louise Green

Michelle Taransky:: Barn Burned, Then:: Omnidawn

Michelle Taransky received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. With her father, architect Richard Taransky, she is the coauthor of the chapbook The Plans Caution (QUEUE 2007). This past fall, I had the great pleasure of corresponding with Michelle about her debut poetry collection—Barn Burned, Then—which won the Omnidawn Poetry Prize in 2008. We began our discussion of her collection over e-mail and continued over tea when she came to the Bay Area to read at Moe’s for the fall 2009 book release party. Michelle is currently living in Philadelphia where she works at Kelly Writers House and teaches poetry at Temple University.

Sarah Louise Green: I am interested in hearing about how your residency on the Wave Books Poetry Farm effected or affected the writing of these poems. The title of your book is inspired, in part, by the title of the Faulkner story, “Barn Burning.” Your book, Barn Burned, Then, both borrows language from and locates the reader in an agricultural setting.

First of all, I’m curious about how your time living and working on the farm functioned in the formation of the book. Did the barn as a framing metaphor arise directly from that experience? Or, did you seek out the residency because you already knew you were going to use the image system of farm life?

Michelle Taransky: I started writing the poems in Burn Book during my last year of undergraduate work, in a poetry course called “Poetry From the Outside” taught by Matthias Regan. The poem “Barn Burning” was written for that class. I applied for the Poetry Farm residency three years later, after I’d written maybe one quarter of the “Burn Book”, as a way to work more closely with, and think directly with, the things my poems included.

The agricultural setting became every setting—I could find a barn or a farmstead in most readings, a calf or a farmhand at every turn.

SLG: Right, and the book returns to this family of images relentlessly, almost obsessively, throughout both sections, Burn Book and Bank Book. And what about the banks and the language of economies? How did those find their way in?

MT: I can’t remember how the first bank got into the poems—when, or where, or why. I was doing an independent study with Dee Morris at Iowa about 1930s labor poetries during my first semester at Iowa, and while we were reading through Cary Nelson’s “Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left” I encountered Genevieve Taggard’s line ‘They sold the calf. That fall the bank took over.” and realized this was probably happening to the farms in my poems, as well. This gave me total permission to go from barn to bank.

Another permission-giving moment: Charles Barkley, during halftime of a Nets/Clippers game, Barkley “invented” the phrase “BURN BARNER” to describe the game. When he said it, I knew I was writing the right book.

And finally, while visiting Louis Sullivan’s jewel box banks around Iowa City with my parents, I saw “Barn Burned, Then” in the world: a mural depicting rural life by Allen Philbrick around the four walls of the main banking area in the People’s Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

SLG: I’ve read that the Poetry Farm required four hours of daily work. How did this affect your writing routines both in terms of schedule as well as transitioning between rigorous physical work and mental work? Did that relationship manifest itself in your poetry, whether by subtle shifts in syntax, rhythms, or forms?

MT: During the early moments of my residency at the Poetry Farm, I realized I knew nothing about the facts of farming. This really pushed me to focus on the poems I hadn’t written yet as sites for discovery and innovation.

SLG: So, it helped generate content and serve as an engine for the poems. You mentioned your use of mistranslation, a technique you used on your own poems to create this book.

MT: Yes. I wrote “Barn Burning” first and generated much of the first section by doing “mistranslations” of that poem. “Barn Burner, If” came first, then “Barn Burning, That”, etc.

SLG: Also, in most of your biographical notes (including the one for Barn Burned, Then), your work with your father, architect Richard Taransky, is mentioned. Besides your direct collaboration on the chapbook, The Plans Caution (QUEUE 2007), how has he influenced your work?

It seems that growing up with someone who works with the medium of structures and constructing spatial arrangements would influence your own thinking about space and how it is managed within the poem. Do you think he has shaped your formal tendencies on the page and within the line? If so, how?

MT: Some of my earliest memories of invention happened while looking at (and looking into) my father’s drawings. I would look for the figures, the walls, doors, windows and make up a story of what was “happening” in the drawing, had happened, or would be happening soon. These stories, or inferred happenings, gave me permission to get things wrong.

The chapbook represents these inferred happenings—I think of “The Plans Caution” as a set of mistranslations of my father’s architectural drawings, models and plans.

