Likestarlings: Often your work is a response to a work of art. When did that start to happen?

Frances: There was a phase when I did a lot of that, particularly in the late ’80s, early ’90s.

Ls: There’s quite a bit in your collection Linocut from that period…

FP: Yes, especially in Linocut. It probably had to do with two things. One, being in London working pretty much full-time and going to exhibitions at weekends. And secondly having to write, writing occasional poems – in my pre-project days – often related to an exhibition I’d been to.

Ls: So you felt the need to be writing things. Did you seek them out as deliberate subjects sometimes?

FP: Not really, I think it was more just a general enthusiasm for going to exhibitions. I’d always had a fascination with the visual arts. My unfinished thesis was on the visual arts and poetry, and I did my MA on Pound and Apollinaire and the visual arts. I’d always felt at home with the visual, in a way that I hadn’t with music. And because of the way that modern poetry’s been involved in that world; the other home for experimental poetry has been (visual) art, because that’s been successfully experimental as an art form. There was also the feminist aspect and discovering forgotten women artists – Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim for example.

Likestarlings: On Automatic Cross Stitch I’m interested in how you devised how the collaboration would work between you and the artist Irma Irsara, and how you made the performance as well the creation of the book.

FP: It started with a poem called ‘Stitching’. I was watching a woman making bridal dresses in a factory at the end of my garden and that was a straight account of what I could see out of my window in that factory and also imagining what was happening. That was the first one I wrote, before the collaboration began. It was more Irma’s idea that we’d actually go and talk to people. So that was slightly novel for me. And also she was very keen on doing research, which again wasn’t something I was thinking of at that stage because you look at her work and just think ‘oh, abstract art, lovely colours’, but when you get to know it you see that in fact there’s always a theme and a project that comes through.

This whole issue of thinking in projects was something that existed in British experimental poetry and which was reinforced by the influx of Language writing around that time. But as an artist Irma would also have a major theme for a project and would do lots of research and that would come through in the work in various subtle ways. She was the one who suggested that we go to the V&A library and do all the research there on fashion and textiles.

Ls: So the research element is something that’s continued to be an interest?

FP: Yes, and the community aspect of interviewing people as well – especially working with Tilla Brading [on Stone Settings] who likes to get involved with community issues. I found it quite tricky in a way because it’s sometimes easier not to know people. The only real falling out Irma and I had was because she was unhappy that I’d transcribed somebody’s conversation. But it was teacher giving a public lecture and I felt it was out in the public domain. Some of it was just downright comic and I couldn’t resist using it, having collected the material, and it was relevant to the sequence. Because Irma was in a way much closer to fashion, as an artist, than I was as a poet – using words – she could actually use forms and shapes and colours and materials. She was already in that domain, the non-verbal. There was a point in the V&A library when I thought: what am I going to do with all this? So these interviews became both fascinating and important for my writing.

Ls: Did she suggest things to you that might be interesting to write about? Did you draw her attention to certain aspects that she could incorporate into her artwork? And how did you organise what each of you would do and the order it would all go in?

FP: Well, the book came later; the performance was the initial thing, which was for a Feminist Aesthetics conference Penny Florence organised with Dee Reynolds in 1995.  I read my texts while Irma projected her slides. The book is not an exact reproduction of the performance, and includes some texts that were added later. Regarding what material we dealt with: it was very give and take.  I made a list of things we ought to cover, different aspects of the fashion trade and women’s clothing and we discussed it together, making additions and changes.

Ls: This is one of the key questions with collaboration: to what extent do you have ownership?

FP: For it to be really interesting you do have to have a kind of intimacy. And you do have to get very involved with what the other person’s doing, and you have to be able to say what you think about it and be open to ideas and criticisms. I think, for instance, that Irma suggested I write about buttons. She’d done something on buttons. And I started by just emptying a tin of buttons onto the table and picking them up, and seeing what happened, so it was a very tactile, sensory experience. And the sound of the sewing machine, Irma said we should talk about that – so we recorded it and I listened to the tape and wrote from there.

Ls: So these are things that just wouldn’t have ever happened without the collaboration…

FP: Yes, you get bored with that you’re doing, and you want to do something you never would have expected to do, to go off in a direction you would never have expected to go in. And hopefully it comes together as a coherent whole between the two of you. But it’s also partly just about friendship, and not being alone as a marginalized poet!

Ls: Returning to the question of how things are organised or devised: when you were working with Tilla on Stone Settings, how far was the actual layout already there for you? – in the sense that the stones setting are physical things in the landscape.

FP: Tilla’s probably more of concrete or visual poet than I am. She also creates visual sequences on Powerpoint with photographs and images and texts that appear and disappear. I’d been writing about visual art for a long time but the actual visual poetics aspect came a bit later. Then it developed on a larger scale in my writing after meeting Kathleen Fraser, and encountering her take on visual poetics and other American women poets and their close alliance with artists. Meanwhile of course visual artists had been using text for a long time. In fact the pieces of mine that tend to have the most arranged visual layout in Stone Settings are the ones based purely on text. When you’re in the landscape there are all kind of distractions – like the elements!

Ls: Although of course these poems are based on the actual stone settings, as I read the work I began to realise that you’re in fact also setting the stones yourselves…

FP: Some of the time we are, yes.

Ls: … in the sense that as much as you’re deciphering them by writing about them you’re actually re-ciphering them, or perhaps re-enchanting them as well…

FP: Using those geometric forms was interesting.

Ls: On page 16, in ‘Withypool Tracks’ you have this discussion of directions, with the speakers trying to locate themselves correctly in the landscape. As the authorial voices are blended in collaboration, and you are co-signatories to the work, I was wondering who the people in this section are – if they can be ascribed individual identities? Is this an amalgamation or a persona?

FP:  I was transcribing some material Tilla gathered on her recording equipment, and there were three voices. Tilla wasn’t deliberately recording these moments – she just always had a tape recorder on, and she would be more likely to extract some sound from the recordings to soundtrack our performance of the work later on. I became more interested in the dialogue. I didn’t want to identify individuals, and we were also working together in our search for the Circle.

Ls: With these stones did you say: ‘Right, today we’re going to go here and respond to that’?

FP: Yes. But it would also depend on the weather and whatever else we had to do. The difference between Stone Settings and the sequence I did with Elizabeth James (Neither the One nor the Other) was that it wasn’t what you would call ’simultaneous’ collaboration, where we would directly respond to each other’s texts, and this was often due to various constraints of time and place. So we tended to go to a particular site and make individual responses, then or later. There are a couple of poems that were simultaneous, like the ‘Tercets’ on page 10, which began as an exchange of lines. For the ‘Interrupted Tercets Near Furzebury Brake’ I actually dragged Tilla out on the hillside and we wrote at the same time, for no particular reason other than it was just an easy place to get to. Her tercets are on the left and mine are on the right.

Ls: The approach to laying out the text with one poet aligned left on the page, the other aligned right, is something you employ in your Likestarlings conversation with Julia Cohen.

FP: Yes it’s a neat way of distinguishing voices without naming them. With Tilla I didn’t know what she was writing; I arranged it afterwards on the page. It’s an example of two people writing at the same time and place without actually talking to each other, but with the same things happening around them. This guy came and interrupted us and complained about us being there.

Ls: Being out en plein air is something you experimented with in your sequence with Julia Cohen as well isn’t it? There are the journalistic and also landscape art aspects to this approach. In your poem in Paravane, ‘The Landscape Room’ (a response to a work of art by Jane Prophet), one line reads ‘disappointingly 2D’. Are you sometimes frustrated by the trappings of page-based or desk-based poetry and are these explorations ways of escaping that?

FP: It’s something I’ve always done and I go to the country and I just have to be there. But in terms of writing poetry I didn’t really think of it in that way for a long time, and to some extent I was influenced by getting to know Harriet Tarlo and that fact that she was doing all her writing outside. It becomes an addiction after a while.

Ls: So do you go somewhere and think, ‘I’ll make a sketch’?

