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Travis Macdonald The O Mission Repo ISBN 13: 9780982077306

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9780982077306: The O Mission Repo
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Treating each physical page of the original report directly, Mr. Macdonald takes his readers on an operatic journey through the shifting fields of language that have arisen in the post-9/11 world. A resident of Brooklyn, NY at the time of the attacks, the "author" modifies each line of text with the alternating tenderness and rage of one who has experienced the uncertainties of this changed world firsthand. Indeed, the agency of this change is evident throughout the text, from the first black, redacted bars to the last faded musical staffs, Mr. Macdonald generates an entirely new narrative while maintaining an apparition of the report's prior contents. "The O Mission Repo" is published by Fact-Simile Editions, a boutique press in Santa Fe, NM specializing in literature that pushes the boundaries of genre and traditional form.

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About the Author:
Travis Macdonald received his BA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He currently works a 60 hour week in advertising and publishes his poetry in independent literary journals worldwide. This is his first book-length work.
Review:
Various American poets have taken on other texts with an eye toward doctoring, treating, or otherwise erasing most of the original. Ronald Johnson s RADI OS is something of a touchstone in this area, with other notable contributions by Stephen Ratcliffe, Jen Bervin, and Mary Ruefle, among others. Whether the source text is canonical (Milton for Johnson, Shakespeare for Ratcliffe and Bervin) or not, the linguistic possibilities afforded by the source ultimately shape any later treatments of it. RADI OS, for example, is often as intense and intensely lyrical as its source text, Paradise Lost. And as Guy Davenport has noted, the book conjures an image of America as a paradise lost, thus demonstrating how a treatment can seem both intriguing and necessary, even inevitable. This connection between past and present has been a central element of most erasure projects. So it s curious that Travis MacDonald reworks a contemporary document in The O Mission Repo, and that his source is not literary but entirely worldly functional, political, commission-y. In re-working The 9/11 Commission Report, MacDonald demonstrates how poetry can reside, or hide, within the most utilitarian of language, inside the most public of documents. MacDonald transforms the report s Preface to reface and the chapters We Have Some Planes, The Foundation of the New Terrorism, Counterterrorism Evolves, and Responses to Al Qaeda s Initial Assaults to We Ave Plan, The Found Error, Errorism Evolves, and Re Po in A, respectively. Throughout the text, some common replacements include light for flight, Unit for United, Lad for Bin Laden, error and errorism for terror and terrorism, and opera for operation. These changes end up exerting a powerful force on the new text. Each chapter employs a different erasure technique and thus retains, or effaces, the original text to varying degrees. Most of the original preface has been covered with a thick black line, bearing some resemblance to the censorial dash in Bob Brown s Gems. The book s opening announces its own project: We the narrative of / America / present this repo / as a / history of the / how. Within the field of serviceable communal prose, MacDonald isolates and retains the communal while locating the profound by (and at) the end of his reface : We / have searched / past / sight // and witness / for // This final / fraction of / light. // We emerge from this / or / into this / as / other. In We Ave Plan, MacDonald crosses through most of the existing text, but because his lines are not quite letter-height, we can make out the original text, albeit with some eye strain. However closely we examine the stricken words, we are not allowed to entirely ignore the presence of the original. By treating the timeline of the hijacking of the airplanes on 9/11, MacDonald fashions a shadow narrative one that s both strange and poignant: At 8:54, the craft was lost. At 9:00, lines had been lost to Unit. At 9:12, the point was cut off after the first call. At 9:29, the Dull east light. At 9:34, vice pointed toward the Pen and advanced the throttles. At 9:37, Liberty was delayed at the gate. When it left America. (In the original, of course, the words are scattered across several pages, in their positions in the original document.) In The Found Error chapter, MacDonald blurs the original and maintains the legibility of the words he wants to retain. Again, the original remains legible, with some effort, its presence unmistakeable. He even carries this technique over to a photograph of Osama Bin Laden, blurring out the face and thus turning the focus of the photograph to the palm of his hand. --Verse Online