SLG: The epigraph by Oppen particularly struck me: “I look at things and they become large, like barns, I feel lost and yet they are not big enough—merely a little clumsy, reminiscent and clumsy.” That final phrase—reminiscent and clumsy—resonated with me in relation to your syntactical strategies. Of course, here I mean clumsy in terms of thwarting the reader’s ease with an innovative fragmentation that, at times, veers into an extreme parataxis.

MT: The thwarts, the stutters, the choice to not conclude—this isn’t the way I speak when I go to the bank. As Oppen writes, “We change the speech because we are not explaining, agitating, convincing: we do not know what we already know before we wrote the poems”

And this is part of why I write: I want to know about things, to discover.

SLG: Yet you create so much familiarity for the reader through sonic repetition, colloquial language, or the limited number of figures (barn swallow, teller, robber, etc.). And this makes the scheme of the book navigable as well as believable. Can you talk a little about your processes and concerns in relationship to the reader? Also, your decision to speak in what I’ve fondly come to think of as the “beggar’s way”?

MT: Yes. The beggar’s way of speaking.

It’s the way of speaking in which you speak to yourself about things you can barely speak to yourself about. Instead of how to speak in a poem I was writing, I thought about how to speak in that poem I was writing.

Also, I wanted to de-emphasize the ‘characters’ because I didn’t want people to be frustrated by the inability to make connections. There’s a story, but it doesn’t pose itself as linear.

SLG: Right, and consequently, the speaker of the book seems very comfortable slipping from one language register to another:

(from “Preface”)
[…] Here
the sentence needs
to be completed. It was the sentence
the detective decided
the robber
deserved.

This way of speaking allows words to scramble and reassemble themselves to stake new meanings. And:

(from “Barn Burner, A Call”)
Place where split beckons

Between stage and the stag
An unsharpened knife used.

Does this sort of play occur naturally while you are writing or are these clever turns placed after the fact? Talk about this process.

MT: The line breaks happen while I am writing, as a part of the writing process. The unit I was working with in the book is kind of a “breath-line” which is made by writing a line, taking a breath, writing a line, etc. Also like: response, response, response, response… When the breaks are disruptive, they can show the work I did, or the stitches I made, or the breath I took then.

SLG: The book seems to come forward a few times and confess its self-consciousness of being a working-out of some sort, though what precisely is being worked out is frequently obscured because objects are being examined so closely. We can only see your figures in part; we can only see one wall of the barn. I see this clearly in strophes such as the following:

(from “Barn Burner, Say It”)
Wanted walls in place
Of the worrying

And:

(from “Barn Burned, Then”)
Writing a statement

To take the barn’s place

There is a consistent exchange between the spatial construction and the linguistic construction as well as the idea of displacement—I was wondering if you could comment on that process. What did the construction of this book accomplish for you as a human speaker? How do these self-referential admissions function for you in the space of the book?

MT: When I started writing the book, I thought that while writing it I would find out answers to questions including:

Who burned down the barn?

What kind of war is this?

Is there a family here or no family?

What can the teller do?

Who else should be blamed?

I don’t know if the admissions refer to the myself that is the writer of these poems, or the myself that is the writer of poems. Probably both.

At the time, I was also thinking about using unexperienced trauma, using the confessional mode as a form of “transitive mourning,” a way to join in the mourning of others. But I don’t consider myself a strict Confessional, and I don’t envy that mode since it’s not really my ‘barn’.

A Natural History

[powerpress url=”https://theoffendingadam.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/NathistMix2.mp3″]
Read the poem in Issue 001.
Editor’s Note: The printed version and the audio version diverge in some ways. William Stobb is a self-described “hopeless tinkerer” whose poems continue to evolve into the poem of the moment, not the poem of a past moment.

A Conversation with Gillian Conoley

Interviewed by Sara Mumolo

Gillian Conoley:: The Plot Genie:: Omnidawn

Gillian Conoley’s newest volume discussed herein, The Plot Genie, was published by Omnidawn in fall 2009. Previous volumes include Profane Halo (Verse/Wave Books, 2005); Lovers in the Used World (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Beckon (Carnegie Mellon, 1996); Tall Stranger (Carnegie Mellon, 1991), a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; and Some Gangster Pain (Carnegie Mellon, 1987), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award. Conoley is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. This interview was conducted over a number of email exchanges between Omnidawn assistant editor Sara Mumolo and Conoley, discussing such topics as narrative demands upon character and our culture’s investment in media of enchantment.

