Simone Muench & Philip Jenks

Simone Muench is the author of four poetry books: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Helicon Nine, 2000); Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Sarabande, 2005); Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010); and Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, 2010). She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and now directs the Writing Program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. She serves on the advisory board of Switchback Books and is an editor for Sharkforum.

Philip Jenks' poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Typo, Fence, Cultural Society, H_NGM_N, Canarium, LVNG, and elsewhere. Flood Editions published his first volume of poems in 2002, On the Cave You Live In and a second volume of poems, My First Painting will be ‘The Accuser’ was published by Zephyr Press (2005). He also published two chapbooks – The Elms Left Elm Street (Plane Bukt, 1994) and How Many of You Are You? (Dusie, 2006). His collaboration with Simone Muench, Little Visceral Carnival was published by Cinemateque Press, 2009. He also collaborated with Sasha Miljevic, publishing Distance, an ekphrastic hybrid of prose and poetry (Dutch Art Institute, 2009). His book with Simone Muench, Disappearing Address is forthcoming on Blazevox Books. His fourth book, Colony Collapse Metaphor is forthcoming (Fence Books, 2013). He is currently working on a revision of the carbon footprint model to incorporate the suffering of all sentient beings, as the farm factory industry is the major contributor to climate change.



Dear Philip & Simone—


Your writing’s overwrought. Too haute.
Not cuisine or couture, but chicken-legged

high-kickin’ rhetoric vetted, vent,
& le vexor. French-fried car-talkers,

superspeed diesel drama. You’re all dilemma
& no serenity. Prickly as Jamestown weed,

more story than history. You’ve been dissed
& rechristened: poet to bootlegger; writer

to gothic romancer. I just want to know:
were you in Louisiana simultaneously?

Is that a place or frequency of syllabic
slowdown? A dos-a-dos at the American Legion

hoedown where everyone’s shouting bingo.
You once had a chance—sparrow & listen.

Trued by circumstance? Forget the men & shake
the dj into harmony, shake yourselves out of

a neutered dance, tremors of a doomed species.
Who locks lips to see what one is not?

Who writes themselves to save themselves,
only to find later that the whole of heavenly frame

is sickness propped up on a slouching tongue.




Dear Deer—


Every time I saw your sign on the North Dakota highway,
one of you showed up puffy, jut-rotted & one of you signaled

with white tail, luring us to the wilderness. What we thought was open
shut us up when everyone left. Blood rivulets bind a white blouse

to a spindly tree. Farther down the Mulberry River, fur is fevered
father damage, o you hunted! Hoofing millennia across the rotten chips

of redwood forests. Surrounded by deep-rooted trees, vertigo moved
these instinct instants collared by clothesline’s linear bulls-eye as if we

were to be decapitated instead of shot. Antlers spinning through wind
in some medieval machinery. When the orange vest shot at you,

there were two other hunters too, he shot them both & heaved you
on his hood. Blood ornaments. Dent in the mental. Forest family picnics

blast Sabbath’s “Thrill of it All”. Clogger gargle fat, tobacco juice smear.
Fiddle, venison & beer. A homicidal father cooking on the grill.


-from Disappearing Address (BlazeVOX Books)


How did your collaboration begin?

SM: Philip and I met at a reading in Chicago in January 2007 on the historic night that Nancy Pelosi was officially elected the first woman to be Speaker of the House. Philip was visiting from Portland, Oregon; I saw him read, loved his work, toasted Pelosi, and an email conversation began. Philip eventually moved to Chicago, began teaching at my university, and we became close friends. I had previously collaborated with William Allegrezza and was interested in continuing a collaborative project so I mentioned it to Philip. Two months after meeting, he suggested the following three possibilities:

1. send me three unpublished poems, I will do the same to you. We
could each pick a favorite of the other person's three (random
number) poems and rewrite it, sending it back and forth until it
becomes more than what was there before. If we each picked one of
the three and did this for a spell, then ideally perhaps at the
end of it all, the two would be linked and we could connect them
as one.

2. you pick the form, I pick the topic. trade off stanzas. secondly,
then I pick the form and you pick the topic. trade off. End result
is/are two poems we never would have written on our own.

3. more ambitiously, perhaps, there is the prose option. a
collaborative effort on a subject matter we both share
(problematics of categorization in contemporary poetics?, or...)
and we work together to produce a publishable essay that is also
conferenceable.

I immediately gravitated to #2 as I wanted it to be a work in forward motion, not one that returned to prior work, so I suggested a sestina since I thought it would be challenging—“Haptics, Not Optics” in Disappearing Address was our first collaboration. From there we decided to expand the idea of collaboration to incorporate other voices, so the epistolary poems arose from that.

PJ: There are several moments of it beginning. The first of which was when Simone and I met. I had the fortune of reading for MoonLit with several authors. The great poet and curator Joel Craig was there. My dear friend Rian Murphy and Lisa Janssen. I mention these people because really, language and poetry happen in a community, that’s not a new concept, but the notion of collaborative poetry (which embraces this) seems to meet with so much resistance. Simone was there and after the reading we had a discussion, a bit of a sparring about the South and afterward I left with Rian and Lisa. I vexed on just who was this Simone Muench? Didn’t she know who I was? I mean to point this egotism out, because I think individual authorship feeds that egotism. Later we exchanged books and letters and began talking about collaboration, particularly after meeting another time at Danny’s Reading Series (both of these events were, as many out of town trips are to me, etched in my brain – everything about going from Portland to Chicago carried a different valence). Here, I remember the idea of the epistolary came up. Thinking this over, I am pretty sure Simone had this interest, as I have to fess up that I forgot what “epistolary” meant but the idea of collaborating on poems seemed fantastic. I had a cigarette and looked up epistolary. It was the very thing I had been working on. This seemed all the better. Also, there was some discussion over the meanings of the word “dear” after this and again, we didn’t agree. We consistently seemed to come at meanings (The South, what does saying someone or something is “dear” mean?) differently. This interpretive friction elevated thought on my end after this we started trading lines. We didn’t just write epistolaries, but also a sestina which was a great challenge which I think happens to be really successful or certainly more successful as a poem than any other sestina I’ve written. If we could write a strong sestina, I thought this was very promising. That’s a bit of how it began.