The O mission Repo and Letters from Abu Ghraib, are worthy of attention not merely for their politically charged subject matter but also for the distinctive formal strategies that shape their content. These books defamiliarize the newspeak that has flattened our readings of 9/11 or the abuses at Abu Ghraib, bringing us into a new interpretive relationship with the recent history of the United States. Travis Macdonald is the author of The O Mission Repo, an erasure project that works with The 9/11 Commission Report. Such texts can be awkward, critiques and deconstructions of the original that are not themselves particularly illuminating. Macdonald s work here is a happy surprise, however; it burrows through the 9/11 report (itself heavily redacted prior to public release) to create an alternate text that is downright lyrical: We / have searched / past / sight / and witness / for / This final / fraction of / light. / We emerge from this / or / into this / as / other. The glibness that often emerges from erasure is absent here. Instead, this book enacts a repossession of U.S. history that is by turns playful, indignant, contemplative, and elegiac. In the course of the book, the reader encounters new versions of all-too-familiar players. United States becomes an Orwellian entity known as Unit. Counterpoint to Unit is Lad, a recasting of Osama Bin Laden. Both are implicated in the belief that war / desires death more than / Context. Macdonald places himself in the midst of this cultural and political maelstrom as author an inspired means of owning up to his role in revising the original document while also disrupting its authority. By systematically erasing operations into opera, Macdonald captures the fever pitch of U.S. emotions during and after 9/11, but he also forces the reader to reconceive of the ensuing crisis as something akin to aesthetic experience. Lest this seem a flippant way to address so grave a tragedy, let me emphasize that author s art works within a world radically changed, and his aesthetic impulse is directed toward acknowledging this change and keeping his ear attuned to it, noting that all citizens are put in the position of eating the / error of this / equivalent / art. The formal strategies and serendipities of the erasure process influence the book in felicitous ways. Punctuation is elided and syntax softens the ambiguities that political discourse typically effaces. These ambiguities provide areas for / author to police / the torn / and limiting language. Further, the design of the book, collaboratively done by Macdonald and JenMarie Davis, modifies the visual representation of erasure from section to section. Rarely has a book s design so impacted the meaning of a text: the writing is variously blacked out, scored with lines, blurred, lifted onto open white space, and arranged as lyrics on musical notation. Each of these possibilities points toward another dimension of the work until Macdonald cajoles us out from fear that / sour / asylum to a reinvigorated site where the reader is led / This language / from / Unit / to / You. -Elizabeth Robinson --Rain Taxi Online

Poets have long known that there is as much power in words that are missing as in those that rest on the page. Anne Carson provided a brilliant example of this in If Not, Winter, her 2002 translation of the work of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Of the nine books of lyric poetry that Sappho wrote on papyrus rolls only one poem has survived intact; the rest are fragments. To indicate where words are missing or, in some cases, are illegible, Carson included brackets, so that one of the fragments begins "]heart / ]absolutely / ]I can" while another is a single word trapped in, as John D'Agata put it in an essay in the Boston Review, "a blizzard of brackets." The haunting fragments bring to mind the best erasure poetry, in which the poet alters an existing text by striking or erasing words. Fact-Simile Editions, an independent press in [Santa Fe], recently published a unique example of this form of found poetry. While The 9/11 Commission Report is an important and compelling text in its own right (indeed, when it was published in 2004 the report soared to the top of several best-seller lists and was named a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award in nonfiction), its riveting account is nevertheless crowded by the mountain of information that the commission was obligated to document. Travis Macdonald, a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and a coeditor, with JenMarie Davis, of Fact-Simile Editions, used the text for an erasure titled The O Mission Repo that is a moving commentary on what Davis calls the "shifting fields of language that have arisen in the post-9/11 world." For instance, the second page of the preface, or "reface," as Macdonald has modified it, reads: "Our aim has been to / redress / Its / lexicon / adjust the / lines within / between and / across / loss / and / balance / event / against / the instruments of / change / over every page"with heavy black lines obliterating every word of text save those that remain. In another section, "The Found Error,"taken from the original chapter titled "The Foundation of the New Terrorism," the preserved words seem to float down the pages as if in clouds, the missing words literally erased from the text. Macdonald lived in Brooklyn, New York, at the time of the terrorist attacks, and Davis says he performed the erasure "with the alternating tenderness and rage of one who has experienced the uncertainties of this changed world firsthand." The press also publishes a biannual poetry magazine of the same name that is always open to submissions of "work that pushes the envelope of polite society and has little to no regard for the arbitrary margins of genre." --Poets & Writers Magazine

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