F I F T E E N

Author’s Note: Fifteen was created by frenzy. This is its story: On the afternoon of 9 August, 2011, I joined my friend Mariana Luna in an act of literary sacrilege (sacrament?). We spent three hours cutting apart James Joyce’s Ulysses and The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. After turning her living room into a textual slaughterhouse, we lovingly gift wrapped the remains. That night, at an inter-art, interactive performance event called DARKROOM, we presented these gifts to the audience, tearing them open and spreading the loose pages around the room. Along with poet Nicholas Moore, we spent the next hour teaching the audience the art of blackout (or erasure) style poetry. It was breathtaking. The room was filled with a sizzling energy as people who had never considered themselves poets found their own words in the works of these two masters. The next day, in the post-partum depression of our literary rebirthing, Mariana joined me at my apartment to discuss the event. We were surrounded by the remaining pages and, soon enough, found ourselves in a mood of playful inspiration. I felt drawn to the pages from the fifteenth chapter of Ulysses, the hallucination scene, itself presented in the auspices of a performance, and perhaps my favorite chapter of the work. I stayed up all night taking my blackout pen to the pages. As light spilled into the morning of the 11th, I held the finished text of Fifteen in my hands.

And now I’ve given it to you. What will you do with it?

15 August, 2011

About the Author: Joseph A. W. Quintela writes. Poems. Stories. On Post-its. Walls. Envelopes.

Cocktail napkins. Twitter. Anything he gets his hands on, really. His last chapbook, “This is not Poetry. #poetry�, was published by The Red Ceilings Press. Other work has appeared in The Collagist, ABJECTIVE, GUD, Bartleby Snopes, and Existere. As the senior editor at Deadly Chaps Press, he publishes both an annual series of chapbooks and the weekly eReview: Short, Fast, and Deadly. His work at Sarah Lawrence College revolves around integrating the disparate yet rapidly dovetailing fields of Conceptual Poetry and Eco-Criticism. As such, he is an acolyte of intra-action, hash tags, and the Oxford comma. (www.josephquintela.com)

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