Have you collaborated before? If so, how was this different than other collaborations?

SM: As mentioned before, I worked with William Allegrezza and we put out Sonoluminescence with Dusie Press for its fabulous chapbooks project. Additionally, I collaborated with Kristy Odelius in a less transparent manner, in which we engaged in Harry Mathew’s book-length project 20 lines a day, where we’d swap 20 lines via email each morning until we each had a reservoir of material from which to craft poems from. Those 20 lines-a-day became the preparatory material for my “Orange Girl Suite” in Orange Crush and for Odelius’ “Dislocation Lessons” in Strange Trades. I attempted a failed collaboration with the wonderful and unstoppable poet Jason Bredle; unfortunately, our voices and writing styles never notched together in a meaningful way, and nothing was salvageable. Greg Purcell and I tackled the beginning of a Western together for a fun project that Jennifer Kronovet and Brett Fletcher Lauer initiated. Also, Lisa Janssen of Moonlit, created a Chicago community collaboration, which was an extended exquisite corpse affair in which poets were asked to provide anonymous first lines for others to write off of, and then everyone assembled for a performance of the piece.

PJ: Yes. I’ve collaborated with Hugh Bartling in writing political theory and public policy as well as Elizabeth Daly. My work at the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center on The Future Well-Being of Women in Kentucky and setting benchmarks for progress was entirely collaborative. And, not to be coy but I really think my Master’s Thesis Fear of Clowns (written under Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott) bore not only their strong influences but also, key people I worked with in the workshop – Erin Belieu, Carl Phillips. Their voices were pivotal in shaping the work. That my name went on the poems is true so I’m the author. But, how many master’s theses and dissertations are written without “individually”? None. Not one. Language and power doesn’t work that way. To say my dissertation wasn’t also a work of collaboration with my committee, particularly Herbert Reid, Ernest Yanarella and Susan Bordo would just be wrong. Officially, this was the first poetry project I engaged in as collaboration. Since it began, I collaborated in an ekphrastic text/performance/multimedia, Distance with Sasha Miljevic and Sabina Pasic (Dutch Art Institute 2009). I also collaborated with Neil Michael Hagerty previously on a blog trying to imagine a blog by a trucker. While I failed to get the voice, this led to further work with Hagerty. This was different than each of these because it was all poetry and because we really developed a third voice that was different than either of our own voices.


What were the rules or parameters for the collaboration?

SM: After the sestina, which we wrote stanza by stanza, we decided on a series of epistolary poems that would be addressed to favorite poets, iconic figures, obsessions, and abstractions, engaging in a more integrated form, accreting the poems in more diminutive units than stanzas; thus, the letter poems were staircased line by line via email, and then edited so that each line might contain both of our phrasings with the idea that the poems would be neither Philip-voiced or Simone-voiced, existing instead as a third-tongued entity.

PJ: Kind of. The focus was on the epistolary and on trading lines. One of us would commence a set of epistolaries with first lines and send it to the other. We would then wait on the other for a response. This was sometimes rapid and sometimes delayed (usually the delay was mine). This wasn’t a rule, but a tendency. I delay and ruminate and yes, procrastinate as well. This isn’t a rule but became a part of the process, whereby certain conventions developed. What I’m saying is that even the pace of the process developed its own rhythm or antirhythm. Surely this would be a source of friction, but at the same time, in the process a unity emerged with surprising results. After we were done, we would revise the poems, aerating certain lines, closing others, and then Simone would send them out for publication. This last one is one I can say I didn’t carry my share on and feel badly about, but at the same time it can be tough to know which poem is where when two people are doing it. Still, had I do-overs, I’d be more organized and giving here.


The introduction to the book mentions a common bias against collaborative work. Was it difficult for you to publish to individual poems?

SM: It wasn’t difficult to publish individual poems, but it was tough to publish the book as a whole. Most journals were open to individual poems; however the book presses were a bit less enthusiastic about collabs. Though some editors simply didn’t like the work or it didn’t converge with their aesthetic, various presses wouldn’t even consider looking at a dual-authored manuscript. “Single-author only” is underscored in their submission guides; however, like the notable growth of books of prose poetry in the 21st century, collaborations continue to develop, and I think in the next 10 years we’re going to see a remarkable abundance of co-authored, and even multi-authored, books. One editor humorously noted that though his press was only open to single-authored manuscripts, he needed to revisit that guideline as he was also in the process of collaborating on a manuscript as well.

