Gillian Conoly

The Plot Genie is something of a departure for Conoley. Although there are numerous instances of what I think of as Conoleyesque language ("into the long anarchy before them," "Along the lower serifs of the city, and "will you be my shapeless nonentity under the ancient olive tree" are examples) and although the poems generally employ the poet's almost signature double spacing, the motivation, language and tone of The Plot Genie seem different from earlier books such as Beckon, Lovers in the Used World and Profane Halo. Always an admirer of Conoley's work, I am entirely enthralled with this latest venture. Perhaps because I too am intrigued by language-generating devices (here taking the form of The Plot Genie, a plot-generating system created in the 1930s by Wycliffe A. Hill, a former silent film screen writer)fragmented narrative and narrative strategies employed for other than story-telling ends. A group of stock characters wander in and out of the poems: Miss Jane Sloan, Redhead, Handsome Dead Man, Comedy Boy and E & R(whom we end up cheering on, hoping that they will at least once land in the same love story). Conoley's love of cinema, particularly films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, once again inflects her poetry to good effect. I intend to re-read The Plot Genie soon for further enjoyment.… (més)

I hear Gillian Conoley's voice as I read these poems; by voice, I mean her real & physical voice, its temperature, resistance & flirtatiousness. The poet's experience shapes these recent poems as much as the gorgeous yet quirky language that she has long been lauded for. Conoley says that the primary obsession in her work is perception, which, although true, perhaps downplays the vivid thoughtfulness everywhere evident in the poems themselves. She stares America right in the face & stares it down with lines such as these:

"We could unfold and try once more to open/ a language in which we do not do/ most of the killing"
& "We could all take off our skulls and stare into them" ("an oh a sky a fabric an undertow")

"with patience I can sit on this bench// and wait for the ironworks of a previous century/ to reverse themselves// . . . . time to move along/ it's pathos time" ("The Patient")

"What are we to the man/ who attacked the gunman/ as he started to reload, a constituency?" ("Opened")

"we were thinking a lot about the feminine/ we were putting our feminine in a suitcase" ("Plath and Sexton")

"it was morning and all the white guilt got balled up/ and tossed through the sky then landed back/ into the white guilt which had made a very good deal with the white privilege" ("Monday Morning")

"I didn't want my eyes to be/ my reality negator" ("Begins")… (més)