Travis Macdonald
The O Mission Repo
2008
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Travis Macdonald lives and works in Philadelphia
“When I began The O Mission Repo, I was studying at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. But my first exposure to erasure poetry didn’t come in the classroom. A fellow student, Michael Koshkin, gave me a chapbook of his called Parad e R ain from Big Game Books. It was a tall and slim volume of spare and engaging verse that he had culled from the pages of Milton’s Paradise Regained. I was immediately intrigued by the idea and we got to talking about erasure/subtraction as a poetic form. He told me all about Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS (which I promptly checked out of The Allen Ginsberg Library and devoured) as well as Jen Bervins’ Nets (which took a little longer to lay my hands on). Later, another classmate, HR Hegnauer, suggested I check out Tom Phillips’ A Humument, which opened my eyes to the physical possibilities of erasure as something applied to the text rather than removed from it. So those early influences were already in place the day my eyes fell on a thrift store copy of The 9/11 Commission Report. The title of and the initial idea for my own work emerged simultaneously at that moment, fully formed and demanding realization. So I grabbed a pencil and started dissecting the text right then and there.”
– kenyonreview.org, 2012