PJ: Yes! Even though as I’ve indicated, I think it is regularly acknowledged in and out of academia that a lot of what we do with language and writing is collaborative, still there’s the myth of the Author – even those self-proclaimed “death of the author” people are way into publishing “their” work, “their” voices. This is the age of memoirs (and really good ones exist, sure, but hey do we all need to know everyone’s sordid details? I’m one to talk, I do it as well.), individual blogs, facebook status updates (I painted my left pinky toenail and want 400 people to know immediately!). I’m not above it, nono. But, this bias in popular culture has strong roots in Western culture. “I think, therefore I am.” An individual’s very existence seems to pivot on this fake Cartesian impulse of the Ego. Plenty of authors have understood this (Rimbaud, Surrealists, many oral traditions and nonwestern “authors”). Every other discipline gets it from sciences to social sciences to the realm of art, film, music. But, for some reason in writing fiction and poetry, it’s less common. We need the fiction of the “self-made” being, like we give birth to ourselves and live in a vacuum in order to prop up the patriarchal racist capitalist system of oppression. Far from being this isolated “oddity” in culture, the resistance a collaborative author faces is well-nigh universal. Everything in western culture screams against it, despite the patent reality that we are intersubjective beings. We faced a great deal of difficulty publishing. We even dealt eventually in pseudonyms. People who liked our individual work sought to compare this to our individual works. It’s not a competition. Still, that’s the regnant perception. There were exceptions, such as the great Nate Slawson who published Little Visceral Carnival (Cinemateque Press) and all those who did accept our work. But it didn’t seem to matter what “school” a journal or author was in (“experimental” to formalism), both shared the common trait of resistance to collaboration. That I was not more involved (which was on me, not something “taken” from me) also made it difficult, and I bear that responsibility and regret.


Did the collaboration affect your own work?

SM: Definitely. For one, it allowed for more extensibility, for me to be less rigid in my constructions and flex in various new directions. I tend to be a more orderly writer whereas Philip is fabulous at deranging syntax: when my lines would become plodding and prosaic, he would explode them. In our collaborations, there was no director just a script-less performance, you improvise as you go along and each time you think you know where you are heading you get a surprise. So, the overall unpredictability was revitalizing. I’ve always considered poetry a call-and-response art, so in many ways it’s always been collaborative for me as I tend to gravitate towards forms, both when I teach and when I write, that engage community or conversation whether it be with the living or the dead—ekphrasis, bout-rimes, exquisite corpses, epistolary poems, centos, etc. After Philip and I completed our book, I decided to undertake a different sort of collaboration, mediating pre-existing texts for a collage manuscript I’m currently working on called Wolf Centos.

PJ: Yes. Pointedly, Simone's attention to revision and image gave a certain "permission" to dwell longer with my own work before declaring it "done." I came from a space where if it went down on paper, there it was. To some extent, I feared harming the poem if I touched it again. My relationship with revision is still complex but working collaboratively showed me again (as I learned in school) that yes, revision can help. Also, the very fact of recognizing the collaborative role of all writing influenced certain elements of my poetics. The I may be another, to follow Rimbaud, but that another comes into being in the presence of spirits, other voices, people, animals.


Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?

SM: Mainly, I was surprised at how well our minds converged, and negotiated, to create work that I believe transcends what many people mistakenly believe collabs to be, and what my mentor Michael Anania refers to as “the bi-polar diffusion or poetic ju-jitzu contending egos can produce.” Additionally, I’m thrilled that we were able to sustain the project, our “workshop of filthy creation,” to its book-length completion.

PJ: Yes. All of it! The publication of these poems, which began as a thought or debate in a bar thousands of miles from home eventually became a voice that isn’t/is “mine” (Is Disappearing Address “my” third full-length book? Yes! And publishing any book is surprising to me.). The collaborative work with Kim Ambriz (artist), Nate Slawson (publisher of our chapbook), the introduction by Kevin Killian in Disappearing Address (which was collaborative as well) and the generous contributions on the back of the book by some of my favorite authors blows my mind. Ed Roberson said that?! Robin Schiff? But, not just being amazed but also realizing that all texts are really collaborative. I was squarely in the single-author notion before – and now I see this as the superstructural ideology for the Great Man theory of History – and I see this sexist racist speciestist imperialist Great Man notion going down. I see the possibility of people ending Empires. Or at least the reality and necessity of resistance. I’m just a spoke in the wheel, no big deal.


How do you feel about the finished product?

SM: Collaboration is such a manifold process with multiple approaches: our approach was one in which we edited heavily and revised over the course of a couple of years; but, it’s a much different process to edit with a partner than without because each decision has to be revisited by both. As a whole though, I think the book turned out really well. There are only a few poems in the book that perhaps were less cohesive, or more slack, than I’d like them to be. But then again, Philip and I have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a “finished” poem. As an artifact, I couldn’t be more pleased with the book with its fabulous linocut cover from Kim Ambriz, a dazzling introduction by Kevin Killian, and an absolutely lovely publisher to work with, Geoffrey Gatza.

PJ: Thrilled. It's an honor to have published and worked with Simone. I believe in the work and am really pleased with/by Kevin Killian's Introduction, the generous reflections by other authors, the cover art by Kim Ambriz, and the great work of all at BlazeVox. Also, there's another feeling, one distinctively different from my excitement about my solo publications. For some reason, I feel more free to brag about it than I would my own work. I think this has to do not only with it being great, but also because collaboration creates a different relation to the work. This is and is not my book. Perhaps that shared notness permits a certain celebration that when I publish I can’t engage in. I don’t know how to explain it.


What are some collaborative books you would recommend?

SM: There’s a wonderful journal that was published in the 60’s called Locus Solus and edited by John Ashbury, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews, and Kenneth Koch. The collaborative issue is Locus Solus II: A Special Issue of Collaborations edited by Koch. If you can find a copy, buy it. My first introduction to a contemporary co-authored poetry book was Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton’s Exquisite Politics (1997). I’m looking forward to Your Father on the Train of Ghost by John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep (2011). Recent anthologies I enjoy are Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007) edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad; > 2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry (2007) edited by Sheila E. Murphy & M. L. Weber; and New Pony: A Horse Less Anthology (2010) edited by Erika Howsare & Jen Tynes. There are numerous other collabs that deserve mentioning as well. Nate Slawson of Cinematheque Press, who put out our chapbook Little Visceral Carnival, is devoted to collaborations and is publishing work by Emily Kendal Frey & Zachary Schomburg, Mathias Svalina & Julia Cohen, Karyna McGlynn & Adam Theriault, and others.