FP: Yeah, and it’s a good excuse to just go out there.

Ls: So in the same way that collaboration can make one’s work porous, writing away from the desk can have a similar effect? Because there’s a kind of arbitrariness to what goes into the poem in that situation.

FP: Yes, it’s the giving yourself to the other, as in collaboration, and that’s what poetry’s all about really – whether it’s the unconscious mind, or artwork, the landscape or language itself. So you’re allowing things to happen and relinquishing total control.

Ls: When you do one of these pieces with a date at the bottom, how far do you work up the sketch when you come back to the studio, so to speak?

FP: Ah yes, that’s always interesting. It’s a bit like simultaneous collaboration and working out whether you’re allowed to revise things afterwards. For instance, when I was doing Neither the One nor the Other with Elizabeth she always wanted to revise things more than I did… But yes I do revise things. Sometimes you think ‘Oh, this hasn’t worked at all’. But you have to really believe in that particular place and your reasons for being there. With writing on site I do keep a lot of what just happened, and the accidental stuff, especially when you’ve been writing a long time you want to take larger risks. It’s always risky and less controlled, but then again it is somewhat controlled as you’ve gone out and decided to be at this location.

Ls: In Neither the One nor the Other you quote Ulli Freer’s ‘there is no ego in collaboration’. That sounds like the aim rather than fact…

FP: Yes, becoming an other and not recognising yourself in a way is quite exciting. And of course the whole issue of ego is part of the feminist idea as well. I remember Bob Perelman giving a talk and saying that with men it’s never a question of losing the ego – there’s always a huge signature there! It’s a fiction really.

Ls: It’s a process isn’t it, part of an ongoing development and evolution in poetry.

FP: Yes and it depends at what end of the spectrum of experimental you’re on. I mean with the extreme forms of surrealism and Dada there was really no telling who was doing what. But that was only a part of what they did and the rest of the time they were saying ‘this is my work and I’m an important poet’.

Ls: Collaboration also seems to engender a sort of metacommentary on the work as it’s being created. There seems to be a need to acknowledge what’s happening…

FP: Yes, in our case that’s partly because it was so experimental, and we started incorporating bits of our emails to each other and saying what we were doing. So there’s quite a lot of that in there, which wasn’t the intention originally but became important.

Ls: When something is very experimental like that, and non-linear, does it sometimes seem good to include that sort of information as a helpful signpost?

FP: I think it’s a way of binding ourselves together as well, because you’re sharing the process as well as the actual thing itself. You’re making sense of it as you go along and developing it and deciding new aspects.

Ls: I guess because with collaboration the process is the thing itself as well, to a larger degree than normal, so you want to retain elements of that process. Borges says of his collaborative writing with Bioy Casares that together ‘we have somehow begotten a third person that is quite unlike us’. Is this a fair reflection of any of your own collaborative experiences?

FP: Yes, well that’s the ideal – like a sort of heavenly marriage! And there’s always a sense of bereavement or a period of mourning afterwards, having experienced this intense intimacy.

Ls: Who’s your next or current collaborator?

FP: Peterjon Skelt, who I’m working with on An Alphabet for Alina. I’ve just finished X.

~

Select bibliography

Neither the One nor the Other, a collaboration with the poet Elizabeth James. London: Form Books, 1999 (CD version also available)

Automatic Cross Stitch, a collaboration with the artist Irma Irsara. London: Other Press, 2000

Paravane: New and Selected Poems, 1996–2003, Cambridge: Salt, 2004  www.saltpublishing.com

Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976–2005, Exeter: Shearsman, 2006 www.shearsman.com (includes Linocut)

Lines of Sight, Exeter: Shearsman, 2009

Stone Settings, by Tilla Brading and Frances Presley, Minehead & London: Odyssey Books & Other Press, 2010

2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry, ed. Sheila E. Murphy and M. L. Weber, Colorado: SugarMule.com, 2007

“Collaboration: Neither the one nor the other by Elizabeth James and Frances Presley, with an introduction on working practice”, in How2, Fall 2001

“Neither the one nor the other: aspects of performance within a feminist collaboration”, in Additional Apparitions (ed. David Kennedy & Keith Tuma, Cherry on the Top, 2002), pp. 172–180

Could be something new altogether
Or a break in flow in what had started
The line shimmers innocently
Let me know your thoughts

Then in ‘Uncertain Noises’ the straighforwardness of a co-operative writing is perhaps questioned by ‘Only an older and more distant/ Symbiosis, fit as survival’. The poem must arise from whatever vexed or uncanny set of contingencies gave it its birth. In these more recent pieces we are left guessing the authorship of individual stanzas, lines, words even; but maybe we are led to a place where we can wonder if such questions of individuation are in fact relevant at all.

Undoubtedly, a fundamental characteristic of the human mind is to sort, to recognise one from the other. The blending of voices, styles and histories in collaborative writing challenges that instinct and forces us to push forward into new territories as readers. It is from those new lands that the just completed collaborative chain by Julia Cohen and Frances Presley arrives.

As Frances commented (in recent email correspondence), ‘I must admit there were moments when I thought, did I write this?! And, of course, in collaboration, I is another.’ This is doubly pertinent because Frances and Julia’s sequence is firmly rooted in place, or two places to be (in)exact: Denver and its surrounding national forests (see below) for Julia and for Frances a particular former railway line now nature reserve in north London. However, while the local exerts a definite pull, a wider concern, reflective of the intercontinental span of this pairing, is in evidence: ‘counterfeit the global exchange’ (’ribs & leaves’). Likewise, a poem apparently describing ‘Archway tunnel’ (part of Frances’s walk) can surely only be transformed, and indeed transform its subject, when a poet from far away is invited into its mysteries. Throughout ‘bricks grow’ the perspective is joyously in flux: to whom do ‘my fingers’, ‘my feet’ belong? who
are ‘you’? whose are ‘our clouds’, ‘our ground’, ‘our hands’?

We see evidence of a potentially liberating loss (or metamorphosis) of the authorial self that can be attained in collaborative practices. Perhaps poets return from such adventures energised and, paradoxically, knowing themselves better. For us as readers, as well as being artefacts worthy of study in themselves, the poems could be hinting at a more open appreciation of literature as something less tied to the cult of personality.

This sequence also functions in other dimensions: Julia and Frances exchanged images of their respective locales and wrote partially in response to these prompts. The images sometimes form a part of the finished work as well, worrying the solidity of what poem should contain. We are reminded that writing (and reading) collaboratively can be – to a greater or lesser extent – an immersive process. How far could one take the provision of such stimuli? Ambient audio files seem another obvious extension. Momentarily inhabiting another writer’s space, however remotely and imaginatively, can certainly enrich one’s own dwelling on
the word.

Aside from supplementary illustrations, the texts themselves are already highly visual – ‘Two red contrails converge’ (’Glazed Leaf’) – and careful attention has been placed on their layouts. In ‘acid grassland’ the left- and right-justified lines can’t help but talk to each other, whoever may be saying them, and ‘mining bees burrow tiny holes in the ground’ at the bottom begins to disappear through its own edgy perforations.

Images are also foregrounded in another collaborative conversation underway between Laynie Browne and Matt ffytche. The pictures they have selected are more abstract, and their relation to the texts more oblique, but those opening colours reverberate through the experience of associated poems. The texts are densely woven, and despite some degree of familiarity with their previous work I would find extremely difficult to discern who wrote what. Actually, to attempt such a thing seems both inappropriate and pointless, especially while observing the deft shifts of subject and location flowing into each other – ‘open bids with second voices’ (’Sixfold Elegy (b)’). There is a clear engagement with recent world events, ‘a ferry balanced on the roof of a neighbour’s house/ stared into the city and its subsequent fire’ (’Enkindle’), making these poems of deep concern and combined forces. We hope to have more collaborative chains illuminating the LS electropages soon.

