Gillian Conoley discusses her new collection, Notes from the Passenger, with Iris Jamahl Dunkle.
Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. Her new collection is Notes from the Passenger with Nightboat Books May 2023. The author of ten collections of poetry, Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. A Little More Red Sun on the Human, also with Nightboat, won the 39th annual Northern California Book Award in 2020. Conoley’s translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights.
“Our soul is an abode, and by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves.”
–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Gillian Conoley, author of Notes from the Passenger, Nightboat Books, 2023, met with me over Zoom to discuss her latest collection of poems. I’ve been fascinated with this collection ever since I taught it in my poetry class at UC Davis.
Conoley grew up in Taylor, Texas, a small rural town, in an old Victorian haunted by ghosts: two brothers who had no heirs, and so left the space filled with their belongings. The house was also furnished with a floor-to-ceiling library on the second floor landing, filled with books on everything from Greek philosophy and history, to 18th, 19th century, and modern novels. Conoley spent her childhood perusing these books, many of which were filled with marginalia written by the erudite brothers: “It was great luck to grow up in that house. Books were everywhere, and so I, too, as a child, began to write.” As she remembers, “my favorite thing to do was to pull books out randomly. Sometimes I read cover to cover, but more often I sampled. That experience was formative. I would pile books from different time periods and weave them together.” Years later, when the house burned down and almost everything was lost, Conoley recalled how she can “still go through all of the rooms in my mind. I can hear the back door shutting. As Bachelard tells us, the home that you grew up in is imprinted in your consciousness, and remains a kind of architecture of one’s world view. I still own many of their books. And I have enough of their belongings to make me feel like the brothers are still with me. ”
Indeed, Conoley’s collection Notes from the Passenger is as haunted as the house she grew up in. In it, using narrative and disjunction, she moves through time and space. Contemporary, even futuristic moments collide with the ancient in the bardic journey of the book where the living and the dead find new communication. In the center of her book a long poem entitled “Perpetua’s Diary” pulls us through time to the story of Saint Perpetua, known for inventing the personal diary in 203 CE in a Roman prison in Carthage while awaiting execution. One can sense how Perpetua and the words she left in the first diary in history haunted Conoley as she wrote this collection.
ID: How did you come across the story of Perpetua?
GC: Oh, I was so delighted to find and read her diary, which is only about six pages single-spaced when one prints it, feverishly, out. I can thank the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley for a series in which they invited poets to work with scholars. I was asked to do a collaboration on war and catastrophe with Homer scholar James Porter, who was doing work on The Iliad, which I re-read (beautiful translations, both the Lattimore and the Fagles; Emily Wilson’s was not yet ours) during the pandemic. The Iliad became an influence on my new book, Notes from the Passenger. I felt both transported and with a front-seat view to and within an archaic time fraught with our current concerns: mortality, plague, violence, greed. The unrelenting battlefield of The Iliad felt eerily analogous to our non-stop war, conjoined with the most despairing times of the pandemic and its aftermath, when all of time and space began to feel in utter collapse. As it turns out Perpetua, writing in 203 CE, alludes to the Iliad written in 8th or 9th century BCE. It’s an indirect allusion, but undeniable among early martyr narratives which so often rarely mention family. The Iliad’s Hector disobeys his father, who begs him to avoid battle and find shelter in the walls of Troy. Similarly, Perpetua disobeys her father who pleads with her to take back her vow to Christianity so she will not be killed. Like Hector, Perpetua refuses family entreaties and sacrifices her life for her beliefs. She also rejects her role as daughter, as woman in imperial Rome’s cultural context. I remember being astounded that here was the first diary, and it was so magical, inventive, and unfinished . . . and why wasn’t it taught, why didn’t I know about it? I fell in love with her rebelliousness, and with her visionary, imaginative writing.
ID: I can see how Perpetua would haunt you after learning about her that way! I love how you begin the poem by introducing us to the text of her diary:
“We were left no original papyrus, Vellum no parchment
Though a redactor soon after 203 CE, date of her martyrdom,
Is certain: “she wrote in her own hand and from her own experience.””
…
“I was languishing because I had seen languishing” was one of Perpetua’s phrases
ferrying us through time—
Soon before she receives a vision.”
Can you tell us more about the vision she describes in her diary and why it haunted you?