PJ: Putting aside the claim that all is more collaborative than it seems as well as other fields (e.g. Marx and Engels, Laclau and Mouffe), I’d recommend: Disappearing Address! Revisiting the Exquisite Corpse work of Breton, Char, all is worthwhile. Saints of Hysteria is a great anthology/introduction – and Duhamel and Seaton certainly have contribution their own great collaborations to the field. Creeley’s work with Ted Berrigan. Locus Solus II, while not a “book” is a great journal/anthology of collaborative poems (and one of the most generous gifts ever, thank you Simone). In it are phenomenal collaborations such as Basho, Bonsho, Fumikuni and Kyorai’s “The Kite’s Feathers” and cut ups with Burroughs, Corso, and Rimbaud are awesome. Something Really Wonderful (and others) by Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert. Anne Waldeman’s work is fundamentally collaborative as are so many. No matter how I answer this, I know I’m leaving off a ton of people whose works I love but am spacing out…

Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and Sentence, among other journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, and The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics. She currently lives in Boston and blogs at The French Exit

Kathleen Rooney is an editor of Rose Metal Press and the author, most recently, of For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010) and After Robinson Has Gone (Greying Ghost Press, 2011). With Elisa Gabbert, she has co-written That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008) and Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2009). She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University.



ABERCROMBIE ADDRESSES FITCH

Caught in the cross-hairs, we are at cross-purposes.
I’ve heard that love is a dangerous game. Well,
I’m wearing my Kevlar vest & know the best defense
against Cupid & other Valentines-y symbols is
faux-Army surplus, old chap. This crap is golden
like oldies, like golden rectangles, when it comes
tangled in ratios & marketing plans. Put your hand
in the hand of someone whose spending power
is in service to the dowager empress. What am I
talking about? I’m talking about tweens, & evil
beings known as guerilla marketers. Take this sock
& make it into a puppet of the Faerie Queen
then recite Spenser. What do you mean, you don’t
like games? That’s like saying you don’t like
T-shirts with offensive sayings. Fitch, don’t bitch
when I wear the “B IS FOR BEEYOTCH” number.
Your own mom wears “Blondes are adored, brunettes
are”—wait, your mom? Who cares?? Her affairs
scare me. She’s an unholy combo of martyr/satyr,
so she’s one-quarter horse. Of course I’m no
expert in husbandry, but teens today are animals;
they wear flannel pants w/ graphics right on
the crotch. Our new Watch Yer Crotch line
can actually help you learn to tell time. Digital
or standard. Each pair comes w/ a lanyard
because society needs its whistle-blowers.
In this world, Fitch, there are doers & knowers;
also those who know & those who know they know.
You, w/ your antique service revolver & your
other fine excursion goods—I could catalogue
how little dialogue these have w/ our demographic
target these days. Close one eye & aim that thing
higher. A little to the left. When you fire,
fire hard & loud. That’s what it takes to get thru
the rock-hard washboard abs of the indolent crowd.


-from That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness


How did your collaboration begin?

KR: It was EG’s idea. She was visiting me in Provincetown back in 2006, and she pulled Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer’s Nice Hat. Thanks. off my bookshelf at one point, and was all “We should try this.” So we did.


Have you collaborated before? If so, how was this different than other collaborations?

KR: I’d collaborated with other writers on plays and scripts, since it seems sort of natural to go back and forth on writing dialogue, but never on poems. So it makes sense, in that respect, that it turns out that in poetry collaboration, the results are also fairly conversational.

EG: I haven’t to any meaningful extent I can think of.


What were the rules or parameters for the collaboration?

KR: Most of our collaborations are driven by forms, which seems logical since we can’t just default to the autobiography so common to the lyric “I” since there are two of us. At the outset of each poem, we decide on some rules, and then use those to generate our content. Some of the forms are fairly traditional like sonnets or villanelles (although EG refuses, to my chagrin, to try a sestina), and others are of our own invention, like limited freedoms and out-of-orders.


Did the collaboration affect your own work?

KR: Yes, it helped both of us lose some of the pressure to be “perfect” in every single line we ever put to the page. So much of our collaborative work gets thwarted by the other partner, and so much of it also gets discarded that it’s gotten easier to relax a little more in our solo stuff.


Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?

EG: I guess I'd say what surprised me is that I often forget who wrote which lines.

KR: Agreed.


How do you feel about the finished product?

EG: I think the finished product is hilarious.

KR: Yes. We frequently make ourselves LOL as they say. And hopefully that effect transfers to our readers. Frost said “No tears in the writer, no tears for the reader.” We think that’s probably true for laughter as well.


You can also read a great review of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness at Coldfront.

Kyle McCord & Jeannie Hoag

Kyle McCord is the author of two books of poetry: Informal Invitations to a Traveler (Gold Wake 2012) and Galley of the Beloved in Torment (Dream Horse 2008), winner of the 2008 Orphic Prize. He has work forthcoming or published from Boston Review, Columbia: a Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s worked for The Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, and The Nation. He currently coordinates the Younger American Poets Reading Series and reviews for Pleiades. He’s received grants or awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Iowa Poetry Society. He lives and teaches in Des Moines, Iowa.