SARA MUMOLO: Your newest book, The Plot Genie, adopts its title from a plot-generating system devised in the 1930s by silent screenwriter Wycliffe A. Hill. His system provided a writer with plot elements and characters. Can you talk about your employment of characters in relation to intimate moments for the I in this manuscript?

GILLIAN CONOLEY: Maybe we could begin by talking about the characters who have names and the characters who have pronouns. First, I should say that I don’t employ any characters from Hill’s Plot Genie. My characters are of my own invention.

Hill’s Plot Genie was essentially a list of plot elements and characters in different genres: Comedy, Action/Adventure, etc. It came with a cardboard wheel a writer was to spin to derive a plot. When I first came in contact with the Hill volumes, I tried it out, spinned as instructed, interacted with the apparatus, and was given characters and situations to work with. But I didn’t find the experience that intriguing. Ultimately that wasn’t what interested me—the chance operation.

Instead, I was very enchanted by the volumes themselves, by the books as books, because they were old and rare books, many with red pencil inscriptions made by other writers, and they held such potentiality. They had a kind of aura. I carried them around with me. I loved their arcanity and their sense of the occult and of magic. I was intrigued by a source many writers before me had used, who knows how many, who knows who would admit it. Apparently pulp writers and serious writers alike used Hill’s system, but few were wont to reveal that, as the system was often met with derision and used in secret.

What I eventually came to write about was a world of characters I imagined as being trapped within the system, waiting to be dialed up and thrown into narrative. I was intrigued by their constant sense of possibility and by their imprisonment.

To answer your question of who this “I” is that surfaces out of my characters–– E, R, Handsome Dead Man, Comedy Boy, Redhead, etc.— These are some of the named characters, but there are others who are unnamed. There is a whole throng of the unnamed—they speak as a “we” in the poem “[How We Wish]”—and sometimes, as you point out, there will be a singular unnamed character who will rise up and speak as an “I,” as in the poem “[Culte Du Moi].” In the beginning of the poem “[E and R],” the “I” there is either E or R, as they are taking turns speaking to one another, making a vow to one another, though the poem begins to slip out of that and move into other directions, and just who is who also clouds. And the “I” we started with sort of transmogrifies into other “I’s” before returning to the “I” we started with. E and R are lovers, but they can never find one another in the same plot, so they write love letters back and forth. These letters are delivered by Comedy Boy. But perhaps I have told too much.

SM: In your answer, you note that you are “intrigued by their constant sense of possibility” despite the characters’ “imprisonment” in the system, which limits the characters’ ability to even come into being.

GC: I like your idea that my interpretation of the plot genie device is a kind of language handed to the characters. The idea that language is world. Then Wittgenstein’s idea that the limits of language equal the limits of the world. My characters are definitely fighting against their limits, but they also seem to be alive to the moments they find themselves in. They often become fully awake when they are given their limit, or their role. Redhead, for example, when she gets to be a young girl on a bicycle is free and joyous during that moment, as is Tyger when he rears up on his hind legs and jumps across rooftops. When E and R meet on the sly, they are defying the limits of the plot genie.

Here is my favorite Wittgenstein quote: “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than to push.”

That sentence seems to embody the notion that limits have their limits, and that great freedom can be found not in spite of, but because limits exist.

SM: One of the interesting discussions in literary theory reflects on the role or position of the lyric speaker, and how that speaker’s agency or lack of agency, presence or absence, is demonstrated in both implicit and explicit ways.

I see this being worked out, argued, or queried in the construction of The Plot Genie, and the evolution of its characters. I’m curious if the construction of multiple speakers who are thrust into action by an anonymous structure, like the plot genie’s wheel, is a play on questions of speaker autonomy?

GC: Yes, I think that vast terrain of multiplicity of the lyric speaker, especially concerning authority, presence/absence, etc., has at this point just become sort of abstracted in my mind, or was already there in the first place. It’s just how I experience the world; it makes sense to me. I don’t experience my own identity or perceptive abilities as something pinned down—it’s diffuse, multiple, porous. It was a kind of relief to accept this and find out that there were “others” who experienced the world the same way.