GC: I appreciate the focus on Saint Perpetua in this interview. In her diary, while she is in a cave-like prison cell, Perpetua has several visions. A ladder, which is not an unusual symbol in Christian writing (the ascension) appeared to her as a way to escape her cell. The ladder was not easy to climb. It was treacherous, filled with daggers, swords, serpents and thorns, and one slip could impale one on the ladder, or could send one falling to one’s death. At the bottom of the ladder was a dragon, another common Christian symbol, snake-like, tempting, the devil. Perpetua’s brother, also captured by the Romans, climbs the ladder first, encourages her to follow him, but warns her to “watch for the dragon.” Perpetua calls on God to help her, and the dragon, rather than attacking her, lowers his head in obedience to offer it as the first step on the ladder, to ease her way. In essence, God tames the dragon for her. “I trod upon his head,” Perpetua writes, and then she carefully ascends the rest of the ladder. At its top she arrives at a magical place, full of shepherds and angels. It’s at this point that Perpetua as a writer engages in great suspense. Perpetua as a character worries for her safety, as do we. In today’s colloquial terms, she doesn’t know how to “read” her experience. She knows she is receiving a message from God, but she does not yet know if it is a passion or an escape, if she will be allowed to live or die. Must she step back down the ladder to her death in the Roman arena? Or, having climbed the ladder, does she ascend into the eternal?
What haunts me about the diary is its sense of being an actual account of spiritual experience, and that one experiences a sense of discovery when reading it. Discovery of the text itself, and discovery within it.
ID: Then, when she reaches the top of the ladder, I love how you describe what she finds there in the poem.
“And four angels who lift with no touch
A white haired ‘shepherd of a large stature
who gave me cheese as it were a little cake.’
‘I received it with folded hands
and understood that it was to be a passion, not an escape,
and ceased to have any hope in this world.’”
What do you mean by “passion”?
GC: “Passion” is used by Perpetua in her diary, and I repeat the word later in my poem when we move into contemporary time. In biblical terms, “passion” means “to bear, to suffer, to endure.” It is the final moments before Christ’s death. When Perpetua writes “it was to be a passion, not an escape,” she means that what she discovers in the ladder vision is that she is going to be killed. Like Christ, she will be martyred.
ID: I like how when you get to that part of the story in your poem, you mention that there is a change in authorship!
“I don’t want to read further because we know the rest of the words aren’t hers”//
“but a shadow language (redactor left to complete the tale):”
GC: Yes, this is another intriguing aspect of the diary–the death of the author. After Perpetua’s ladder vision, the break in her writing occurs when Perpetua is lead out to the arena filled with wild beasts where she will be killed. Many scholars think that Tertullian, a contemporary of Perpetua, who claimed to be an eyewitness, finished the diary, though we have no historical proof. Whoever the redactor was picks up when Felicitas, Perpetua’s Egyptian servant and rumored lover imprisoned alongside her, is ushered out first to the arena, and Perpetua, watching, goes into a trance-like state.
ID: Then the poem continues on toward Perpetua’s influence on the future–a typeface, a pencil. Then we go back into the contemporary time of COVID and disease.
GC: Yes, in my poem, after Perpetua is no longer writing or alive, the poem shifts to 1928, when stonemason and sculptor Eric Gill creates the font Perpetua, and 2021, when an Italian pencil named Perpetua is invented, and then, in current time, the ladder reappears, as do a group of people descending it, going back into the world.
ID: I love how Perpetua also appears in “How it was no longer only the country that was divided”, another poem in this collection not found in this section,
GC: I wrote “How it was no longer only the country that was divided” after I finished the Saint Perpetua poem, which is composed in a series of sapphic-like fragments. The words in the Perpetua poem wanted to have space, like the poem was a scrap in time that was almost impossible to render. I realized the book had become about all of the living and the dead in communication, in a kind of backwards and forwards bardic journey with no known destination. There wasn’t a lot of time between 203 CE and 2020-2023. Saint Perpetua is one of the many passengers in the book., just like the passenger in first poem “The Passenger.” Time and space and linearity had exploded to that extent. The mother and daughter who appear in “How it was no longer only the country that was divided” are also passengers. They are driving in a car but not sure where the house is, or if it is still there, when Death also settles into the front seat. The mother is aware of death being very possible for everyone. And wants to pass down that knowledge to her daughter. It’s a profound act of love, but an impossible thing to say.
“do you want it to say Sister Perpetua or Mother Apocalypse
on your T-shirt”
ID: Wow. It’s just like the marginalia in the books you read as a child, you are writing back into history, leaving your own mark, and engagement, a continuance. At the same time that you are eliminating the barriers of time and space. What a brilliant collection, Gillian! Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today!
Dunkle earned her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of two biographies, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, forthcoming), as well as four collections of poetry, including West : Fire : Archive, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.