Jeannie Hoag lives in Buffalo, New York. Her work has appeared in GlitterPony and notnostrums. Her chapbook New Age of Ferociousness was recently published by Agnes Fox Press.




The Only Day

Start with weather,
evaluate. Today
is hot. Today is
cold. One day
doesn't cause the next
Flowers bloom, Miss Kim,
the next day wilt,
burning to no benefit

Say it is cyclical,
say it renews itself:
today there were
accidents & tomorrow too
Another leaf on
last year's leaves
the ground under
inches of leaves
This the only honor this
life


from Informal Invitations to a Traveler, forthcoming from Gold Wake Press


How did your collaboration begin?

KM: It started in Northampton Brewing Company in Massachusetts nearly two years ago. I’d just finished my first book and was working on getting it published. I was thinking about the prospect of writing another manuscript, and I realized it seemed more daunting than I could handle by myself.

I don’t remember having an epiphany about working on a collaboration—it just seemed natural. But I do remember having an “ah-ha” moment when I realized Jeannie seemed like the right person to work with. We hadn’t worked together much, but she’d been an excellent editor for my first manuscript and I liked her poetry. I approached her with the idea, we got together for lunch in NoHo, and I think we both came away pretty psyched about the prospect of writing a book together.

I don’t think either of us realized it would take nearly a year and a half to write and edit it, but I suppose it wouldn’t have surprised me either. Poetic collaboration is a tricky animal because, unlike fiction for example, the parameters are so much wider. Jeannie and I’s work had just enough stylistic similarity that we both thought it would be a good match without the two voices sounding too similar. It was the right choice, I think, but it did mean three months of editing and arranging the voices to make sure they weren’t talking past or over each other.

JH: Kyle contacted me around December 2008 with an idea for the project, and we met to talk it over. I was really interested in the idea, particularly by the correspondence. I hadn't really participated in long-term collaboration, and it seemed like a good chance to develop and commit to a different type of voice.


Have you collaborated before? If so, how was this different than other collaborations?

KM: This is actually the first collaboration I’ve ever worked on. Many of the folks at UMass did collaborative work: the Agnes Fox folks in particular seemed very attracted to the medium. But, at least from my end, this was a completely new experience.

JH: I had written a collaborative play with Madeline ffitch for the UMass theater department that fall. I loved working with Madeline, but the project had a lot of constraints—we were given a topic, source material, and a very specific deadline which made the process seem pretty high-stakes. At the other end of the spectrum, I had done very short poem collaborations, but always with a perception that they were amusements rather than poems that would live beyond that moment. This collaboration fell somewhere between those two. Without an immediate audience or deadline I felt more freedom, but still felt I had a responsibility to Kyle to follow through.


What were the rules or parameters for the collaboration?

KM: At the first meeting, we set out a few basic guidelines that we’d largely discarded by the time we finished. It’s not that the rules weren’t helpful. They just became obsolete by the end of the work. We set out that each week one of us would write a poem and send it to the other. The other person would then write a poem that responded in some way to that poem. That worked most of the time, though both Jeannie and I got caught in a few potholes along the way which actually became part of the process itself. Much of the book is about the breakdown and renewal of communication, especially as it relates to the seasons.

The poems often have an epistolary quality (as you can tell from the title), but they aren’t always letters in the way you might envision letters. The poems are always responding to each other, but sometimes it’s on a sonic level, sometimes on an associative level. Sometimes one voice just changes the subject. It’s meant to mirror real communication.

We had some ideas about who the two voices—Ms. Kim and J.R— were but we’d largely discarded that by the end as well. They’d really formed pretty independent identities through the work, and neither Jeannie nor I wanted to impose on that.

JH: We tried to keep the project open to evolution, but there were still some parameters that stayed with me throughout. When Kyle first brought up the idea, he had some character ideas, and I found writing as a specific voice was a way to approach each round of poems consistently. Another parameter was that each poem would respond in some way to the previous poem. Beyond that, we had a general agreement that there would be a two week turnaround time—something I was not very good at following.


Did the collaboration affect your own work?

KM: I didn’t write anything else until Jeannie and I had moved into the editing process. I have to admit it’s been tough not to write poems now without imagining a particular audience on the other side. My new manuscript (which I’m currently working on like a dog) utilizes the “you” much more than any of my previous work. I think the collaboration has a lot to do with that.

JH: As with Kyle, I didn't write many other poems during the time we were working on the project, but my current writing has definitely been affected by it. My voice in the project tended towards disjointed flashes, and I find that even though it wasn't my natural way of writing at the start of the project, it's become a default for me now. The project had more of a focus than my usual writing life, and for that reason I think it trained me.


Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?

KM: Mostly the way the voices morphed and shaped each other’s identities was unexpected. I particularly remember Jeannie and I discussed how our own struggles and the seasons might seep into the poems. Both things happened, which wasn’t the surprise. Both Jeannie and I finished our MFA’s as the recession was sweeping across the markets. I don’t want to overstate anything, but it was tough time to be writing or teaching and especially to be looking for a job. It was also a horrific winter in Iowa where I was and in Buffalo where Jeannie was. All of this worked its way into our communication.

However, the surprise was how the call-and-response took on a life of its own at certain points, and the characters started articulating some anxieties and delights that didn’t have much to do with me or Jeannie personally. It was both strange and enlightening to watch a relationship develop that I had prompted but didn’t fully control. It was like introducing two friends and watching their friendship blossom, only at a much closer angle.

