Ellie Tipton interviewed Travis Macdonald about his book “O Mission Repo”, an erasure of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Here is a link to the book publisher’s website: “O Mission Repo” by Travis Macdonald
Check out this article by Macdonald in Jacket: “Travis Macdonald: A Brief History of Erasure Poetics”
I’m fascinated by your use of musical scoring in the book as well as the repetition of the words “ear” and “opera.” It seems as if you are constructing an opera through the act of erasure not only by calling attention to it through the language, but also through the visual representations. Also, in Jacket 38 you say, “[Johnson] pulls a new music from Milton’s text.” Do you think that musicality plays an integral role to the erasure form?
Short answer: I think musicality plays an integral role in all poetic endeavors.
Long answer: I would hesitate to characterize any one element or device as integral to erasure-as-form…Indeed, it seems to me that this and every form that has come before it contain complex combinations of poetic and authorial artifice that are completely removed from their central constraints and largely dependent on the cultural influences and situations at hand: that ever evasive zeitgeist, I guess…
That said, I do feel safe characterizing Ronald Johnson’s Radi os as containing a precise and beautiful music. Indeed, Johnson himself concedes this patterning in his preface. Of course, on the other hand, you have practitioners of the form like Tom Phillips whose processes are primarily visual. Here (in A Humument) the song takes second billing to the images laid over each page.
For my own part, the basic music of speech and writing has always intrigued me, so that is something I’m constantly struggling to harness and/or exploit with my textual selections, erasure or otherwise. I think, when I originally set out to engage with The 9/11 Commission Report, I came to the table with a whole set of preconceived concerns and biases that, ultimately, were washed out by the reading process itself. Confronting the materiality of each page of this rather extensive government document has been a daunting and exhausting task. As the erasure process unfolded, I quickly discovered that the narrative I wanted to write wasn’t the one that “wanted” to be written. “Ear” and “Opera” are good examples of this, I think: E-A-R, as it turns out, is a frequently occurring sequence of letters throughout the text (early, clearly, fear, etc.) and, of course, “opera” was drawn from the clinically ubiquitous “Operation.” Because of the nature of the process, this language was really revealed rather than written. For this reason, I would equate my own erasure work more directly to that of a carver than a musician. I see the musical staffs (suggested and designed by my editor) as a direct sculptural progression from the subject matter that had emerged naturally in the text. So, although they hold a certain music of their own, the container itself is necessarily visual.
Also in Jacket you write, “the merge of form and meaning is, in fact, embodied in the act of fabrication.” By merging the 9/11 Report into the erasure form, you create a narrative text that comments on government, knowledge, war, and the fabrication of perception. How do you understand erasure to extend the fabrication of perception? Or do you think that it uncovers a truth by recontextualizing the narrative?
The quote above is actually taken from my necessarily brief investigation into Armand Schwerner’s Tablets and was meant to provide some historical context and foundation for erasure poetry. By manipulating his reader’s expectations through the cultural authority and context of “translation,” Schwerner creates a narrative in which form and content exist simultaneously in the textual object or artifact that arises. Or, perhaps more accurately, the “meaning” of these pages is directly dependent on the co-fabrication of form and content. There is no need for any egg-chasing-chicken race between the two.
As far as the faculties of perception are concerned, I think it is the very nature of artistic expression, perhaps even human experience as a whole, to re-contextualize our surroundings. Narrative itself is an embodiment of this natural urge to contain time within a referenced space. What artist or writer doesn’t seek to shift or affect their audience?
In the case of the narrative contained in The 9/11 Commission Report, I was interested in drawing new meanings and perspectives from what was a personal, communal and national tragedy the likes of which most citizens of this country had never seen. The official narrative of this multi-faceted event therefore cannot, I think, be contained in 562 pages of political concession and statements of unquestionable fact. I was/am interested in extending that narrative or creating a “parallel narrative,” as the text itself suggests, capable of continuing that story in different, perhaps unexpected, directions.
Along with that question– is the repossession in O Mission Repo the act of erasure itself? In other words, is the text with its silences and visual alterations reclaiming a perception of manufactured truth that only the erasure can repossess for the reader?
I think of the “Repo” in The O Mission Repo in several different, though interwoven, ways. It is, on one hand, repossession on a textual level; using the tools and methods of our mass-media culture to re-frame what is, undoubtedly an already heavily redacted “public” document. On the other hand, it is a narrative repossession as well; of the infinite stories left untold by that selfsame culture of digitally typeset headlines and flashing “click here” sound-bytes. Our individual faculties of perception are being constantly bombarded with information from every angle. What is gained and what is lost, ultimately, in this inherently imbalanced exchange? How does a 562 page government document figure into our newly tailored attention spans? Every American citizen paid for the commercial production of this book. Some of us twice: once with tax dollars and once at the checkout line. And, of course, some paid considerably more than others. What does it mean to have a public document of national tragedy published under the guise of literature and sold for $30 by Barnes & Noble? I’m not sure I know, not exactly. I hope the “Repo” answers some of those questions. Or at least gets the reader asking them out loud.
Truth, on the other hand (at least the communal kind) is always manufactured. At least that’s my experience. But there’s always a historical basis for justifying personal experience: Galileo’s observations were once considered wild heretical speculation, right? Darwin’s still are in some circles. My point is that truth is a fickle, changing thing. Personally, I want nothing to do with it whatsoever. As a writer, I’m more interested in revealing the machineries of human language and perception through whatever tools I find at my disposal. Different artists use different tools, but again I think the reclamation of perception is a basic goal for most. The difference being that the directly appropriative nature of erasure makes its intentions and procedures more readily apparent.
In terms of my own text specifically, I believe omission to be an extremely powerful political force used upon a news hungry populace to induce all sorts of belief and obedience for a variety of vested interests. By turning that force back upon the flow of information it strives to control, I hope I’ve managed to repossess some small part of the narrative surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the Reface, the blocked text reminds me of a machine– as if a computer blocked off the text; whereas, chapter one appears to have been marked out by hand with a black sharpie. The “Unit” (government) also feels machine-like with its tendency for destruction. Do you see the act of erasure as part of a machine-like process? Or is it an extension of the natural world with its process of erosion? Or is it neither of these, but instead a constant flux of human, machine, and natural erosion that demand erasure to reconceptualize the language of art?
Initial proofs of this project were all done with a sharpie—I inadvertently ruined my roommate’s coffee table with hand-drawn redactions—so that process was definitely on my mind when assembling the final pages. In the end, though, the entire book was created in Photoshop for practical purposes. I feel it worth noting that I was also striving (in the progression of chapters) to embody that gradual revelation of light hinted at in the Reface. As far as Unit is concerned, I definitely envision him/it as an organizing, quantifying, compartmentalizing, mechanized bureaucratic force as opposed to the more elusive and organic character of Lad who does not so much rebel against these qualities of Unit as subvert them by his very nature. Ultimately, I think both forces are destructive and both are indicative of the gradual natural and mechanical influences we experience every day as citizens of the 21st Century.
Any thoughts or advice for me as a novice student of erasure?
I would say: you need to learn to read like an acrobat! By which I mean, just as writers must keep their fingers metaphorically limber, so must the erasurist have flexible eyes trained to read in several directions at once. On an even more practical level, I would say: don’t ever believe anyone who tells you there’s such a thing as an erasurist.