The characters in The Plot Genie are involved in a struggle to come into being despite their fate as characters who will forever get called up to be in an assortment of plots or situations—they would like to have their own “agency” as you say, their own lives. While they seem to enjoy the shape-shifting, they also have strong, unfulfilled desires. More than anything, they seem to want to come into being without the plot genie’s intrusion. E and R would very much like to get together, for example, and Handsome Dead Man would like it if Miss Jane Sloan (an author), would at least recognize his presence. Towards the end of the book, when Handsome Dead Man finds himself in a plot in which he is in prison, he wants to run off with Redhead. The unnamed characters seem particularly sad and murky, sort of trudging around at the bottom of the heap, also wishing that E and R could land in the same plot, that something would work out for someone, somewhere, that there could be some sense of escape or release.

SM: Speaking of escape, how did you negotiate narrative’s power of enchantment in tandem with the unnamed and named characters of The Plot Genie. I’m thinking of Comedy Boy speaking Hamlet’s lines. Can these characters appease the demands of the narrative?

GC: In terms of characters, there is some shape-shifting. Questions of what is real and what is not real. Actors or people. When Comedy Boy first appears, he’s standing in a doorway, “self-advertising,” as in a brothel. Then he spouts Hamlet’s lines, “I am thy father, doomed to walk the earth…” so right away that question of is he an actor, speaking another’s lines, or is he real, comes up. The book has a very democratic cast of characters—Betty and Veronica, Hamlet, Lucretious, Artaud, etc. all make sudden appearances and then fall away—they all float in on a level playing field. I still very much believe in democracy.

SM: I am interested in how this belief appears in what one writes. I do not mean writing political poems, but this belief as a part of the being of a poet. Democracy is based on the concept that public opinion should matter in determining society’s course. Yet, what counts as opinion and how this opinion is delivered to us is uncertain, and still this is what determines a ‘powerful’ narrative for the public. Can you talk about unfixed or indirect delivery and how its implications surface in The Plot Genie? I’m thinking of the need for a message box in “[It would be good if we had a message box]” and or the delivery of E and R’s letters.

GC: I love thinking about this because I think it’s true—how one makes a poem or attends to a poem—these manifestations of mind do speak a politics, a world view—and much more powerfully than if one picks up an overtly political subject matter. Oppen is a great example. William Carlos Williams is too, or Elliot, for that matter. And Beckett, I think one could argue that one of the things Beckett is writing about is Ireland without ever using the word “Ireland.”

Public opinion, as you point out, is of course subjective and amorphous in nature and is shaped and told back to a people by its leaders/handlers of its leaders. Always has been. This is why poets are important. Democracy is a dream; it’s always something to be attained. I don’t think democracy itself is fixed. It’s a practice. Then there is the question of who is in charge, which is a legislative, theological, and theocratic question. Since somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, the slow absence of God dawning into Modernity. In our country, capitalism and democracy make for strange bedfellows, and we are even further cast adrift.

In my book, you’d think the plot genie would be in charge, but she’s this amorphous sort of nonentity. She is “in control” but invisible and without direction. Meanwhile the characters are getting called up and sent into an event, not knowing when or how or why, or for what meaning, to what end. Even their orders are, as you say “unfixed” and of “indirect delivery.” They have no direct line to their leader, to the one who holds power over them. Comedy Boy is a kind of confused Hermes.

SM: How do narrative demands on the characters relate to the demands of our current world upon a people invested in a culture of enchantment whose culprits are media such as Internet, film, and television?

GC: I guess the book is an allegory in that regard. I’m interested in what some people call “the post-real”—this I take to be the blur between what we experience outside of cyberspace, film, television, the screen—and within those worlds as well. Most people must contend with having some sort of identity in both worlds, like it or not. Events can arrive and evolve from either source—the ether world or the air world. I’m not interested in bemoaning a lost pre-Internet world. I’m interested in trying to be alive to the moment, not resist it.

SM: There are interesting polarities or oppositions in the text. One worth noting is the juxtaposition of the high culture of classic literature and the pop culture of movies and movie stars’ dramas. Did you bring these into interrelation in this text with the intention of pressuring our usual stereotypes and expectations about them?

Pieces of dialog from films appear in the book, from, for example, The Postman Always Rings Twice and the silent film The Saga of Gosta Berling, along with poem titles like “[Hitchcock] and [Cassavettes]. Can you also speak to film’s enchantment in your own life and aesthetic trajectory?