JH: I had expected responding to be difficult, and I was surprised that a small element like a word or phrase could work toward creating a dialogue. I also expected myself to behave more literally than I did, which I'm glad didn't happen. You can't quite gauge how a conversation will go until you're in it.


How do you feel about the finished product?

KM: I’m excited to see the new book in print and hear reader’s reactions. With the distance between us, Jeannie and I haven’t been able to do readings together with the poems, so that will be a real thrill as well. We just saw a rough draft of the cover a week or two ago, and it was pretty exhilarating. Big kudos to Brian Mihok for being a secret graphic design expert in addition to a great fiction writer.

Not to be overly personally laudatory, but I do think this is the sort of book that sparks discussion. I’ll be excited to see where that discussion leads and how the community feels about the work!

JH: During the time we were working on this, I finished one graduate program, moved, and began another one. Beyond getting my poems written each week (or month), I didn't have a strong sense of how it was developing. I was really surprised to see how many connections were present between the poems. The voices are so distinct, but the conversation is there.

Melissa Barrett & Pete Luckner

Melissa Barrett is the recent author of False Soup, a veg-friendly cookbook from Forklift, Ink. Her poems have received honors from Tin House, Indiana Review, and Gulf Coast, and can be found in No Tell Motel, Front Porch, and H_NGM_N. “Pilot,” her collaboration with filmmaker Pete Luckner, recently debuted at Video Dumbo.




Pete Luckner is a painter and digital artist working in Columbus, Ohio. His paintings and videos have been included in various exhibitions and festivals, including the voyeur issue of 4x magazine. “Pilot,” his collaboration with poet Melissa Barrett, recently debuted at Video Dumbo.

Pilot from peter philip on Vimeo.

How did your collaboration begin?
 
MB: For me, the collaboration began inside of a square silo three years ago. Pete and I used to work in a studio for disabled artists, located in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. One afternoon we drove a few miles to our co-worker’s farm for lunch. We met her horses and toured her silo, which was square and leaning and blonde with wormy chestnut.

Standing in that space with Pete, I began sketching the framework of a poem. It was then that I realized that Pete stirred all sorts of creative ideas in me; I’ve been addicted to his presence ever since.

PL: Our artistic conversation began for me when we were working together and Mel showed me the film Breathless, by Jean Luc Godard. That was probably the first time we spoke frankly about our sensibilities. The visual imagery in her poems also made me think it would be great fun to talk about ideas with her.

We came to our first project when we stumbled upon Lakeside Amusement Park in Denver, Colorado. We were both captivated by the place—it was such a run-down old park. The man who worked the Round-Up ride ended up becoming the subject of “Pilot”—our first poem/video collaboration.


What were the rules or parameters for the collaboration?

MB: The collaboration was utterly parameterless. There were no rules—the whole thing happened almost by mistake. We just happened to drive along the fringe of Denver on a Friday afternoon when we were looking for something to do. We saw the park from the highway and decided that that would be our weekend. 

It was mere luck that the park proprietors bought my bumbling request to film (they have a strict “no camera” policy—for all of its rusty beauty, Lakeside wouldn’t survive even amateur documentation of its decaying machinery. There’s a reason admission is only two dollars.)  

Going through the footage a few weeks later, Pete uncovered distinctive shots of one of the ride’s operators. He hadn’t meant for the footage to become anything—and I hadn’t either. But the image of the Round-Up stayed with me; slowly, a poem began to take shape.

PL: We sort of made rules as we went along. It started as a documentary project about the humanity of a crusty amusement park. The footage was gathered intuitively, and it was interrupted by park security. They were a little weird about the camera since the park has a reputation for being a dump. But that dumpiness was its charm. When I brought the footage into the computer we realized the Round-Up operator represented everything we loved about the park. We began to construct his portrait.


Have you collaborated before outside your art form?  How did this differ from those collaborations? 

MB: A little. I was in a band that wished it were Kraftwerk. We had seventeen keyboards and unlimited access to a recording studio. Around the same time, I made a few dozen short films with my sisters—some of the most imaginative people I know.

Currently, I’m trying to write collaborative poems with Dan Poppick and Anthony Madrid. These collaborations are very different than “Pilot,” and perhaps more difficult. How can something as delicate as a poem survive the poking and prodding of two people?

PL: I had a band when I lived in Pittsburgh. It was a noisy experimental band. In my head I view collaborations as always finding the parts that we mutually find interesting and trying to inflate what is interesting about them. This collaboration was different in that we worked in chunks. Each chunk had its interesting parts and we would focus on that each time trying to expand on the aesthetic and find new avenues. I really liked how that approach fit the project, I think poetry and video have a lot of promise there.


What did you learn from your fellow collaborator?
 
MB: I learned that the process of editing a film is in itself quite poetic—and that it can be just as agonizing as writing a poem. I also learned that, though poetry and filmmaking are the gods of two different universes, Pete and I are on the hunt for the same thing: a resonant image.

PL: I learned that our approaches are very similar. Mel taught me how writing is like painting and how it is different. She told me once that, “Reading is writing.” I found that very interesting. I think that makes the art of writing very unique.


Did the collaboration affect your own work?

MB: Yes. The problem that I thought I’d have with collaboration was dishonesty—an inability to evaluate and speak openly about the work. Not so with Pete. Honesty might be his best quality—he was always pushing me toward something more exact.

“That’s trash,” he’d say, critiquing an alliterative string of adjectives—all synonyms, probably, for the word “brown.” My first reaction was defensiveness. I wasn’t in this to get workshopped. But Pete uncovered a larger problem of mine: my addiction to over-constructed descriptions, and a heavy reliance on similes.

