The Great Concavity Ep. 9: Jenni Baker on Erasing Infinite — erasure poetry from every page of IJ (early 2016, Infinite Winter's opening weeks)

TL;DR

Interview (early 2016, just after Infinite Winter launched — the guest is doing its PR) with Jenni Baker, who founded and edits the Found Poetry Review and created Erasing Infinite, the project erasing every page of IJ down to a short poem. The episode is mostly book-art and community history — the poetics of un-writing a maximalist novel, the Found Poetry Review DFW tribute issue, a song-cycle adaptation — plus a long hosts' digression on reading strategy, spoilers, and the Canadian arc. ASR transcript: paraphrase only; names corrected where identifiable (Baker, Baldauf, Pietsch, Levato).

Key claims

• Erasing Infinite mechanics: Baker scans IJ page by physical page and erases words until a poem remains (classic erasure/found poetry); started late fall 2013; the original poem-a-day plan died within months against a day job; realistic pace is 3–4 poems a week; she hit 25% of the book the day of recording and projects roughly ten more years. Poems land around 10–15 words each.
• Her poetics rule — don't summarize Wallace: the constant danger is producing miniature synopses of the page; she deliberately writes poems as independent of the plot as possible (so first-time readers face no spoilers), and resists harvesting Wallace's coinages ("word Frankensteins," ASR, approximate) because leaning on his most distinctive phrases invites the you're-just-ripping-off-Wallace charge. Practically she squints at the page to avoid reading it as prose — so her one-page-at-a-time traversal of the first quarter of IJ was nothing like reading it, which is why she's doing Infinite Winter as a proper reread.
• Sample poem: from the book's first page (Year of Glad), titled "EGAD": "hope is at the periphery of my focus, more or less, where you reside" (ASR, approximate).
• Endgame plans: a full collection (or published in fourths/halves given the thousand-page scale), and prints/exhibits — she names the Ransom Center as a hoped-for venue.
• Song-cycle adaptation: composer Patrick Greene found the project ~mid 2015 and is weaving the poems into lyrics for a commissioned song cycle debuting in Chicago that year — soprano and piano, the soprano coincidentally named Joelle (and the pianist Mario), modeled on the Frauenliebe und Leben form (a woman's love, loss, and retrospection); Greene calls it a "postmodern imagining of a postmodern book" (ASR, approximate). A performance plus panel was planned for the Thursday night of the 2016 ISU DFW conference.
• Found Poetry Review DFW tribute issue (timed to the fifth anniversary of Wallace's death, 2013): submissions were unusually strong, which Baker credits to elapsed grieving time — she contrasts the in-progress David Bowie tribute issue, whose submissions are weak because "it's still too new." Francesco Levato (ASR "Lovato"), who directs the Chicago School of Poetics and teaches at Illinois State, curated a special selection of poems by current ISU students for the issue.
• Her DFW origin: a UMass Dartmouth stylistics course (~2007) assigned "Tense Present" — first contact with the footnotes; she read IJ during Infinite Summer 2009, newly moved to D.C., lonely and post-academia, and credits the group read with supplying both the book's themes (loneliness/community) and the cure.
• Laird relays an anecdote (secondhand, from his reading): after the state fair and cruise pieces, Wallace told Harper's editor Colin Harrison he'd write another piece but would not travel again — hence the usage essay, written entirely at home.
• Bucher on the editing fights: in the Wallace–Pietsch correspondence "they really fought" over plot resolution — Pietsch wanted to know what happens and Wallace never gave him a satisfying answer (Bucher's gloss). Bucher adds his own stance: after ~20 years he no longer finds the plot puzzle "solvable or even as interesting," and needs an angle (currently the AA/ higher-power material, co-read with Rob Short) to stay in the book — his reading is that AA's meet-you-where-you-are agnosticism would have disarmed Wallace, a smart guy primed to look down on it.
• Motif-tracking as reading strategy (the episode's recurring advice): pick one thing to follow — Baldauf's colors, Laird's religion references (his MA thesis), Bucher's old masks hunt (sparked by the masked John Wayne at the grave-dig, "page 12" per ASR — the archive places the Year of Glad memory at pp. 16–17), Baker's planned next pass tracking weather, with her programmer boyfriend plotting a temperature data-visualization across the book's length.
• Laird's practical first-timer advice: two bookmarks ("the book feels like a tennis match physically"), and expect the first 200–300 pages to be hard — a corner turns around the quarter mark.
• Pemulis reading (Baker): she's drawn to redeemable-villain characters (Snape, Ben Linus) and reads Pemulis that way — cast as the book's "antichrist" (a word she attributes to Wallace, not herself), but with a sensitive underbelly, e.g. the early tournament scene where the other kids spray-paint a sponsor logo onto the gear of the one boy with no sponsorship.
• John Wayne naming claim (Bucher): naming the character John Wayne was legally shrewd — thousands of real John Waynes exist, so no individual could claim it was him, unlike Kate Gompert (Bucher's aside implies the real-person risk there was live; the real tennis player Kate Gompert's displeasure is documented elsewhere). Baker turned the John Wayne chapter into a mini-series of cowboy poems, and the "This is how" litany into a series of poems sharing that anaphora.
• Erasure-poetry lineage offered for the archive's context shelf: Dada/Tzara roots; Foer's Tree of Codes (from The Street of Crocodiles); Christian Bök's Eunoia (univocalic constraint, itself a multi-year project); Travis Macdonald's The O Mission Repo (erasing the 9/11 Commission Report); Ronald Johnson's Radi os (erasing Paradise Lost); Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout. Plus the IJ-derived-art census: Brad Cheeseman's jazz album, a 2004 avant-garde opera of "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" at the Kaufman Theater NYC (Bucher attended; Orpheus/Narcissus reading of the story), and Blamos's song "Living with David Foster Wallace."
• Canadian-arc appreciation (Laird, a Kelowna BC high-school teacher): Wallace "did his homework" — the FLQ was a real 1960s–70s Quebec terrorist organization; the ultra-conservative Albertan separatist sect in IJ lands as a precise joke about intra-Canadian stereotypes of oil-economy Alberta; he notes the Every Love Story detail that Wallace once considered moving to Canada to teach high school. Bucher: an Alberta scholar gave a paper on IJ's Canadian arc at the 2015 Paris conference.
• ISU employment detail (Bucher): Wallace's last teaching year at Illinois State was 2001–02, moving to California in 2002, having accepted the new job around 2000 and given roughly two years' notice — read by the hosts as loyalty plus reluctance to upend his and the dogs' lives. (Conversational recall; don't cite for dates.)
• Baker's parting frame: two camps come to Wallace — the scholarly/analytic and the visceral/personal — and neither is the right way; Laird amends that the book's distinctive achievement is making head and heart non-exclusive.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ's plot puzzle is not solvable — Wallace never supplied a resolution, even to his own editor

