Notes

1. "Spoilia" is a circular narrative in 8 paragraphs by Blair Johnson and Luke Williams.
2. This project began almost decade ago, after a memorable encounter with a wall. The first page shows a section of the wall in question, taken by Luke on an iphone camera, circa 2014.
3. "Spoilia" is named after spolia (see #9 for a note on spelling), the practice of taking architectural elements of one building and reusing them in another context: an arch might be set into a wall next to a doorway, the decorative top of a column stacked on top of other carved fragments.
4. Spolia comes not from the sense of spoil as in ruin, though these words share a thread. Beat Brenk, in his essay “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology” writes that spolia “...is derived from the Latin ‘spolium,’ which means ‘removed hide of an animal’ and, in a more general sense, ‘a soldier’s booty’ or ‘spoils of war.’ The modern concept of ‘spolia’ refers to the reused parts of architectural constructions that are taken from a demolished building—a building, therefore, to remain with the hunter’s terminology, stripped of its hide.” (103)
5. Brenk’s description of spolia is not the only dramatic one, especially in earlier literature about spolia, those describing the practice seem to indulge in the delight of making meaning from fragments. This trend is perhaps what makes Michael Greenhalgh go to great lengths to disagree with the term *spolia,* instead offering the barebones “reuse” as more “suitable terminology which should help damp down the inevitable desire to find meaning in every reused stone” (75).
6. Another important thing to know about spolia, according to Brenk: “there are no texts clarifying the ideology of despoliation” (103). You could probably see that this might lead to some of the dramatic attempts to understand.
7. However, not being an archeologist, it is exactly this “inevitable desire to find meaning” that became so indelibly printed in my memory. Faced with a set of fragments, what is most immediately incredible is that their counterparts absolutely exist.
8. Likewise, a body of text produces the desire to read. Does language itself produce this craving?
9. There are things you will only notice, or only can notice, when time has passed, or when “time slams into place,” as my friend Jesse just said to me on the phone. A few weeks ago, they called with a question about the name of their album, a time-travelliing collaboration with Machaut. The album was named after “hosanna,” titled Hosana — somewhere, an “n” had dropped off the word. Together, we enumerated the reasons to keep it Hosana, to not “fix it.” On picking up this project again, I realize that, since the beginning, there has been an errant i spoiling a word I thought I was just borrowing, and through misspelling had made into something else. Was this a typo? Yes. And yet, the longer it stayed, the more it felt like the poem wanted its additional i, spilled back into the word, so much so that I had ceased to notice.
10. On iii: “Ah earth you old extinguisher…” is taken from Samuel Beckett, Happy Days.
11. On v: “The bones are like a trapeze apparatus…” is taken from Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.
12. On vii: “I keep a few dreams of a house to live in later…” is paraphrased from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.
13. Thank you to Maxwell Neely-Cohen and Shelby Wilson for giving this project a home, and for the astute and brilliant notes, that helped bring it to where it is now from a long-term state of: “sort of but not really done.”
14. Thank you to each of our beautifully thoughtful readers and playtesters, whose time with this project we are so grateful for: Jan Voitehovitch, Ben Swisher, Katie Naughton, Spencer Harrison, Taylor Brown, Phillip Mates, and Brooke Bastie.