GC: I don’t think I was so much interested in challenging our usual stereotypes and expectations about high and low culture (but I can see how that happens) as much as I was interested in how the book began to drift back and forth or pierce the thin membrane between imagined worlds and “real” worlds—in particular, going back and forth between a projected or cinematic or ether/cyber world and what we could maybe call the “air” world. This just seems to be our experience of being alive at the moment.

I grew up in rural Central Texas. The only art around was film. Whoever was in charge of the daily “Dialing for Dollars” afternoon movie show had a thing for British mysteries, full of fog, and American film noir and gangster movies. Film was my first experience of art. As a writer, I envy film’s ability to immediately draw us in to a world that looks so much like the one we walk in.

SM: Another interesting polarity is the fact that one could see The Plot Genie’s wheel as both subverting the concept of the author as a channel through which inspiration comes, AND as an embodied construction of that, a way for that inspiration to come in. You are at once subverting many of the conceits of narrative, and yet also creating a complex, developing narrative arc that your primary characters participate in. Can you talk about how you see these opposing ideas operating within and upon the text?

GC: It pleases me so that you read the book this way—that the plot genie wheel, while subverting intentions or concept of author also opens a channel for inspiration or invention. My first attraction to Hill’s system was that it seemed to be a channel to creation. A channel that had been used often before. One that had fallen into my hands. If, in my book, I’ve managed to transfer some of that sense of creation to others, that makes me very happy.

Just in terms of sheer shape and form, I very much felt the presence of a wheel as I was writing the book, a kind of churning machine. We’re hardwired to create narratives about what happens to us during the day so we can sleep at night. And then when we sleep, we create more narratives. It doesn’t seem to be something we can stop, it’s eternal. So there was something mechanistic, but there was also something very procreative and alive. And there was so much struggle going on in the book between characters as to who was in charge—it wasn’t the plot genie, it wasn’t Miss Jane Sloan (an author), and it certainly wasn’t the characters themselves. The people with the least agency and the most distress seemed to be the unnamed. One really short poem came that reads: “Dear Master,/ I am the master.” One thing I did notice is that everyone involved seemed to be aware that they were close to the act of creation, to the possibility of coming into full being, and this was what drove them and kept them from utter despair. Near the end of the book, when Handsome Dead Man is in prison and Redhead appears to visit him with a packed suitcase, and the phone rings, indicating that it might be the start of a new plot, that they might be called up—Handsome Dead Man says, “Then take me with you.” He wants to go. Even though he’s not in control of his fate, he wants to get close to that source again, he wants to live.

SM: When reading The Plot Genie, Profane Halo and Lovers in the Used World, I am attracted to the application of the line as a discreet unit. Can you talk about ‘the line’ in this new collection and maybe any thoughts on how the line for you has evolved over these collections?

GC: It’s hard for me to think about the line without also thinking about the page. At a certain point Olson, John Cage, Mallarme–– their discoveries and enactments concerning the page as a field or a score or a room became important to me, and I started to view the page as a less than neutral force, and that changed how I thought about the line. When the page became more active for me, a kind of buoyancy occurred with my line—it was like it had to stay afloat or adrift. It had much more room to move around, and it did. I do remember experiencing a sort of impatience with the standard flush-left poem, which didn’t seem to recognize its relation to the rest of the page. But recently I’ve gone back to that a little.

SM: Considering your thoughts on the buoyancy of the line, I wonder if it is possible to mention how the lyric coordinates with poems concerning pictorial and spatial dimensions in your work, such as sections of The Plot Genie that are in columns, E and R’s letters sharing the same page, or the title poem in which one section casts the resemblance of the cardboard wheel? You mentioned the aura and magic of the Hill volumes, which makes me inquire about the inclusion of palimpsest-style pages or cut-ups of Emma and other volumes, whose pages have been whited-out to procure certain words. Another example could be the photocopy of Plot Scientific’s’ page 111 that is embedded among the poems.