[Upper image © Frances Presley, lower image © Julia Cohen]

Peter Larkin & Jonathan Skinner examine the organisation of trees in their (still wonderfully ongoing past the standard six instalments) exchange. Throughout the sequence these ‘entity-cities’ are read to and from at many angles. Trees are essential for our wellbeing and our conceptualization of space, they divide it and they unify it. A ‘forest-chased transaction’ begins in poem 1 and evolves into greater and greater complexity through this conversation that has become – on one level – a sustained investigation into how we inhabit our environment, how we dwell.

Larkin lifts much terminology from the language of town-planning in a recontextualization that makes us seek the light of a clearing wherein we can ’study to be quiet’ (to rekindle Izaak Walton’s words). Then Skinner jolts back with feelings of rage and bitterness at the influences to which we’re all subject in a time when an idea like ‘perestroika’ can still hang over the seeming ‘personal whimsy to be born’. We are reminded that ‘the park was built by a man’. The latest poem (7) takes us further with the suggestion of admitting ruderals (plants that are first to colonize disturbed lands) to the allotted space. What next? Whatever happens, it’s time to ‘green out the irony’ and really look.

Trees and the zones they inhabit are also important for Ian Davidson & Carmen Giménez Smith. From the outset the trees in a landscape are crucial to its identity and our own, capable of constant renewal, but also under threat of being stolen away at any time. One central tree can mean everything, as at Guernika; but they can also stretch off in an ‘unbroken line/ Of administration’, their literal and symbolic power co-opted under the conquistador syndrome. It’s a question of order, and longed-for chaos. Peter Larkin’s threat can hang in the background here too: ‘set urban growth to begin the horizon’.

The collaboration between Linnea Ogden & Nicholas Liu has taken the possibilities of Likestarlings in new and exciting directions. Before they commenced writing they laid down some guidelines, and what we see is a series of simultaneous responses, presented in pairs on the same page. Nicholas Liu even started off by doubly responding to Vincent Katz & Barry Schwabsky’s coauthored poem ‘Finally‘. In the second instalment, Ogden’s drunken narrator shows us a compelling ’sensory map’, while again we find apposite ‘tree trunks bordering scrappy parkland’. All this contrasts with Liu’s explosive metapraxis and his discernment of ‘a// system/ changing’. Perhaps the phrase “This took my breath away and gave it back sweeter” is expressive of the possible joys of a poetic conversation.

Onward!

]]> http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/archives/1209/feed 1 http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/archives/1167 http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/archives/1167#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:48:41 +0000 David Hawkins http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/?p=1167 In this wide-ranging and fertile conversation poet Laynie Browne talks with the author Danielle Dutton about her new book S P R A W L. We learn how responding to photographs, everyday objects, consumption and the built environment helped lead to the construction of a solid but perspicacious text. Meanwhile we see how a narrator might seem to live inside us, and start to glimpse how a book itself can become a kind of place.

LB: What was the beginning of the project S P R A W L? Did you start with a question, an image, other influences, etc? Also, please talk about some of your formative prose influences. I’m wondering both about classic long dead authors and the very contemporary. Was there a moment when you read a work of experimental fiction which made you want to write prose? I’ve just been re-reading Pamela Lu’s Pamela, for instance and was wondering if that book was important to you.

DD: In terms of beginning S P R A W L: Yes! There were Laura Letinsky’s still lifes in her book Hardly More than Ever. There was a class I took on American poets of the first half of the twentieth-century, and subsequent conversations about a poetics of the city. There was reading: Thomas Bernhard, Georges Perec, Diane Williams, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein. There was 9/11 and a war. There were trips back home to visit my family, and new subdivisions, and fewer fields. I had a mess of questions: what would the poetics of sprawl be like? What does it mean to be in America right now? Do we really need this many Office Depots? Also, formally, my first book is a collection of short pieces, many of these broken into their own smaller sections, and I had a palpable desire to write something without any breaks.

There was no one author or text that made me want to write, but there were many who made me love to read. I was a big reader as a kid. And I liked to write stories, but I didn’t do it with any regularity (I remember two, in particular, both of them melancholy and both of them of sci-fi; one got eaten by the vacuum cleaner because I left it under my bed). In college I wrote horrible, sad poems. I never thought I was a good writer and never thought of my writing as anything more than a private kind of outpouring until I took a night class at UCLA when I was about 23. This was when it was confirmed for me that writing was a thing people did now, still. We read Dave Eggers’s book, and Lorrie Moore, stuff like that, stories by living people about people alive right now. I was a history major in college and I’d gravitated to nineteenth-century novels and historical romances (and, obviously, a little science fiction) when I was a teenager, and it was only when I was 21 and working in a bookstore in England that it occurred to me, seriously like a retarded epiphany, that there were people alive who wrote. Within about a year or so of taking that class at UCLA I enrolled in the MFA program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’d say this is where I started to be formed, or to form, as a writer, or as the writer I am right now. There was a lot of emphasis on exploration and experimentation, in the best possible sense, and on connections between writing and other art forms. We read everything from Gertrude Stein to William Gass to David Antin to Clarice Lispector to Rilke and Wittgenstein and Anne Carson and Ovid. Several years later I encountered (and was taken by!) the work of Pamela Lu and Renee Gladman. Yes, I’m sure that they and other contemporary writers of “experimental prose” have had an influence on me, but I can’t say how.

LB: What was it like to co-habitate with the narrator of S P R A W L, in your brain?

DD: I don’t know for sure how to articulate it . . . but I think that the narrator of S P R A W L felt less like a wholly fictionalized character than any other character I’ve worked on. It was like pulling a thread from a sweater and watching it unravel. I began to experience moments of my life in the voice of the narrator, and then I’d hurry home to get it down. I think it was something like putting her on, like a mask that looks peculiarly like myself, and playing/becoming her for a while. But, then, she’s still in there. And she was in there before I wrote it too. I guess the writing of S P R A W L was her time to rise to the surface of my mind.

LB: One thing I especially appreciate about S P R A W L is that it doesn’t take a stand, doesn’t grossly judge, but kind of like still life, lays it all out. And I often associate an imagined suburban “character” and a life concerned with so much consumption and display with a lack of reflection, as if objects were masks or substitutes for thought. But your narrator is beyond the thick of things, in it and outside it in such interesting ways.

I was wondering when you first began to be interested in the idea of sprawl and when seeing the still life pieces connected with the idea. There is also such a great sense of catalogue in the book, which works with all of the objects. And the way that the text avoids and fragments dialogue I also found fascinating, utterance being often at the level of single words, exclamations almost, and often out of context, which makes for interesting juxtapositions. Also, it feels so seamless, like one long utterance. Did you write it that way, or more in sections that later combined?

DD: I think I’ve been interested in sprawl, in a really loose, vague, general way since I moved away from the town I was born and raised in to go to college (in Santa Cruz), and then away (to England), and then away again (to Los Angeles), and again (to Chicago), and every time I came back, my hometown was changed. I’ve been watching sprawl happen there in a really vibrant (for lack of a better word) way for the last fifteen or so years, and I think I was able see it differently (differently, say, than if I’d never left) because I would be gone for these stretches of time, and immersed in very different landscapes, and because I have a nostalgic sense of the “proper” outline of the town, of where the fields are, the orchards, and so when I’d come home and there’d be a Walgreens where the walnut orchard had been, and a new subdivision where the strawberry field once was, and a four lane road where there was no road, with six new churches, and three new Starbucks, and it just would hit me, like in my guts, in a really profound way, as wrong. Nevertheless, this is the place I come from, for better or worse. So that’s kind of a background of feeling that had been there for a while.

And then I happened, randomly, on this book of photographs by Laura Letinksy. They’re images of everyday detritus: Tupperware on a kitchen counter, plates on a sideboard, flowers wilting in a vase beside unwrapped candies. The objects in the images are normal enough but there’s something just off about the photographs, in a provocative way. They’re beautiful and strange.