In grad school, I saw a craft talk on the (dis)function of simile and metaphor. One of the panelists implored, “Is any one thing really that similar to anything else? Isn’t the designation of words dishonest enough?” Which is similar to the Mad Hatter’s inquiry: “When is a raven like a desk?” And later, he divulges, “I have absolutely no idea.” 

PL: Working with Mel gave me a scaffold to build a lot of ideas about editing and visual scenarios. I have tunnel vision on occasion when it comes to editing video. In being forced to stretch that tunnel in different directions to fit the flow of the video I was able to see more possibility in my own work. In the project I am working on now I am constantly trying to harness that.


Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?
 
MB: We recorded “Pilot” with my voice at first, and something just wasn’t right. We actually abandoned the project for several months because we couldn’t figure out what that something was. Pete finally made the suggestion to redo the audio with someone else’s voice. Though I’m a huge advocate for poets reading their own work, this particular story—about a man’s simultaneous aging and infantilization—is benefitted by the sandpapery voice of poet Maj Ragain.

All Hail the Yurtmaster

This has become my new favorite project. An interesting take on community collaboration. Check out the great Yurtmaster poems on this blog if you haven't already come across it.

The Yurtmaster

Nick Lantz

Nick Lantz is the author of two books of poetry, We Don't Know We Don't Know (Graywolf Press, 2010) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). He is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His plays have been produced in Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin. He is the current Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.




Across A Distance Website



How did your collaboration begin?

The collaboration began without me. Julia Faulkner, an opera singer, and Robert Schleifer, a Deaf actor, had met a few years back and very much wanted to do a piece of theater together that incorporated their different experiences. In 2006, they enlisted a composer, Scott Gendel, and then later a director, Kelly Bremner, to work with them on devising this project. After a little over a year, they decided they needed an actual script, and that's where I came in. Kelly brought me in to one of their rehearsals, and after looking at some of the themes they were dealing with, I went home and sketched out a story that I pitched to them at their next meeting. This was in early summer 2008. They liked the idea, so I started working on a draft of the script and had it finished by that fall. In the summer of 2009, we had a week of reading, rehearsal, and revision, and they performed a selection of scenes at a play development workshop in Chicago that September. Then the show was picked up (I say that as if it just happened, but really Kelly was doing the work of shopping the project around) by the University Theatre in Madison as part of their fall 2010 season.


Have you collaborated outside your art form before this? If so, how did this differ from those collaborations?

I think that theater is a fundamentally collaborative art form in a way that poetry and prose aren't. I've written several plays before this, and whenever a play of mine has been performed, I'm always amazed at how the interpretation that appears in the final performance is so dependent on the efforts and intentions of so many different participants. When writing a play, I always try to leave things with a lot of wiggle room for the director and performers. In fiction or poetry, I feel like I need to micromanage every little detail, because there's very little mediation between me and the reader--it's almost a direct line--but with a play, I don't think it's even possible to do that. For example, in fiction or poetry I might spend several sentences/lines describing how a character peels an orange: how he's standing, where he's looking, what's around him, how his hands move, what he's thinking about. In a play, though, those are the blanks that directors and actors and set designers fill in. The playwright's job is to point in a certain direction, to suggest something compelling, and to trust everyone else involved to make good choices with the rest. A playwright is in charge of the language as it appears in dialogue, but even that, to me, is flexible, especially when directors or actors are working with a living playwright. I think that if a playwright sees her play in rehearsal or performance, that will change how she sees the lines she's written. Some things don't play on stage the way you expect them--I think this is especially true of playwrights (like me) who do most of their writing in other genres. What works on the page isn't always what works on the stage, and so as a playwright, I always want to leave myself open to the commentary of the people who are actually going to be making the performance happen. They have expertise and intuition that I just don't have--they're coming at the script from an entirely different angle. So I want to leave myself open to the idea that the actors or director might have valuable changes to suggest about the dialogue itself. But this project was a step beyond that, even. First of all, I was commissioned to write this piece. Also, this is the first time I've written poetry that was set to music and the first time my work has been translated into another language (American Sign Language). My musical talents and familiarity with ASL are about zero, so I was really dependent on others even at times when it came to the actual language of the piece.


Once they began adapting your work for the opera, was there any additional feedback on either side?

I was commissioned to write the script, and being paid to write something is a very odd experience (for a poet, anyway). But because I was writing this script for a group of people who were going to perform it, I approached the writing process somewhat differently. I got some initial notes from Kelly (the director), and then about a year after I'd finished the first draft we had a whole week in which we met, read through the script, and discussed issues that came up. I took notes at these sessions, then went home and make revisions based on what we discussed. I've had my writing workshopped before, certainly, but this was different. In a creative writing workshop class, you're never really obligated to make any particular changes that your peers suggest. But in this case that's exactly what I set out to do. I very much wanted the final piece to be something that would work for everyone. So I often went home with very specific notes from our meetings that I tried to incorporate into revisions of the script. We had lots of debates about different aspects of the show. One sticking point was the title--we spent what felt like hours working on the title, because we wanted something that worked both in English and ASL. Another issue was onstage translation. Contemporary opera performances are often accompanied by projected captions or translations (especially when the opera isn't in English), and Deaf theater also often includes on-stage sign interpreters for spoken parts and so forth. An idea I was committed to from very early on in the development of this project was that significant portions of the show would not be translated. The themes of the show have to do with both the frustrations of human communication and the sensory beauty of language, separate from its meaning. Leaving parts of the show untranslated simulates that frustration and (hopefully) encourages the audience to just watch the performance, to let go of having to understand everything and instead simply appreciate language as a sensory experience. My original stance was that none of the show should be translated, but this was something we negotiated in the process of revising the script, and the end result (in which only key parts of the show are left untranslated) certainly worked out better than it would have if I had gotten my way. So that was a really important example, for me, of collaborating to find a middle ground that was both practical and made sense thematically and was ultimately better for the show.