GC: This goes back to the page again, and then to the book as book. I think we’re living in an intriguing time for the page, since technology has brought us to a moment when much material (poetry or otherwise) is being read from and written on a glossy, celluloid-like substance that has properties of appearing to have depth and dimension. The page is lit and projected before us. Like film it has great properties of seduction, and arrives and is delivered in a much more frontal gesture than the lateral, tactile properties of the paper page. And even if we turn away from the computer to a hard copy, or a book we hold in our hands, the page is still altered by its original source, the mother from which it came. When we think about the page as a non-neutral force, Olson’s great essay of course comes to mind, with his notion of the page as an open field, where words sprout up like vegetables, a plane for breath. And then we have the great precursors, Mallarme and Appollonaire. I think of Appollonaire as using the page more as a canvas, while it was Mallarme who took the great exhilarating risk of throwing the page into a 3-dimensional space with his unprecedented work A Throw of the Dice, which traversed gutters, enacted void, and created pages that had much more in common with actual rooms than the flat, lateral plane of the page or canvas.

I wanted The Plot Genie to have a sense of dimensionality, of layer, of things coming in and floating away, like pages from other books, changes in typography, spatial shifts. In terms of narrative, I wanted the sense of movement and arc that one experiences in story, or architecture, form, angle, trajectory, shape.

SM: What prompted you to select the pieces of literature (the original texts of the cut-ups) that you incorporated into the text? Did you have a literary period in mind when you selected them? Since the issues of limitations and its possibilities are central to the text, can you speak about your decision to use language from other sources, and how this decision and process engages these issues?

GC: I spent a lot of time writing this book, watching it unfold. One of the few things I seem to hold as a constant as a writer is the belief that we must practice patience with the material and attend rather than orchestrate, that we have to get out of the way of the writing and our own intention. This is a hard practice, but without it there is no sense or thrill of discovery for either the writer or the reader. Since I’d already adopted the plot genie, or it had adopted me, this seemed especially important. In the first draft of the book all the characters had arrived, and it was a pretty minimal, stripped-bare world, sort of Beckett-like. Then things became more verdant. The book started to take on a sense of its own play.

Early on, I did a Rimbaud erasure which I lost and didn’t find again until the book was in production. I love that that happened—the lost page that came back when it was too late. Meanwhile, since I couldn’t find the one I’d made, I made others. Why Rimbaud? Probably because he is so verdant, because he was working so much with limits of self and world, because he freed himself so much in his work, and therefore freed all writers who were to follow.

Next came Twain, because I still own an old copy of Tom Sawyer that was in the house I grew up in, and because I thought Twain might be a good American down-home foil to Rimbaud’s Frenchness and sophistication. And then Jane Austen’s Emma, because perhaps then Emma could be in The Plot Genie, too, as a character, since the word “Emma” appears on the top of each page of the novel, at least in the copy I own. By this time, other writers were starting to show up as characters in the text: Keats, Leopardi, Artaud, Kruchenykh, and characters from other texts, Frankenstein, Paul Bunyan, etc., and then Brad and Angelina and directors like Hitchcock, Cassavettes, Sam Fuller. No literary period in mind. I just tried to let what wanted to happen happen.

SM: The cut-up of original source-texts is itself an interestingly constructed device. Did you see the act of the omission of language in these cut-ups as reflecting in any similar ways upon the hidden-ness of the characters that lie behind the plot genie’s operations? Were you attempting to reveal new characteristics latent in these original texts, new characters trapped inside them? Which ones were the most exciting to you in how the emergence occurred?

GC: The palimpsest nature of painting over another’s work, the covering, does draw one’s attention most to what is hidden, and what arises from that hiddenness. The characters in The Plot Genie all have a quality of hiding to them—they are hiding from the genie so that they can spend more time trying to come into their own, to escape from her, or as in the case of E and R, so that they find each other outside of one of her plots. So yes, I would say there is a connection there. When I was making the erasures, I remember trying to have the erasures be both a kind of homage to the writer and the book, and also I was interested to see what might surface with a contemporary mind working over an older page, written in another era—so all these things, what might stay true to the original, what might emerge, those were things I was thinking of, and also a kind of release from the original text. I also played, I worked intuitively. This sort of activity links to what we were talking about earlier concerning authority and multiplicity and/or autonomy of speaker. It’s complicated. But I do believe that erasures have a sort of responsibility to stay true to the original text as they move away from it.

SM: I wonder if you might riff on what you let into the poems. Or, how do you negotiate what you have room for and how these items of the world may enter?