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [draft] The Wallace–Pietsch correspondence: "they really fought" over plot resolution — Pietsch wanted to know what happens, and Wallace never gave him a satisfying answer (ASR, approximate; Bucher's gloss of the letters). [00:21]
  • [inference] Bucher's ~20 years of rereading: he no longer finds the plot puzzle "solvable or even as interesting" (ASR, approximate) and now needs a non-plot angle (currently the AA/higher-power co-read) to stay in the book. [00:21–00:22]
• Notes: Speaker is Bucher (host), not the guest. Baker adds the reader-side corollary: IJ's "spoilers" are less plot events than connections — reading the book is assembling a puzzle, and handing over the connections robs readers of that joy [00:20–00:21]. The preserved letters read more urbane than "really fought".

THEORY: Pemulis is a redeemable villain — cast as the book's "antichrist" but written with a sensitive underbelly

• Crux: pemulis-redeemable
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The early tournament scene: Pemulis is the only boy with no sponsorship, and the others spray-paint a sponsor logo onto his gear — funny but also touching and tender (ASR, approximate). [00:36–00:37]
  • [text] "Antichrist" as Pemulis's label she attributes to Wallace, not herself (she says the word was Wallace's, not her own — ASR, paraphrase; provenance of the word not specified on-air). [00:36]
• Notes: Baker (guest) advancing, explicitly framed by her taste for maybe-redeemed villains (Snape, Ben Linus); Orin gets a passing inclusion in the same category. [00:35–00:36]

THEORY: The character is named John Wayne to be lawsuit-proof — thousands of real John Waynes mean no individual could claim it

• Crux: wayne-naming
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [inference] The naming logic: like a "John Smith," thousands of Americans are named John Wayne, so even the real tennis-player John Wayne that Wallace reportedly came across could not sue ("I named it after a different John Wayne") — unlike Kate Gompert, where the real-person risk was live (ASR, approximate). [00:45]
• Notes: Bucher (host); community lore about authorial intent with no documentary anchor offered.

THEORY: The Hal/Gately grave-dig is a real event (with John Wayne present, masked)

• Crux: joi-head
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] Bucher's masks motif-hunt was sparked by the Year of Glad opening's first glimpse of Gately and Hal exhuming the head, John Wayne in a mask beside them ("page 12" per ASR; the archive places the memory at pp. 16–17) — flagged on-air as a spoiler, i.e. treated as a real plot event. [00:18–00:20]
• Notes: Presumed rather than argued — no one on-air contests it; counted as a popularity sighting.

Themes

communication-and-solipsism (loneliness → Infinite Summer community as the book's theme enacted by its readership); addiction-and-recovery (Bucher's AA/higher-power reread angle); entertainment-and-the-self only glancingly (the "anxieties relievable by purchase" ad-theory line Laird flags as his consumerism focus); Quebecois separatism (the Canadian-arc discussion); plus a meta-theme the archive cares about: maximalism inverted into minimalism — erasure as a reading method.

Cross-references

• gc-ep004-corrie-baldauf-ij-colors — Baldauf's color-tab project is explicitly invoked as the model for Baker's motif-tracking advice; the two projects are siblings (obsessive page-by-page physical traversal as art), and Baker proposes a joint show with Baldauf on air.
• infinite-summer-how-to-read-ij and infinite-summer-guest-essays — the reading-advice genre this episode's middle section belongs to; Baker's origin story is an Infinite Summer testimony.
• dtmax-2009-the-unfinished / infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — the Wallace–Pietsch correspondence behind Bucher's "they fought about it" gloss.
• gc-ep001-intro-discussing-dfw — the hosts' backgrounds (Laird's theology thesis, Bucher's community roles) referenced throughout.
• themes/the-ending — the spoiler exchange presumes the grave-dig; Bucher's anti-solvability stance belongs to camp 4.
• Characters/scenes: Hal's Year of Glad interview (pp. 3–17, the "EGAD" source page); the grave-dig memory (pp. 16–17); Pemulis (the spray-painted logo scene); John Wayne; Orin in Arizona ("the sun like a hammer"); the NoCoat LinguaScraper ad sequence (Laird's favorite comic set piece).