I don’t remember when I first sat down to begin writing the book, but I think I had the photographs there when I did. I often wrote off the photos, cataloguing them, as you mention. I didn’t want to enliven them in a way that would change them (at least in my mind, my sense of them, or their tone of strangeness, a kind of flatness, but a flatness that hummed for me), so I’d just list them, list everything in a photograph, and then keep writing. In terms of the overall composition, I wrote initially in bursts, often just a page or so, and then I started stitching them together, like a quilt, smoothing out the transitions, and then a character and a narrative started to emerge from it and I kept on writing with her in mind.

LB: I’m thinking about avoidance and disassociation and the taboo of suburbia, how you really turn that on its head, and that’s what I find so interesting. And the process and the project as you describe its evolution is no less interesting—though not at all necessary in order to appreciate the book. S P R A W L is so wonderful in the way it forces a re-seeing of something seen habitually in a certain locked way. I’m always interested in unlocking perceptions. This seems to me one of the most useful things writers can do—provide new ways of seeing outside of preconceived notions while also exploring those notions.

I’m wondering if, like so many, you’ve spent time demonizing suburbia, hating it, being embarrassed by it, feeling disgust—and if so how these experiences eventually played into writing about it. There seems something shameless and shameful about suburbia as subject, which is useful. So I think lots of people try hard to avoid thinking about it and I’m interested in what this says about modern culture, and about an inability for people to evaluate lifestyles and impact on environment, health, consumption, etc. It seems to me that not looking is really dangerous and that we are in a time when that is prevalent and therefore disturbing that people wouldn’t want to take a closer look. I’m thinking about how your speaker in S P R A W L believes in the purity of the institution of a lawn for instance.

Another question, how to make people look at what they don’t want to see? And was that something you thought about with this project, or not?

DD: I’ve definitely spent some portion of my life being embarrassed about where I grew up. My mom moved from NYC to LA in the sixties, as did a number of her girlfriends from the east coast, but my mom wound up following my dad (who is actually from LA) up to the Central Valley a year or so before I was born. They divorced when I was two or three and when I was growing up we (my mom, my little brother, and I) would go down to LA almost one a month to visit with her friends. Their lives seemed so glamorous and urban to my eyes. The funny thing is, the friend we stayed with the most, and her family, lived in Northridge. Which is so not LA, as you well know, to anyone who actually lives in LA. They had the most beautiful, gracious home high up on a hill and you could see the whole San Fernando Valley down below you, which during the day meant a sort of smogging view of sprawl, but at night meant twinkling light galore and this is still, in my whole life, one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen. It filled me with butterflies and a naive sense of possibility and life, which is so sweet and silly and banal when I think about it. Like any little kid seeing the “big city” for the first time.

I think “not looking” is a huge part of contemporary American life in general, in the suburbs and the cities and small towns. One thing this immediately brings up for me, personally, is the issue of meat. It’s plain that the factory farming of animals is cruel to animals, is horrible for the environment, and is not totally necessary from the perspective of human health. But people gobble it up, in the suburbs, in cities, all over. I talk about this with people I love, people who do eat meat, and it’s such a fraught conversation. These are educated and kind people who seriously don’t want to examine this aspect of their lives. Obviously, for me, taking a sincere look at the factory farming of animals necessitates an ethical refusal. I realize I’m probably coming off as a righteous ass, so let me say that I’m not arguing that everyone everywhere needs to be a vegan, and of course I too look away (I close my eyes and use disposable diapers on my son, for example). I’m just saying that it’s important to look at the systems that make our lives work. A friend of mine recently became concerned about “what we must ignore in order to be consumers,” as she puts it. Her ideas are more nuanced than this will make it sound, but the result is that she decided that for one year she wouldn’t buy anything made in China. She’s been tracking her progress (it involves a heck of a lot of research before each purchase) on a blog. I’m really impressed by her work and her desire to observe and make plain. Or take the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some people I talk to, and a lot of the posts I see about it on Facebook, speak only about the evil of BP and oil companies in general, but obviously we all have some responsibility, all of us who drive our cars and ride in airplanes and drink water out of plastic bottles. We gobble and gobble. We live within a huge (capitalist) system that promotes gobbling (consuming rapidly and without thinking) and it’s really tempting not to look at it because it’s depressing as hell.

Anyway, this is all me ranting, as opposed to me trying to write a novel, which is a really different thing. I do think one thing that the book seems skeptical of—and I’m seeing this more in retrospect—is the idea of Progress, with a capital P.

LB: Yes, suspicion of “Progress,” and progress as consumption seem key. It is curious that characters completely caught up with objects enable objects to absorb or become the narrative. I was thinking about this in relation to Aaron Kunin’s wonderful novel The Mandarin and the lineage of the “it” novel (which Kunin introduced me to), in which common objects are foregrounded and narrate and recollect their own adventures. For example Crebillon’s The Sofa (1742, French) recounts the many amorous adventures from the point of view of a Sofa, and the soul of a young courtier imprisoned within it. I think that S P R A W L fits this lineage in a subversive way—not in that it narrates the tale of the object or that the objects narrate, but in that the objects and the catalogue occupy so much mental space of the speaker that they do blot out and obliterate other narratives. One way to view the speaker is as a montage of objects talking. She is consumed by her consumption, if that makes any sense.

Where to next, from shame to how to counteract perhaps. In your opinion is writing a remedy? How does writing fit into your sense of citizen?

DD: I’m not sure what I think S P R A W L (or any of my writing) has to do with being a citizen, but I love this question. I’d like to think that writing is part of the way I’m a citizen, a good one—in addition to calling my congressperson, for example, or returning my library books, or helping an old lady cross the street—certainly this would make me feel better about spending so much time alone with my computer. But I don’t know . . . I don’t know that it is any kind of remedy for anyone but me, and I hope that my work doesn’t function in any overtly responsible way. But I do like to think that it could offer a reader at least a moment of frisson, of estrangement, a la Viktor Shklovsky’s notions of defamiliarization, in which she might re-see the world, if briefly. I think this re-seeing is crucial to being awake in the world, and I agree with something you said earlier—about unlocking perception—that this is one very interesting function of art. I admire the work of writers who aim for their writing to be overtly political and alive to social justice and I admire the work of writers who abhor the idea of their writing functioning in this way. I don’t know yet where I fit on that continuum.

LB: I think certain work, because of its innovative quality, goes beyond genre to create vibrant and spacious possibilities for writing. I tend to gravitate towards work which falls into this category—which is really beyond category. For instance the work of W.G. Sebald comes to mind and the poem/novel Language Death Night Outside (recently translated from German by Rosmarie Waldrop). I’ve been thinking about teaching a course on novels by poets, and would put your work in that category. I wonder what you would think about that. Would you object? Do you think of yourself as a cross-genre writer? Did you always write prose? Are the writers who were most formative to you all strictly prose writers?

DD: I’ve been thinking of teaching a class on poetic narratives, too, narratives that move in poetic ways, I guess, rather than in strictly linear or causal ways. I do think S P R A W L would fit pretty naturally into such a course, or a course on novels by poets. I don’t think of myself as a poet, though, and I’ve never been called a poet by other poets . . . I mean, in classes, for example, when I “had” to take poetry writing classes at the University of Denver, I felt like an outsider; not unwelcome, but outside it somehow. But then I don’t always fit right in with fiction writers either, so maybe I do aspire to that space you’re talking about. A little genreless . . . concerned very much with language but also with narrative, if not so much with plot per se. I liked the conversation about “prose” that was going on in the anthology Biting the Error, primarily in Renee Gladman’s contribution. Renee herself has most often been talked about as a poet; most of her work is listed at Small Press Distribution, for example, as poetry, though most of what she has written is prose concerned with narrative movements . . . and this is interesting to me. I recently started a press called Dorothy, a publishing project and our first title is Renee’s novel (note the generic distinction!) Event Factory. I think it’s good to think about Renee’s work as fiction. It’s provocative. Renee’s writing provokes fiction. I’d like my work to do that too, I guess. And Dorothy, a publishing project’s website says we’re dedicated to fiction (not to experimental prose or cross-genre writing or anything else), so I guess I do have some stake in fiction as a thing, in reclaiming it, I guess, from so much boring work, so many crusted-over ideas. I think I’m still working it all out for myself. It seems a little uncool to be concerned with genre these days, but there you go. And, yeah, the writers most formative to me were all prose writers, mostly fiction writers, so I think that’s a big part of this. There’s a kind of sense of inheritance, a ground I feel emotionally invested in (as a reader), that I want to continue to cultivate and provoke (as a writer and, now, a publisher).

