Talk:Gillian Conoley

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Analysis of Conoley's work[edit]

Hi - I am dropping the following on the talk page - if there are reliable secondary sources that back of this analysis, feel free to replace it when cited. Missvain (talk) 18:36, 23 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Conoley's work is difficult to classify into any discrete poetic category. Haunted by narrative, linguistically alive, the work is inventive and exploratory, certainly influenced by such movements as Language Poetry and the French Symbolists, Conoley's poems are often meditations on culture which may contain multiple dictions and narrative directions. Language itself seems to be of particular interest. Barbara Guest has said of her work, "The poems of Gillian Conoley lead us up to then step just out of sight where an ordinary sign begins. They beckon us from where an invisible power distorts; a sudden view appears of innocence aslant."

Her earlier work (Some Gangster Pain, Tall Stranger) contained more straightforward narratives and was resonant with the desperado atmospherics of Conoley's native state. The next four books became more and more linguistically inventive, without ever entirely abandoning narrative.

In Profane Halo, Conoley takes her title from the Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a post-rapturous world whose figures and creatures roam the earth, striving to find new community, new meaning. Post-allegorical, post-apocalyptic, these poems continue Conoley’s exploration into the impossible questions of grace and redemption, self and other, death in life, language and being, democracy and song. As Barbara Guest says of the book, "Out of the old beliefs a new language speaks. We said this yesterday, and today the words are stronger. I am taken by surprise by the wit and jeopardy, by the way an ending is avoided on the surface of the book’s meaning. I am excited by the triumph of this writing." Rain Taxi says of her work: "All the pleasures and dangers of the work achieve a brilliant suspension, like particles of dust in air… a time-stopping grace in quantum improvisations of form."

Her previous collection,The Plot Genie (2009), takes its title from a 1930s writer's aid used by pulp fiction writers and screen writers alike. In this work, a murky underworld is constantly created and recreated, peopled by hapless characters waiting to be “dialed up” and sent along multiple and fragmentary narratives. Conoley's The Plot Genie includes characters of her own invention, contemporary film actors stripped of their veneer by the rapid, shape-shifting powers of the plot genie, and characters from other, older texts, such as Frankenstein. In this book the plot genie itself becomes a character, a force neither fully in charge nor culpable, much like our leaders or guides today.