GC: I like the idea of letting anything into a poem. I don’t think about what I have room for. The world is complicated, and anything can happen in it.

Gillian Conoley:: The Plot Genie:: Omnidawn

Charting the Raft

Real Poetry

Ninety-five percent of airplane crashes have survivors.

In March 1910, Houdini became the first person to fly an airplane in Australia. He learned to drive a car in order to help him pilot the plane. After his successful first flight, he left Australia never to fly or drive again.

According to the “Arbitron Airport Advertising Study: Exploring an Undiscovered Upscale Medium,” 90% airline magazine readers say they trust the information they read in the in-flight publication. Seventy-one percent of airline magazine readers agree (strongly or somewhat) that because they are on a plane, they read the in-flight magazine more closely than magazines they pick up at other locations. Forty-one percent frequently look at the flight route map.

The writer Sherman Alexie is fond of saying that in order to avoid crashing, he listens to a mix tape with songs by musicians who died in plane crashes. His logic is that he doesn’t think God would be as ironic as to crash the plane he’s flying in as he’s listening to the tape.

You can do a fly-over tour of Antarctica, the world’s last great wilderness, for as little as $1000. Antarctica Sightseeing Flights, which operates in conjunction with Qantas, will take you on a 12-hour journey, flying as low as 2000 feet over the highest parts of the continent.

On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. So says NATCA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. To put this is tangible terms, NATCA provides a visual: “It would take approximately 7,300 airport terminal monitors to show all the flights controllers handle in a single day and approximately 460 monitors to show the number of flights being handled at any one time.”

“And if man were to learn to fly—woe, to what heights would his rapaciousness fly?” wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885.

Nobody who did it ever forgets the experience of flying into Hong Kong’s old airport (Kai Tak, 1925-1998): you flew so low and close to buildings that you could see TVs flicker inside apartments. Plans for the old airport keep changing but have included turning it into a cruise line terminal, a giant stadium, a line of hotels, or a green space larger than Central Park.

“Compared with the motion of a jolting automobile is not flying real poetry?” wrote Wilbur Wright in a letter in 1905.

Not far from the north end of the runway at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport stand two, four-million gallon water tanks. You can still see the dent that Delta Flight #191 made in one of them on August 2, 1985. On landing, the plane was suddenly pushed down by a microburst and crashed. Of 163 passengers and crew, 29 survived. Most of the survivors sat in the smoking section.

The first emergency safety cards are from the 1920s and are for flights over the English Channel; they contain no images or illustrations, only text, which essentially says that in the event of an emergency passengers should ask the crew for help. In the late 1940s, emergency cards included bits of light humor to mollify fearful flyers, with slogans such as “life vests are fashionable and quite handsomely tailored.” Mr. Carl Reese, an aviophile and former airline attendant, has amassed the world’s largest collection of safety cards: 70,000.

The Denver Airport sculpture “Mustang” was designed and partially constructed by the artist Louis Jiménez. We must say “partially,” because Jiménez died while working on the sculpture—the giant horse toppled and crushed him, and the work of art had to be completed by the artist’s wife and sons.

For the movie Fearless (1993), a crash site was made based on the plane crash at Sioux City’s airport in 1989. The recreation took 10 days to prepare, and included 85 acres of cornfields, a bulldozed swatch of land, and 600 suitcases and their assorted contents purchased from local thrift stores. Total cost of the fake plane crash: $2 million.

Of the U.S. passenger carriers, only Northwest and United still use 747s. The 747 weighs almost a million pounds on take-off. About one-third is fuel and less than one-tenth is passengers and cargo. Of the six million parts of a 747, half are rivets.

Princess Juliana International Airport in St. Martin is famous for its short runway (7,980 ft), which is just long enough for large jets to land. Incoming planes approaching the island for Runway 10 pass 30 to 60 feet over relaxing tourists on Maho Beach.

On an otherwise pleasant spring morning in 2009, Air Force One’s look-a-like 747 (sans the President) and a couple of F-16 fighters zoomed past lower Manhattan on a photo op fly-over the Statue of Liberty. The event terrorized lower Manhattanites, led to evacuations of office buildings, and even sent the markets on Wall Street spiraling down for an hour. The rest of the country hardly noticed, however; it was the same morning that a possible swine flu epidemic made top headlines across the country.

