Poetry | $10 ($7 direct from UDP)
Hand-bound. 20 pp, 4.5 x 7 in.
Publication Date: March 1, 2009
Distribution: Direct-only

A chapbook-length poem that sardonically examines a modern society caught in the grip of the military industry complex, the war on terrorism, consumer culture, and Toby Keith.

[ reviews ]

Lawrence Giffin’s first chapbook, Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane, revisits the voice and tone of high-modernist abstraction, the mode perfected by T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens in their long poems, and perfected again, in a burlesque variant, by John Ashbery. Giffin’s version of high-modernist abstraction is alienated and bureaucratic, the language of a failed attempted at generality, comprehensiveness, and spiritual relevance.  This work asks us to rethink Eliot and Stevens, the bored bank-teller and unworldly insurance lawyer.  Giffin reminds us that these titans of modernism were marginal and disappointed men, whose rigorous poetry constructs a transcendent consciousness that compensated for their airless lives.  The controlling intelligence of Get the Fuck Back Into that Burning Plane is a man like them, an intelligent man with few options, loyally going through the motions of the day-job before taking over the universe with majestic rolling vowels and nuanced Ciceronian grammar on the evenings and weekends. —  Stan Apps (in Jacket)

 
Heir apparent to Kevin Davies’s pitch-perfect spin of idiomatic vernacular, critical theory, and a range of references spun between stunned horror and laugh-out-loud humor. “Is this thing on [?]” Giffin asks at the end of the second section. Absofuckinlutely YES.  —Craig Dworkin (from Third Factory's Attention Span)

[ excerpt ]

Sir! Ma’am! For the safety and security
of you and your family,
I need you to get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
For the 245 whites of Shanksville, PA,
bombed from eight weeks in the future,
recovered into historical memory
from the pixel debris connecting
the monitor to the hardpoint,
please, get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
A finger prodding you through an array
of channels and devices:
lab, factory, prison, school.
Into the time-period you go,
fluctuating like a canister,
handed yourself by the bursar
and the ombudsperson
like a glass of gravitas.
You lick the bottom of the glass;
there is candy there.
You lick the wreckage of racialized vespers;
there is a nation here.
We are living in a serialized world,
and I am the Aleph and the Omega Manifold.
I am there at helpdesk, on holiday in Apartheid Villages.
Wherever information processing continues
indefinitely along one world-line gamma
to the future c-boundary of the universe,
I, cable news, am there, bringing you the federal
double-wide prank of dematerialized corporate America,
but only if you get on the plane.
Get back on the plane, now.
The plane, madam, please, the plane,
get yourself the fuck back to it.

NEWS AND REVIEWS

03.22.09 | Wild Horses of Fire reviews Lawrence Giffin’s Get the Fuck Back Into that Burning Plane

Lawrence Giffin is the author of Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Sorites (Tea Party Republicans Press, 2011), Ex Tempore (Troll Thread, 2011), and a split chapbook with Lauren Spohrer, Just Kids (Agnes Fox Press, 2012). He lives in Durham, NC.