On Apr 1, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Hi Barry

I hope you are well. As you know by now, David Hawkins of Likestarlings asked me to do a collaborative project for their site, and I suggested that it be with you. I am very happy you too like the idea and agree to give it a try.

I thought we should have some plans, so here are my thoughts. Feel free to totally disagree, come up with a different approach, etc.

I thought it would be interesting to think of a project of five short poems (short meaning one to two pages). Each poem would have a different set of formal or informal restraints. For the first one, I thought, since we both move around a bit, it would be interesting to capture parallel senses of motion — not necessarily speed, though that could be part of it, but simply the changes from place to place. Since we both are highly indebted to the visual, I further thought that in this first poem colors and/or lights could be guiding structural forces. We could try a poem in four-line stanzas, with the first letter of each line being capitalized. The poem could be of eight stanzas total. Each stanza would have its own spatial character and tonality, but linguistically there would be some continuity from stanza to stanza.

I’ve written a first stanza to the first poem. If that plan for a poem appeals to you, let me know, and I’ll send it.

As to the forms for the other four poems, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.

I am currently in Rio, which may explain my interest in investing a poem with changes of scenery, or it may be just that I´m reading James Schuyler´s new “uncollected” poems, Other Flowers.
All the best,
Vincent

On Apr 6, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

Here’s a thought.

What I’ve been thinking about since I wrote that other email to you an hour ago (or however long it was) is that what counts as a constraint for one person might not count as a constraint for another. So what I suggest is this: You write a poem, any poem, for instance the one you talk about below (or another). Send it to me. I take three aspects of your poem, which may or may not have been constraints you imposed on yourself–and I impose those three aspects on myself as constraints in composing my poem, while everything else is at liberty. When I’m done, I send it to you. You take any three aspects of my poems, of which at least two were not among the features you used in your first poem, and use them as constraints on the poem you write. I do the same again with your second poem. And so on.

Or maybe it would be better if the rule were, at least one of which was not among the features used in the previous poem? Anyway, as you see, this system would generate both continuities and continual variation. What do you think?

On Apr 11, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Hi Barry

What you suggest makes me think about the unit of translation. I grew up understanding the standard method for a “collab,” as it was passed down in legend from how Berrigan and Padgett worked on Bean Spasms, etc., was one person sits at the typewriter, types a few lines, then the next person sits at the typewriter, types a few lines, etc. One could imagine collaborating by the line, the phrase, the word, even (extremely) the syllable or letter(!), then going in the other direction, by the stanza (or section), page, which brings us to your suggestion — collaboration by the poem, i.e. using the poem as the unit of collaboration. I would be up for trying it. It does seem the most removed of the possibilities. That is, we would not be interfering in each other’s writing, only responding to it. The parameter(s) you suggest would certainly provide limitation(s); I just wonder if we might miss some of the back and forth that often energizes collaborations — the energy that derails what one person was attempting, while leading to a completely unexpected outcome.

Having said all that, if that’s how you prefer to do it, let’s try it. Should we plan to write 4 or 6 poems and then see how it’s going? Should each poem have the same structure, say four four-line stanzas (or whatever — three two-line stanzas)? Or should the poems be in any form or lack of form the writer decides? I guess I feel if they were all in the same form, it would provide an interesting cohesion to the project. One of the appeals of collaborating by the poem in uniform format would be to see if we could submerge the individual personalities of the authors — unless of course we do not want to do that. I hope that by starting in the way you suggest, we might eventually feel encouraged to try other methods of collaboration.
Let me know your thoughts,
Vincent

On Apr 12, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

I thought that what we were being asked to do was to individually write poems that responded to the other’s poems. Yes, I see that as a very different thing from collaboration — although presumably the sequence of the poems would then form a larger whole by both poets. But I would be very happy — perhaps even more so — to engage in a “proper” collaboration, which I understand similarly to how you outline it. Should we go back to David of likestarlings for clarification? Or just ignore that we are on assignment and do what we feel like doing and present him with the results?

On Apr 12, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

I think we should definitely do what we feel like doing — and since it seems like we both feel like doing the same thing, let’s just start! So we will send each other lines back and forth until one of us thinks it’s finished.

Here’s a beginning. This relates to an idea expressed in an earlier email — of a poem about lights and colors (in transit):

Finally, a pinkish glow crept in
The sky merited all the love it had received
During the day, all the walking
Colors as they darkened and were lit

On May 6, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

Sorry I’ve been out of touch. The meantime has been a bit of a saga, I can tell later. But here is what I’ve come up with for the moment — see what you think:

Finally, a pinkish glow crept in
The sky merited all the love it had received
During the day, all the walking
Colors as they darkened and were lit

In direst harmony, evening’s next of kin,
We ambled down a cloudy highway,
Under flocks of color learned
That blue is fatal, a note with slow vibrato

On May 17, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Finally, a pinkish glow crept in
The sky merited all the love it had received
During the day, all the walking
Colors as they darkened and were lit

In direst harmony, evening’s next of kin,
We ambled down a cloudy highway,
Under flocks of color learned
That blue is fatal, a note with slow vibrato

There is a city with no color in it
Just a long expanse of trees and hollows
When one has stayed in it, one knows
The paintings flow up to its edges

On May 18, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

We glimpsed a gray horizon
And glimmering molecules within it
All colors are all other colors
When bitten by the teeth of feeling

On May 25, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Hi Barry

I am on the road at the moment, so a little slow to respond.
Attached is poem as it stands so far. Let me know if you think it’s finished. If so, I’d like to start another one. Maybe you would want to set the format, if any.
All the best,
Vincent

On May 26, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

I thought we were just getting started!
What do you think about seeing how far we can keep this going?

On May 26, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

I like it! I will get back to you.

On May 27, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

Excellent.

On June 29, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Hi Barry

It would be great if we could move toward finalizing “Finally” (if that’s what it’s title ends up being). Being very happy with how that poem is turning out, I am anxious to see what other poetic forms we can encompass. Not that it should have anything to do with our creative pace of working, but I know David Hawkins of Likestarlings is curious how things are progressing. What say you?
All the best,
Vincent

On Jul 12, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

Sorry for my slowness. I’m back in London now. I would like us to keep going, but if David wants to start posting the piece in progress I’m comfortable with that.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with four more lines but also intervened more than either of us has up until now, namely, I’ve slightly revised the last four lines you added, and also moved one of them into what would now be the new last last-so-far stanza, as you’ll see.

Obviously, if you don’t care for what I did please change it. I’m thinking that in a way we are now far enough into this that we can treat our structure–and each other’s words–more freely. See what you think. Now or later, we could also start to think of revising some of the earlier parts of the poem in light of what’s come since.

On Jul 13, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Hi Barry

Thank you for the continuation! I find the changes interesting but need some time to let my responses come into focus (a day or two, hopefully).

The day, an accumulation of fears
Caresses in the past cannot be changed
An overage of yellow casts out eyes
Some sentences read like wine labels

Paintings welcome source and target
A girl flings out reddish laughter
I caught the accent of her hair
But make its document sallow music

In the above, I like your transposition of my line to your stanza/your line to my stanza. Still need to think about the changes in first two lines. I agree with you about, and am open to, our having freedom to change each other’s contributions. Everything is open to revision until it isn’t (or even later).

Regarding what we can release to Likestarlings, I thought it might be interesting to release our correspondence now, without the actual poem, until it is finished. Another thought: I kind of like the 6×4 format as a structure; it’s looking really solid suddenly. Maybe we should try another poem in this format? Or, if you would like to propose a new form (or absence of form), I would like to take a stab at that too (forgive my conventionally graphic metaphor, but I just saw The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and it’s haunting my imagination).
All the best,
Vincent

On Jul 13, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

That’s funny, I just saw that film on Sunday (when everyone else was watching the world cup).

