kadar koli 10: Off the Books

"Off the Books": not recorded, not taxed. Under the table, stretching the rules.We conceived of this issue as coinciding with the theme of the 4th Annual Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group (scholars, primarily medievalists, interested in bridging disciplines and testing boundaries) in October 2015.In addition to works by creative writers, we feature here several revised presentations from the BABEL conference. We're glad to host these works for people who presented, performed, experienced, and embodied the conference. We see this issue as a bridge between the creative text and creative discussions of text. A few of the pieces here (Mike Rose-Steel, Angela Warner, Tracy Zeman) feature an internal caesura, that white space that allows a place of stillness between sound, as well as the juxtaposition of thought. Across the white space, the medieval looks at the contemporary, the creative at the scholarly. Across the caesura of the page's margin, the text looks at the real.The texts here reflect how we assemble the journal itself. "Still I am linking a word to a word to a word," Ruth Williams says in her prose poem series. We link poem to story to essay, many of which stretch the rules of genre in some way-and which stretch the tendencies of culture.Paula Billups' piece here, a transcript of a presentation, itself "off the page," describes the process of a communal collage piece. Her statement here acts as microcosm for what we hope kadar koli 10 does for its writers and their texts: "I intended this as a creative commons. So the book belongs to all of us and to none of us. Because it can't be here unless we all do it. The only way this book could exist is if all of these people have shown up during these days in this place with this paper. Otherwise it would never have happened."