by Emily Simon

If our world, material and familiar, is broken and harmful, almost dead and gone, then Gillian Conoley’s Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat Books, $17.95) imagines our world miraculously transmogrified—navigable, accommodating, and hospitable through lyric insight. Fractalled images and mythic characters engage in a kind of playful dialogue that is dead serious about its assemblage and precise in its amplitudes.

Notes from the Passenger is Conoley’s ninth collection; her previous books include A Little More Red Sun on the Human (Nightboat, 2019) and Thousand Times Broken (City Lights, 2014), her translation of three books by French poet and artist Henri Michaux. Though our conversation began with Conoley’s latest book, it didn’t take too long for us to digress. “My narration is by nature digressive,” she texted one evening—and indeed, this ruminative, meandering way of thinking and talking is how Conoley and I understand each other best.


Emily Simon: The curiosity cabinet you assemble in Notes from the Passenger is one of sinister, mystical, and delightful stuff—for example, “The Messenger” includes an “overheated RV,” “a moonstone talisman,” “an implant in the hand the size of a grain of rice,” “a divining rod,” “a child’s silver bucket, handle still on the pail,” and much, much more. The poem pulls these images up close for inspection, even admiration, yet it also suggests intense frustration and grief. What is your relationship to images?

Gillian Conoley: I love color, shape, texture, material, detail, all aspects of the visual and sensory world. I like to try to see—though an impossible task, given that humans can only perceive a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum—what we call “reality.” Our visible spectrum is just a fragment, and yet we have this astonishingly rich visual perceptual world before us at all times.

Even given those limitations, I think of the visual as totemic, talismanic, transcendent, seductive, fleeting, ever-changing, immensely pleasurable. The intense frustration and grief that you sense is very interesting.

ES: I sensed frustration and grief in the “aura of intimacy.” I was wondering about the messenger being “smitten by the mystery,” too; it’s as if our world promises a kind of intimacy it cannot deliver, and that seductive promise hangs over like a veil or a shroud. There’s something sexy and obfuscating there.

GC: What is very sad about the “aura of intimacy” is that it isn’t intimacy, but only the aura of it. The messenger in this poem and in the world of the book doesn’t have a message, wasn’t given one—so instead of, say, Hermes, who was a powerful and inventive messenger, our messenger is presented as disenfranchised. Unlike Hermes, who could travel between mortal and divine worlds delivering messages to and from gods and mortals due to his winged sandals (which he wove himself), the messenger in my book is free-floating between worlds due to system collapse. This messenger is caught “in the aura of intimacy // awaiting the message”—much like texting, for example, which contains a lot of waiting, delay, drop out. Texting promises and can deliver speed and communication, but intimacy—touching, seeing, hearing—it withholds, it teases . . . so yes, “sexy and obfuscating” as you point out.

The aura is very much like a veil or a shroud. From John Locke in the seventeenth century to Maurice Merleau-Ponty in our more modern moment, one encounters “the veil of perception.” For Merleau-Ponty, the body was the main conduit of perception, not consciousness as in earlier philosophy; he didn’t think one could separate the body as perceiver from the perceived world. In the digital age I sense a sadness, frustration, or grief over the loss of the body.

The messenger in the poem is not completely without powers, though, being “of temporary noncitizenship // in an exclusive, genderless, paradisiacal future universe, an orb” (and so, a new possible world). The messenger points to “a quiver over history’s ossuary of banality and greed” and, like Hermes, offers travel between worlds: “down pathways to an old // belief system turned glassine” or the “sky blue tube” of the future that has no known destination. Like Hermes, who invented writing in order to make deliveries, the messenger in the poem is engaged in language as an essential tool: “where the mysteries are contemplated // in the true ink and felt // future public orphan of the word.”

ES: I want you to say more about the radical imagination of this collection. How do the poems testify to a possible otherwise in the very center of system collapse, language failure, and injustice?