It’s interesting that you find the 6×4 satisfying. I was just thinking, after my last email to you, that I feels like it is about to come to a conclusion, but not quite there — that maybe the next stanza would decide that it is either finished, or else that it was coming to a pause that would enable it to launch into its next part that would allow it to go on much longer.

But maybe this is good, but it needs a somewhat different last line?

Or maybe it could end with one more line, by itself, line 25?

On Jul 13, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

I am up for more length, if you want to try to extend the poem (and think it can be extended). Let’s mull it over again. It’s interesting how time passing changes it. This time, when you sent your most recent version, the poem had changed quite a bit, even the parts that were not literally changed. That would be something interesting to consider, in our ancillary commentary.

I don’t normally like having additional (non-stanzaic) lines ending poems; they usually look a failure of form, but as I said earlier, I’m open.

What do you think about sharing our correspondence w/ Likestarlings?

On Jul 13, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

Would it be embarrassing to reveal that we do not wax philosophic?

On Jul 14, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

No! We do wax, I think, poetic!

On Jul 28, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

I’m starting to come around to your thought that we could stop the poem there. As an ending it
seems a bit abrupt but maybe that’s good.

On the other hand, what if we were to decide to add one more stanza? I give two lines, you give two,
and basta?

In the meantime, I’ve made a few more very small changes–using the “track changes” function.
See what you think. I’m not wedded to any of them.

Also wondering, how do you feel about the title being the first word? And should there be a
period at the end?

On 29 Jul, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

Let’s try to add a stanza, see where it goes. Thanks for the changes; I’m mulling them over.
I like “track changes” — let’s use that from now on.
I like the title also being the first word (but am open to other title possibilities).
I would tend not to put a period at the end of this poem, but am open to it, if you want to try.
The thing that most excites me, and I hope you agree, is that I feel there are more poems where
this one is coming from.

On 29 Jul, 2010 Barry Schwabsky wrote:

I know what you mean. There is definitely more we could do from here on.
Let me try to write the next 2 lines, then you polish off.
...

Here’s what I came up with.
I was starting to feel like it needed some geographical specificity, so I made it a London poem. I thought that would be ok with you. It could still secretly be a NY poem, because the last line is, obviously, a twist on “They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.”

On Aug 2, 2010 Vincent Katz wrote:

I guess my reaction is I would prefer to leave this poem free from specificity, as the poem started (in my mind, anyway) as a graph of both of our travels through various cities. This poem would take as its context “the city” but not any particular city, though undefining specifics could enter. What I did think, though, is that these two lines could form the germ for a possible “next” poem that could allow urban specifics. In fact, this next poem could be the opposite to the first in a sense (making it paradoxically identical): we could include defining details from many different cities, so the cumulative effect, though achieved by different means, would again be “the city.” What do you think?

…

Following on from Caleb’s last blog post, I’m inclined to agree that ‘impulse’ and ‘theme’ or concerns are probably more profound ways to root out poetic kinship than measures of formality or how ‘experimental’ someone appears.

It does seem that recently there has been a great deal of discussion regarding poetic schools, locales, groupings and styles though – and the obvious distinctions, value-judgements and schisms that such taxonomization entails. Not to make light of the intentions behind (sometimes crucial, sometimes pointless) conceptual ordering of poetry. As Caleb says, we need to have critical apparatus to grasp what’s going on of course, but the lasting quality of various items can be a much trickier thing. Vitriolic denouncements and supercilious dismissals of other styles or approaches seem like a waste of energy. In light of this, what sort of debates are actually progressive and useful – in the broadest sense? On what sort of debates ought we to be spending our limited energies?

At the same time, contemporary poetry is broader and more diffuse than ever. Perhaps it is an anxiety over this breadth that leads to such impassioned attack and defense positioning. It sometimes feels as if Poiesis is conceived as some great mother ship, with opposing factions grappling over its controls.

Hierarchization of living literature is a tricky and uncomfortable thing, and can be very divisive. So many decisions are instinctive – this is art after all. Within the poetic ecosystem, there ought to be space for many variants, adaptations, specializations. Naturally there will be experimentation because experimentation is both inevitable and essential in an ever-changing world. I’m wary of pushing the ecological analogy too far though – some things that are certainly wondrous and beautiful fail to survive.

Here at Likestarlings, we believe that good, urgent, vital writing can happen within many categories, can look and sound radically different, and can be apparently ’simple’ or ‘difficult’ on first examination. This might sound idealistic, or even naïve, but we reckon it’s as perfectly possible to have an eclectic taste in poetry as it is in music, films or condiments. And we think many people share this view. This isn’t to say that poets don’t have ancestry and heritage both selected and ineluctable, but new unities can be found regardless or in light of these things. We continue to be excited by poetry coming from and heading in many different directions, at many different heights and velocities. Fundamental to the Likestarlings project is getting these differences to talk to each other, and make something new out of that meeting.

Over the coming months, watch this fluxious space as we pair poets from across divides, physical and conceptual, real or imagined, and see what happens as they converse in their chosen medium.

I’m very much in agreement with your last week’s post. I guess when writing I just hope that someone will read it – but who that person is I don’t really know. Of course you want there to be some form of engagement, otherwise it’s elliptical or solipsistic. So I always have an ‘audience’ in mind, but, as I say, their faces are obscure – as in a dream! Perhaps these ideas become clearer over time (or if people are actually reading your work!) Perhaps other people have a much clearer idea… and without needing a specific social cause/ coterie or such. What about you? It strikes me that poetry concerned with ecology ought to be trying to speak to everyone, somehow, anyway.

I suppose one of the problems with audience is that with most poetry which can broadly, vexedly, be termed ‘experimental’ or ‘progressive’ or something it seems likely that the audience is going to be almost solely other poets. This issue was dealt with rather grimly on the Poetry Foundation recently. Mind you, elsewhere they provide more detail about who is in fact reading the stuff, in America at least.

Basically I concur that you just can’t worry too much about it, but should try to keep some awareness. And absolutely to write with ‘the widest possible empathy’, as you say, is surely a noble aim, and the best thing we can do. And to write as clearly as possible, using just the right words to further one’s ends i.e. taking risks where you have to, and not hedging. All this sounds very obvious and Coleridge, but it’s never that simple.

In the quest of better elucidation and in order to swing things back more to our original discussion on ecopoetics I turned to something which had heartened me before: the final chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, entitled ‘What are poets for?’ He characterizes poets as sort of earth-links who can speak from/through/within the earth, at their best when not describing, not giving narratives, but ’saying’ the things that are – rather like the Sami tradition of Yoiking. He also offers us a way out of didacticism (as discussed before): ‘…Ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must first concern itself with consciousness.’

The argument is complex but the poet is seen as ‘the guardian, the treasurer, the primary maker of language’. The role is crucial, and the societal space is both necessary and allotted; poets are ‘imagination-workers’. This is a big job, and its takes me back to what I said in the first instalment of this conversation that it will a ‘failure of the imagination’ that scuppers us as much as anything.

But in the course of all this it’s occurred to me again that the vast majority of poets are naturally and unavoidably amateurs – in the etymological sense, and in the sense of being non-professional. This puts us in a very privileged position: we can say anything. But with that realisation comes huge responsibility of course.

That’s very much what I meant, yes. It is difficult this thing of being overtly ‘direct’ in poetry. It so often blurs into a seeming or definite didacticism. And it explains why so much of what we find is oblique or incomprehensible. Adding a layer of artifice (and this is not to denigrate the intention) allows the writer to step back into the joy of poiesis, a joy (not the same as happiness) that having a surefire agenda displaces very easily. Any lyric impulse is innately troubled by the need to take make an ideology or value-system so explicit and naked as this.