What did you learn from this collaboration? Did it affect your own work?

Our work together reinforced what I already knew about theater: that it is fundamentally collaborative, and that one will be better served by acknowledging and embracing that fact. In terms of the script itself, I think there were interesting parallels between what we were doing in or workshops/rehearsals and the themes I was actually working into the play. The show is about the struggles of communication, and what the characters realize is that communication is a collaborative act. You can't simply beam your thoughts and feelings into the mind of another person as if he or she is a satellite dish passively soaking up cosmic radiation. Communication requires effort and negotiation on both ends, which can be frustrating but also rewarding. That's the note the show ends on, for me, and it was certainly informed by our pre-production discussions.


Did anything happen in your collaboration that surprised you?

As I said, I went into this project knowing nothing about music or ASL. The process of setting the poetry to music was painless for me. Scott, who is a wonderful composer, took whatever I wrote and built this amazing music around it. I'd expected that he would have lots of requests for me about revisions to make the language fit the music better, but he basically set the words as I wrote them. We did get together and talk through some small issues, but the biggest surprise for me was how he was able to not only structure music around free-verse poetry but also create very subtle musical themes that carried through from song to song. Robert translated his parts into ASL, and this was probably the most exciting process of rehearsal for me. We ran into a few places where what I'd written in English just didn't have a comfortable equivalent in ASL, and often it was something that had seemed very simple to me when I wrote it. But ASL and English are incredibly different languages--ASL is unlike any other language I've ever encountered, and it was so interesting to see how Robert adapted what I'd written into ASL. In some cases, he had to actually create signs just for the show. Another pleasant surprise was the actual design that Kristin Hunt, another UW faculty member, executed for the show. The play as I wrote it calls for magical islands, with talking birds and trees, and Kristin's design achieved these elements in a very stylized but powerful way. The two human characters deliver probably half of their lines in "dialogue" with these birds and trees, who "speak" through gesture and prerecorded music, so it was essential that they resonate with the audience and give the performers something dynamic to play against. When I wrote the play, I'd imagined the birds and trees could have been realized with anything from puppets to other live actors in costume. I didn't have specific design in mind, and this is exactly the way in which I see theater being fundamentally collaborative. The suggestion of talking birds and trees is mine, but I hand that idea off to the director and designer and trust them to realize it in whatever way they see fit. And that's exactly what they did.


How do you feel about the finished product?

By the time the show was picked up, I had a good sense of the talent of everyone involved in the production, so I didn't have any anxiety about the performance being strong. What I did expect to find fault with was my own writing--that may be a natural thing for most writers, but however long I work on something, once I see it in print or on stage, I always have those nagging feelings like "that image could have sharper," "that metaphor could have been more surprising," and so on. For me, that's an inevitability, so I take it in stride. That said, it was immensely exciting to see the show, and I think the performance was fantastic, better than I'd imagined it, in many ways. The thing I worried about most was the reaction that it would receive, especially from the Deaf community. I believe that writers should be able to write about whatever they want, but I do think writers have to tread carefully when their work involves cultural groups and communities to which they themselves do not belong. The play is not a realist play--its framework is that of mythology or folktale--so it doesn't attempt to represent the "Deaf community" as such. But the premise--a play written partly for the Deaf that also incorporates hearing opera and deliberately refuses to translate significant portions of the script--felt a little dangerous. While I was in Madison for opening weekend, we had a post-show panel and discussion with audience members after a matinee, and I think that the members of the Deaf community who saw the show, at least those who stayed for the panel, understood the show, where it was coming from, what it was trying to say about human communication. The impression I got was that the experience of untranslated ASL was, by and large, probably more difficult for hearing audience members than the untranslated English was for Deaf audiences. One panelist, a linguist who studies ASL, made the point that Deaf people often find themselves on the outside of conversations, even at home if their families are hearing and don't use ASL consistently. Hearing people don't often have that same experience, and it's a difficult experience to deal with. I think some of the reviews the show received reflected that difficulty, but that for me underscores how necessary it was to build it into the play, how valid the point was to begin with. I'm not a proponent of easy art, art that allows the audience to remain passive. Theater, especially, should be challenging. It's a collaborative form not just for those responsible for writing and staging the show but for those viewing it as well. The audience can't merely receive; it has to engage. You should go home talking about it, arguing about it, puzzling over it. The test of good theater (or any art) is that it rewards the audience's engagement. I think the performance of Across a Distance was complex, emotional, funny, and visually and musically stunning, and I'm still a little shocked and awed that my name is on the posters. It's listed as being "by Nick Lantz," but that's always felt odd to me. Even though I came up with the plot and wrote the script, the project had its genesis years before I was even involved, and its eventual realization on stage had very little to do with me directly. The script was my contribution to the show, but the script was not in any way the final product--not by a long shot. It's hard to explain. I feel immensely proud to have been a part of the show, but I'm constantly aware of everything that everyone else did to actually make that show happen the way it did.

Two Is the Magic Number

Check out this great article on Slate: Two is the Magic Number

From babies and their mothers to other partnerships, this article helps put to bed the notion of lone genius. Even Emily Dickinson had Higginson and her sister-in-law.

Yeah, Ayn Rand, who needs you?



Apologies for the summer silence, but I am getting back in touch with collaborators I talked to at the end of spring and hope to update the blog more regularly.