GC: Catastrophe has its upsides. While writing this book, I wanted to be present to what was happening, to what it was like to be alive in this time. Part of me thought tear it down—go ahead, catastrophe, tear it down—because U.S. culture and government, and many governments and cultures in the world, were not functioning all that well before system collapse anyway; the beautiful unrealized dream of democracy was flailing in its failures, never having made good on its promises to so many. But as terrifying as it was and is to see all breaking and broken, to have so much death present—plague, fascism, a suddenly ferocious climate crisis, pugilists all around—one possible upside is that the world broke open, too, and so much that was simmering, so much hate, racism, homophobia, misogyny, came out in full sight like a festering boil pierced. It’s better to see one’s enemies than have them hidden and protected.

There’s still so much work to do. It’s painful, and the country is more than in a crisis; it is crisis. But I was fascinated by how the vanquished illusion of control opened new ways of being; it’s as if there’s a new space-time continuum we might be able to access. While I was writing, eventually the characters in Notes from the Passenger emerged as travelers along a bardic journey, somewhere between the living and the dead. Time is present or future or ancient. The living and the dead are in communication. There is another world. It’s unknown, but to be more aware of the dead, to let them in—surely that is an act of humility and grace.

ES: I’m picking up on a suggestion that poetry invites us into a realm beyond our world. What poetry does to time, or perhaps how poetry regards time—as elastic, simultaneous, alive—strengthens my belief in ghosts. It sounds like you don’t need convincing, though. Can you say more about how the dead and the living are in communion?

GC: With so many dead around us, how can we not be aware of their presence? For those who are actively grieving someone close, the dead are often so present.

I love what you say about what poetry can do with time’s elasticity and how it strengthens your belief in ghosts. I grew up in a house in which the dead were very much alive: When I was six, my family moved into an old Victorian house owned by two brothers who had no heirs, so all their furniture and objects remained—as though they just got up one day and walked out. The second story landing had floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The brothers, Alva and Vernon, were voracious readers and annotated and wrote marginalia. One of them had polio, so there was an old Otis elevator that malfunctioned and went up and down at odd hours, frightening me and my sister. My mother made a joke of it: “Oh, that’s just the Stiles brothers.” It was magical, and I always felt very fortunate to be living with a dead family. We moved our furniture in with theirs, and the books, which ran the gamut from ancient Greek and Roman classics to Book-of-the-Month Club volumes from the 1930s to the 1950’s, opened up so many worlds. This was in a small rural agricultural town in Central Texas. I still own many of their books, and I have two of their armchairs, where they must have often read.

ES: Is a poem a portal?

GC: Yes.

ES: Is there a practical use for this portal?

GC: A poem is a portal in that it opens the way to the ineffable. “Portal” derives from the Latin portalis––an adjective meaning “of a gate”—and porta, “gate, passage.” I love that it can mean door and also the structure around a door, which makes me think of a corridor, a pathway, an invisible door . . . not exactly a door, maybe the door is missing, but there is some kind of structure that leads into a beyond.

ES: Are information and news—essential forms of truth—always perverted or thwarted by technology?

GC: Good question, especially when you juxtapose “information and news” with “essential forms of truth.” On Instagram today I saw a writer from The New Yorker discussing Taylor Swift’s new album, song by song. It was one of those moments that seem so incredulous. Most reporters are influencers. What can carry essential forms of truth? I’d say art has a chance at that; also philosophy. But it must leave room for doubt, for skepticism.

I don’t know much about technology. Typewriters were technology. Cuneiform, the earliest form of writing, a moist clay tablet and a stylus: technology, as flawed as any technology today, as any human. AI is swashbuckling straight into falsehood.

ES: I am so glad you brought up Taylor Swift. I get kind of apoplectic when I hear raves about her—I don’t understand her celebrity, and the media has done nothing to convince me of her exalted place in the culture. Who is she? What stories does she tell? For who, about what?