Troubled, I would say, whether we realise it or not. And it’s out of this tension – the tension between the undeniable poetic instinct and a sense of that instinct being hijacked by something ineluctable like an emergency (in this case the ecological ‘crisis’) – that some of the best work seems to emerge. It appears throughout Peter Reading’s work, for example, but particularly in Faunal (2002). Although the lyric desire there to celebrate the natural world is ironized and sophisticated a step further by a dry, semi-scientific tone and the juxtapositions in the text. Perhaps because he recognises this tension more acutely than most. As in ‘Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas’ where the narrator describes ‘Mexican Free-tailed Bats,/ Tadaria brasiliensis (mexicana)‘ emerging from a roost as ‘One of the most spectacular/ phenomena I have ever been privileged to witness.’ But goes on to explain how he got banged up for ‘Public Intoxication’ after throwing his binoculars into a river.

But while the tension is there, Reading is so clearly didactic that it almost blasts through the issue altogether. You’re probably right, in that we should worry less about whether or not someone is being didactic per se but rather about what they’re saying and how well they’re saying it. But the unsettling thing in didacticism is the idea of certainty it relays/attempts to relay. As you say, it feels ‘predetermined and boring’. Poetry, I always thought, was supposed to inhabit that doubtful stretch, where slippage happens, to walk into the fog without a map and come back some funny mineral off the mountainside or something. Not dictate terms. I need to consider your closing questions for longer. However, I agree that some sort of provocation is vital – because that moves us forward, whereas the timelessly poetic objective of evocation might just have us looking back or standing still. The elegiac mode will come through whatever, but doesn’t serve our purpose now. Inherent in all this ‘-vocation’ there seems to be a target, an audience; but who, exactly, are we trying to provoke?

joint commitment/ joint responsibility/ full accountability// most importantly: the desire and need to make something useful – to as many people as possible – that serves some kind of a purpose now, and, ideally, onward into the future – whatever that might be. This seems ambitious. I hope so. It stems also from a (sometimes desperate) sense of urgency, in the main pertaining to what we might broadly but vexedly term ‘the environment’. I say ‘vexedly’ because I very much agree with James Sherry that to make any real progress it’s absolutely essential that we scud under the (basically Romantic) separation between ‘Humanity’ and ‘Nature’. Any more advanced and holistic (i.e. Gaian) viewpoint doesn’t allow such easy distinction and disambiguation anyway. However, I realise that saying these things so simply is perfectly reductive as well. Still, as the best poetry pushes at the bulbous glassy edge of reality and attempts to chart undistorted its findings we may as well try and get on with things as best we can. It’s only language, our chosen(?) medium. I would rather a restless, risky poetics than the majority inertia witnessed where apparent ‘realism’ is a stultifying virtue. Documentation doesn’t seem like enough, and didacticism is nearly as worrying as the thought of failure. Coaxing and honing the edges of imagination somehow seems to be the thing. Because it’s a failure of the imagination that will let us down eventually.

Some of these ideas also link to an essay on (the impossibility of) closure by Lyn Hejinian (also) in Jacket. The idea of us existing on and in a continuum I find helpful. This echoes the calling out of the artificial division (the default, atavistic us&them) between humanity and nature/the environment. And again the idea of a collective effort comes through.  This is fitting for Likestarlings and for a collaborative clean-up and rescue operation. It points the way to poetry that is less definite in assumptions (but no less definite in its quality) about its immediate purpose (autopilot) and more expansive in its aims – an investigative poetics so to speak. This is poetry that can embrace anything, evolve, adapt – survive (yes). It acknowledges its own transitory nature, the impermanence of its medium and situation, and presents a permeable interface allowing multiple interpretations, trajectories and implications.

These concepts of investigative poetries with permeable edges takes me on to the first-mentioned phrase: poets as filters of information/sensation/ revelation … as a linguistic organ rather like a liver or kidney. Decisions about what to pass over in silence are highly important in this context. Because poetry is open-ended doesn’t need to mean it’s unclear in its aims or convictions. Peter Reading of course, with his wholly linked, inter-referential and remarkably coherent oeuvre, springs very spikily to mind. He’s predicted a great deal of this.

Poetry, it seems to me, is the medium most adept and fitting for considering the ecological crisis occuring now. This is because as a communicative and evocative vehicle  it is the most mobile, the most nuanced, the most capable of being honest thing we have. It most closely reflects the fluxious nature of experience. So, poets as semi-permeable membranes creating permeable, evolving works in an impermanent medium! Sounds difficult.

This is much longer than I intended. Does it make any sense? As ever, I fondly (but not complacently I hope) await your elucidation and better ordering of these fuggy thoughts…

DEH

Last year I began sending e-mails something like the following to a number of poets whose work I admire:

I am hoping you will consider contributing to a new project I have in mind. Basically the inspiration for this came when I was at a painter’s studio and he mentioned to me that a particular painting had come about when the artist in the neighboring studio was throwing out a canvas she had given up on. He took her abandoned painting and painted his own painting on top of it, but you can still see her painting coming through at certain points. Well, this gave me the idea to ask a number of poets whose work I like if they have a poem that they’ve abandoned that they would consider giving me to work on—to write on top of it, so to speak, the way that painter painted on top of his friend’s painting. So give it some thought and let me know if this is something you’d be willing to do. If it seems too uncomfortable or whatever, don’t worry about it, I completely understand. It’s such a personal thing. That’s why it interests me of course—an opportunity to delve in a different way into the work of some people I admire in the process of, I hope, coming up with something of my own, or maybe of both of ours, but anyway in part my own. Of course, I may not end up being able to do anything with some (or maybe even any) of the things people send me. But I’m curious to see what happens. Let me know what you think.

The origins of my desire to work with the “failed” or “abandoned” efforts of other poets undoubtedly lie deep within the history of my work. I have always been fascinated by the obviously self-contradictory notion of a text whose final form would nonetheless be predicated on the suggestion that it could easily have been otherwise. My first chapbook, The New Lessons, whose form was much affected (as I seem to recall) by my then-recent discovery of the books of Jack Spicer, was a sequence of poems with, at the foot of each page, some sequences of words that seemed to suggest the reader could substitute any one of them for certain words in the poem above. Two subsequent sequences, Fate/Seen in the Dark and Hidden Figure, with their parallel texts, were undoubtedly influenced by my reading of the alternating voices in John Ashbery’s “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’” and above all on the “simultaneous but independent monologues” of his great “Litany,” but even more so, I think, by the parallel text editions I had used during my failed years in graduate school, books in which the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude or the A, B, and C-texts of Piers Plowman were juxtaposed—that is, although I hadn’t worked the idea out fully, I was struck by the notion that my parallel texts were somehow versions of the “same” thing, no matter how different they appeared. That only happened later, with my four “Opera” poems, where the second, third, and fourth poems were presented as remixes of the first.

The remix idea could have led to the idea of working with material gathered from other poets, and arguably should have, since it is standard practice to remix the work of another artist, not one’s own. But that didn’t happen right away. The idea made me nervous. Working with someone else’s material evokes considerable ambivalence—is one honoring the other person’s work, vandalizing it, or both at once?—and I wasn’t ready to handle it. I remember not long after the publication of Opera giving a reading with a friend whose poetry I admire greatly—am in awe of, frankly, having always to ask her, “How the fuck do you do that?” She had written a long poem taking off from a line in one of mine and presented it at the reading. I was furious; I couldn’t bear the sense of competition, the feeling that she was outdoing me. Today I would react very differently. It would probably cause an incurable crush or something. That’s how much I’ve become caught up in the pleasure of the text of the other.