The same week that it’s reported that new airplanes will begin to have airbags tucked into lapbelts for greater safety, it’s also reported that two airlines, one European and one Asian, are seriously considering standing-room fares. Someday a flight that overshoots the runway on take-off or landing may have some passengers snuggling gigantic plastic pillows and others zooming past them head-first banging into seatbacks, storage bins, or bulkheads.

Some 27,000 miles of toilet paper is used at Pittsburgh International Airport in a year—more than enough to circle the Earth’s equator.

Kamikaze comes from “kami” (divine) and “kaze” (wind), and was first used in reference to the typhoon that saved Japan from an invading Mongolian fleet in 1281.

The pilot of the Concorde that crashed was the first Frenchmen to windsurf across the Atlantic.

Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne died in an airplane crash in 1931. He was so famous that people demanded to know what happened to the plane. It was the first time a report from a crash investigation was ever made public.

Castor oil is used as lubricant in jet airplanes. It has also traditionally been used as a laxative.

According to Carl Sagan, the first metaphor for the stars was fire. Great flames shining from a great distance—seen by us as little fires behind a dark cloth. Later came the gods, to explain who lit the fires. The question remains: Who lit the gods?

Kafka once traveled more than 500 miles from Prague to Northern Italy to watch some of Europe’s first aviators. The attraction was not only to watch an aviator fly but to watch him crash. Going to an air show was like going to a smash-up derby, the desire to witness the wreck trumping all else.

The turbine engine (the jet engine) evolved relatively quickly and necessarily as aircraft makers sought higher speeds, great fuel efficiency, and thrust to weight ratios. Today, the typical, high performance turbine airplane engine may have taken twenty years to develop from conception to final product. In the initial planning stages only 75% of the needed technology would have been available—the other 25% projected to occur as “scheduled invention” during the course of the project.

“I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven times a month,” said Frank R. Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and airline safety director who runs a safety consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C.

Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly across the Atlantic. He was the sixty-seventh. But he was the first to fly alone.

Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) is probably the best known airline music ever. United Airlines originally licensed the tune from the Gershwin estate in 1976 for $500,000.

The flight number “191” has been associated with numerous crashes and incidents over the years: X-15 Flight 191 (1967), Prinair Flight 191 (1972), American Airlines Flight 191 (1979), Delta Air Lines Flight 191 (1985), Comair Flight 191, also known as Delta Air Lines Flight 5191 (2006). This has prompted some airlines to stop the use of the number altogether.

Mohammed bin Laden, 73, father of Osama bin Laden, died while trying to land his Beechcraft 18 HZ-IBN on a mountain landing strip in Usran, Saudi Arabia.

Neither Orville nor Wilbur Wright ever married.

According to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots, the percentage of women airline pilots is about 5% worldwide (2009).

On the first commercial flights, the co-pilot would hand out the in-flight meals (i.e. sack lunches). When stewardesses were introduced, they were registered nurses. And later when they were not required to be nurses, many airlines modeled stewardess uniforms after nurse uniforms. (Eastern Airlines bought the uniforms but didn’t hire the nurses.)

“I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” Charles Lindbergh, in an interview shortly before his death in 1974.

Aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont didn’t invent the wristwatch (Patek Philippe did), but before Dumont only women wore wristwatches (as ornaments) and men carried pocket watches. After having to continually look down at his pocket watch during dirigible flights and fumbling with tangled chain and clasp, Dumont finally asked his friend Louis Cartier if he could find a solution. Cartier fashioned a leather strap and buckle to hold the watch in place. Time was never the same.

No U.S. carrier flies to Africa, nonstop or otherwise.

In 1962, the Nashville Public Library opened a reading room in the municipal airport. It wasn’t technically a branch since books couldn’t be checked out, only read in the room. Other than a photo from a library calendar with the caption “Airport Reading Room: 1962-69,” there is little information about the space. In fact, the airport wing where the room was housed no longer exists, and there’s no archival mention about its demise.

Two or three seconds after TWA Flight 800 exploded in flight, the nose section broke off completely. The rest of the plane kept on flying for about 40 seconds before it lost all lift.

The term “ambient music” was coined by Brian Eno in his liner notes to his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The story goes that Eno conceived of the album after being stuck for several hours in an airport in Germany and being annoyed at what he heard (or did not hear) in the airport. “Ambient music,” he writes, “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

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