GC: Here’s my take: American parents are scared to death of who their young offspring might emulate, and Taylor Swift is the antithesis of Amy Winehouse. Swift is an amazing capitalist. Her father was a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, and her mother a mutual fund marketing executive. She’s not from Nashville; she’s from Pennsylvania, where at age ten she made the decision to become a singer after seeing Shania Twain on television. At thirteen, she and her family moved to Nashville to follow her dreams, i.e. to create her brand. She’s a pop culture icon who knows her target audience and how to expand it; there’s a high degree of strategic marketing in her politics. Now I am feeling apoplectic! I also think Swift serves as an antipode to Beyoncé, whose sexual freedom and animus onstage is unparalleled in contemporary popular culture, though it’s also highly packaged. By contrast, Swift is almost sexy—she’s more a Doris Day of our times, projecting a kind of wholesomeness through her look and sound. She fulfills a white American mythos. She’s even got the football boyfriend. It’s all about the poster on a teenager’s bedroom wall.

So Swift does offer a great study of capitalism in our era, though for that I prefer Shark Tank. It is a more honest and straightforward experience of capitalism at work—and it improves one’s math skills. The sense of enterprise and invention, the desire for money mixed with kitsch and courtroom drama, are better representations of the capitalist experience.

ES: The first time you and I met, we were stuffed in the back corner of a very crowded hotel bar, and I remember laughing with you about the texts you were sending your husband. I was reading over your shoulder, and I felt a kinship with your writing there, before I’d even read your new book. Do you enjoy texting? Do you prefer a phone call?

GC: I love texting. Most of my closest friends, the life-long ones, live far away, in other states. I love the speed and the economy of language in texting. Also the lapses of time, and that it doesn’t feel intrusive. If someone doesn’t want to communicate, a delay can happen, and no one takes offense. Or someone can just drop off and pick up on the same thought hours, days, later. With relationships that one has had a long time, one can just dive right back into them as though no time has passed at all. Texts can be very funny. I love one brain moving ahead of the other brain and the kind of slip of communication that happens in between. I love the intimacy, though it’s not a real intimacy—the miracle of being so far away and so close at the same time. It’s sexy and it’s also full of illusion.

I like phone calls too. I have a few friends that I talk to for hours. But this is rarer. A lot of people like the freedom of multi-tasking texting allows. The human voice, more digressions, long narratives, laughing together, hearing the pauses and nuances—there’s nothing like a good phone call.

ES: Do you “doom scroll”?

GC: I’m more of a binge and purge kind of doom-scroller. In recovery, I’d say. More and more I hate giving up my time to it, so I catch the headlines, and if something really horrible happens, I’ll go to several different news sources to get the different takes: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. I also like weird little small town newspapers, and I drive a lot, so I listen to NPR. When I travel I watch cable news, but it’s all a loop.

ES: It’s indeed all a loop. I’ve unfollowed most mainstream news media sources online. I’ve become so jaded about “coverage” and reporting, and I don’t want to be jaded; I want my senses activated, alert, alive, so I can be useful. Hope is a powerful weapon! But it can be very interesting to tune in to cable news, which endlessly streams crisis, crisis, crisis.

GC: And fear, fear, fear. How do you sense “the loop” come into your work? Your prose is surprising and disrupts narrative—there is a strong sense of the intuitive—it has an “I” and involves experience, yet it isn’t “auto-fiction.” Is there any connection between how you form sentences and paragraphs and exterior cultural forms? I don’t think you have to define it (though the marketplace would like you to!), but is it closer to poetry? Does it matter?

ES: Thank you for asking, and you’re right about the intuitive as a structuring device in my work. I used to write more formally conventional, distinct “poems” until I discovered a longer, more disjunctive form: the lyric fragments in my book In Many Ways (Winter Editions, 2023). I think foregrounding the intuitive ferries in a sense of play, desire, propulsion, and so it amplifies the “I,” maybe even exalts that voice or persona on the page. I’m interested in the mind at work, the mind beset with dilemmas and contradictions but also sort of in love with the messiness of living. If poetry is about memory, witness, testimony—truth-telling—then I want the form of my work to reflect the exterior reality, the cultural mesh, from which the “I” speaks.

GC: I like that verb “ferries” and how it evokes motion and travel and propulsion . . . I also like the trust in the “I” that can arise if one pays as much attention to the external as the internal. I think poetry has a restlessness to it, and that its nature might be to put itself in a kind of alignment with the exterior world, what you call “the cultural mesh,” which is ever changing—a world we step into, out of, and alongside, where we hope to be at our most attentive and alive.