There were two things that finally gave the idea to undertake this project. The first was a request from Kasey Mohammad to contribute to a magazine issue he was editing on the theme of “Do Your Worst.” He wrote, “Would you consider sending me the worst poem or poems you can possibly concoct? Or, alternately, an essay on some aspect of poetic worstness? Or a review of what you believe to be a consummately dreadful book of poems, etc.?” The issue never materialized, but I spent a long time thinking about the idea of failure—whether and how it was possible to present it as a positive force. I thought a lot, too, about something the painter Marlene Dumas once said: “A big mistake is better than a small one.” So, a good rule of thumb when revising would be, “Correct the small mistakes and amplify the big ones.” Anyway, sometime later—as alluded to in the e-mail I quoted at the beginning of this text—I found myself in Tel Aviv, visiting the studio of another painter friend, Tsibi Geva. Among the paintings he showed me was one that, he explained, had been painted on a canvas he’d obtained from the painter in the neighboring studio. He saw her throwing out a painting she had given up on as a failure, and he asked her if he could use the canvas. So Tsibi painted his painting on top of hers, but certain traces of her painting still showed through his.

Bingo. I knew I could do this: I would ask my fellow poets do give me their failed or abandoned efforts, the wretched refuse of their teeming shores. I would try my best to make them citizens of my own poetic country. I did this knowing full well that there is something uncomfortable about the whole idea—both of showing someone else the work one has decided isn’t good enough and of letting go of something that really one just might be able to do something with, later. That’s why I am so grateful to the poets who agreed. They’ve done something that can’t have been easy. (And many of those I asked could not do it, which I understand.) I started calling it “the abandoned poems project,” and when I’ve published a few of the results it’s been as “from The Abandoned Poems” but whether that name will stick, I’m still not sure.

Some of the poems I received already seemed almost good; they just need more or less extensive improving. (One poem I had to return to sender, saying that I’d have felt like a thief taking it: It was already perfect as it was—except for that title.) But others hadn’t been finished for good reason. There was something fundamentally wrong, self-defeating, about their underlying impulse, insofar as I could make that out. Without that impulse I could see nothing to work with, but something about it was almost intolerable to me. All the wrong notes are right, as Charles Ives said, but some music is just wrong no matter how many right or wrong notes are in it. To see this project through, I would have to learn to let some of that wrong music into my work and I would have to learn, somehow, to right it. This turned out to be the hardest part of the job I’d set myself. By the way, although I’m sure I won’t be able to use every poem I was sent, the unused poems are not necessarily “worse” or more problematic than the ones I use. It’s just that their problems, sometimes quite superficial, were ones I couldn’t see a way to solve.)

Something else that feeds into this project is my long-standing envy of musicians and the way they get to collaborate with each other, providing mutual inspiration. It always seemed like so much more fun than working away in a room all by yourself as we poets usually do. Until now, I’ve never seen a way to overcome this isolation. Not that I would consider these poems to be collaborations, mind you. However much or little of the original poet’s writing remains in them, I alone am responsible for the final configuration. The poets who contributed to my project had no say in what I would do with their words. I’m still not ready to give up that much control. (As Dumas said about her collaborations with fellow painter Bert Boogaard, “I don’t try to become one with someone else. I wanna be two.” Or as I recently heard Charles Bernstein read from a not-yet-published piece of his, “I want other voices / but I want them always to be / / My own other voice.”) And yet I’ve given myself something of the pleasure I imagine I would get out of a full-scale collaboration—the pleasure of getting closer to another poet’s manner of working, his rhythm, his sensibility for the texture of words. At times I get an almost physical satisfaction out of being able to work with language that seems to bear the traces of having passed through another person’s ears, eyes, hands, nervous system.

There is no special methodology to how I’ve proceeded. Each poem seems a special case, demanding its own improvised response. In one case, where a poem was built around a repeated phrase, I started by substituting a new anaphora for each case—then I started looking for what to do to make them work with what was already there. In one case, I used the original poem whole, in a form only slightly changed from the original, but doubled the length of the poem by inserting a new line after every one that I’d been given. Often enough it’s just a question of working on the poem much in the way I normally would work on one of my own, just worrying at it line by line, trying to hear its inner structure and bring that out. Of course I know that inner structure is one that I’ve imagined, not one that really came from the poet who started the poem—but it’s also one that I’d never have found on my own, which is why I continue to find this process fascinating.

Poem

We’re heading in the right direction. We don’t know

what we’re going to know but we’ll open a bottle and taste

agave. Heading in the right direction: my latest

near-death experience, as a stand-alone

or as an add-on. In the right direction, fact fans:

seeing things and then getting wicked ideas. I’ll top

whatever I see. The right direction: to live

to 80. I try and stretch all the time and do some sit-ups and

push-ups. Yeah well, if you’re heading in the right direction:

We have more silence in our ears, a poem

I never knew was mine, loud songs

in memory of a hairline fracture. It better

have some pretty damn amazing gameplay. You’re heading

in the right direction: getting into the meditative state as many

moments in the day as you can. Is this just madness? I don’t know,

man! You’re heading in the right direction so who am I

trying to protect? But don’t forget

last night: I love the drama

of role playing. I’m a drama queen, and that’s what

we do. It’s like bottled liquid sunshine, and heading

in the right direction: my kids. I want the kids

to do what they truly want to do, but heading

in the right direction. We’ll hold hands and never, ever

look back. I always mocked your game

because my whole game is speed, while yours

is obviously jumps and ramps. The right direction: where words

go missing. Sentences between leaves. Made-of things

won’t hurt you. And one more thing, Batman, about what

we are trying to achieve, about us getting better. I’m doing

what I feel the need to do. Slim, lethal, the ghost

of an absence, you’re heading in the right direction:

equality. If we’re going to be equal, then let’s all

be equal. New visitors forever, heading

in the right direction, despite rumors

the place was haunted: parents and animals.

It’s a bit bitter. It was her long hands

I couldn’t stop looking at. This is not about me being unhappy

with what I’m being paid. I signed a contract

and I’m going to live up to it. Everything I see or hear

reminds me of the poem I’m working on, reminds me

you’re heading in the right direction. But I

figured something out for once: that heading

in the right direction, toward an inability

to see the universe, in all its glory, as a total accident

that came from nothingness all by itself: impossible.

I’ve got a pretty good work ethic, I can say. I will be fine

if I get a job but totally not fine if I don’t. That

sucks. I need money, the source of most

of my problems. We lead symmetrical lives, both heading

in the right direction: live performance

as you can probably tell. The right

direction: the music. The live stuff, it sets me free. It’s

that hour. We go up to the door. And in the right

direction: to avoid a violent confrontation. I’d rather

back off. Some guys’ll grab hold of you and bust you up. So

I guess it’s time for me to catch up with myself. Maybe I’m a bit

anxious, and my whole “deal” is paranoia, what’s my bag

you ask? Well, all you cool cats promoting Bigfoot’s existence,

fly away with me in the right direction: fishing slow

and just having confidence in what we’re doing. We’re kind of

the new kids on the block. These words in memory

of Electrelane, the only band we ever heard

in the last world. Goodbye. Okay okay—they’re heading

in the right direction: “Fuck work” is the slogan

that started this company. It may not seem simple,

but practically, it is. I believe you should stick with the religion

you were born with. For me that’s Judaism, and so that

is the only religion I’m against. The others don’t even exist for me.

My photo shoot alter ago, you’re heading in the right direction:

to get these guys paid. Then, I’ll go back to the planet

where I came from. I feel kind of like I just

wasted a lot of time giving someone else pleasure but

we agreed to do this and we’re doing it. With poppy seeds

between my teeth. You watch them slowly

and you’re heading in the right direction: looking

for a good fuck. The next day I couldn’t walk. Pop stars

for breakfast. The kiss that almost killed me. Well, in a way,

but not really, because of heading in the right direction: I never

even buy clothes because I get free clothes from all of my friends

who make clothes anyway. Whatever. Keep heading

in the right direction: promote tools that allow people to organize

and communicate in groups, particularly in local communities

around the world. I have no desire to be a pop

crossover artist. I wear a hat and I’m heading in the right

direction, playing my guitar. But I want to hear more hymns

that were done that way. To have my cadence considered

for centuries. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

After K. Silem Mohammad

(Originally published in With+Stand 2, 2008)

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet living in London. His books are Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003) and Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009) and he has also published chapbooks with Burning Deck and Mindmade Books (formerly Seeing Eye Books), among others. He is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. You can read further examples of his abandoned poems here and here.