Spacetime Flexpass
Check out this ebook made by artist/writer/designer/photographer Topher McCulloch from some very old poems of mine. I guess Topher made this a couple years ago, but I didn't know about it until today.

I wrote these poems during the spring of 2002, when I was in a class about relativity. It was one of my favorite classes in college. When the instructor asked us to say what our final projects would be, I blurted out that I was going to write a series of poems about relativity, not really having any idea what a series of poems about relativity would look like.

A few days later, my disinterested creative writing teacher had us spend his ninety-minute class sitting and writing. I spent it reading my relativity textbooks, and it was then that I came up with the gimmick that would more-or-less carry the chapbook: what if you created literal backstories for the rhetorical situations set up in physics problems? I wrote the first poem, "Frames of Reference," which sets up the gimmick and also expounds upon the gimmick the most. For better or worse, the book is kind of frontloaded, as many of the other poems are just sort of addenda to "Frames".

That summer, my roommate and sometimes collaborator Laura was supposed to lead a drama workshop at Governor's Camp, a camp for gifted middle- and high-school-aged kids held annually on the University of South Dakota campus. She was looking for a play to direct that allowed for large casts and wasn't the usual kind of stuff that high school drama directors make their kids do for competitions. After she and I had spent a few days digging through books of one-acts, she said, "Why don't you just give me a bunch of your poems and we'll do something with them?"

Watching Laura and this awesome group of highschoolers adapt Spacetime Flexpass for the stage was one of my favorite art-related experiences. I was very passive in the process, occasionally pulling Laura aside to bounce some idea off her during breaks. More than anything, it was a super educational process for me, seeing people put a good show together in just a couple of days using extremely rough source material. It did a lot to inspire the various things I've writer-directored since then.

A few months later, Laura told me that several of the kids from the play were doing Spacetime Flexpass as a Readers' Theatre performance in oral interp competitions, so of course I had to drive up to Sioux Falls to hang out with them for the day and watch that. I figured out that the person behind all of this madness was Topher. Soon after that, I became a character in his semiautobiographical webcomic. Several months later, I almost wet my pants when he used a line from one of my poems to end the series. I don't feel older than Topher anymore in the way I did then, and it's great to see his art getting the attention it should be getting from people who pay attention to art.

Anyway. About the ebook. I like it a lot, and I'm now deeming it the official version of Spacetime Flexpass from now until eternity. Topher left out a few poems, most of which I'm grateful for him leaving out because they're kind of embarrassingly bad. He also left one out that's embarrassingly good, "Spacetime Intervals," which made me a finalist for the AWP fellowship. But that's okay because that poem is in Luke, Don't Settle (my Morpo Press chapbook), so Harmon completists have already read it.

I'm also glad that Topher largely ignored my linebreaks, not because all of my linebreaks were stupid (many of them were), but because they would have overly weighted down the electronic book experience. This really is its own thing, and is very effective as such.

I like looking at things I wrote a long time ago, even when they're not very good. Sometimes I laugh at them being not very good, and sometimes I laugh at myself for still sometimes trying to pull off ten-year-old tricks. But this thing I wrote a long time ago stands alone because other people took it and did neat things with it. It doesn't really feel like my thing anymore, which is awesome.