Jeffrey is our first North American Editor. Anat will be taking charge of this space – writing and commissioning commentary, interviews and other writings on poetry and collaboration.

We’re also in the process of a rethink and redesign, which will result in an improved site, with new conversations, sometime in February.

In the meantime, recordings from our event at the V&A Reading Rooms last year are up here, if you haven’t found them yet. Thanks again to Aidan Semmens, Frances Presley and Alex MacDonald for all that.

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

This is a great chance for a keen reader of contemporary poetry to help bring about poems that would never happen otherwise.

We’d like to work with someone who has broad tastes, who will take pleasure in expanding the site, and be committed to keeping it active and updated.

The editor will:

·        commission new conversations between poets;

·        read submissions;

·        write and commission blog posts;

·        help develop the site.

We are based in London, so an editor needs to be happy to work independently, and liaise by email and Skype.

Some experience with editing, preferably online, is an advantage, but not necessary. Neither is being a writer of poems.

If you are interested, please send an email to caleb@likestarlings.com explaining why you’d like to be an editor. Please include five pairings (ten names of poets) that you’d love to see on the site.

Deadline: Nov 30th, 2011.

Likestarlings editor pdf

Summer has been unhurried on Likestarlings. We have been taking our time reading and contacting poets. And, as ever, have been pleased to read submissions. Do send us poems and/or propositions if you’re interested in collaboration.

But I’m very pleased to say that two new conversations are just getting going and will be here to read in the next few weeks: GC Waldrep & Toby Martinez de la Rivas, and Caroline Manring & Ahren Warner.

Also, keep 24th November free. We’re hosting a night at the V&A Reading Rooms as the grateful guest of Alex MacDonald of Selected Poems. There’s not much more to say about it yet, except that it’s going to involve video projections and intimacy.

The poems turn over several answers: adulthood; a washed-up rocker; lost objects and landscapes; an ‘awkwardly solicitous’ god at a party.  For the teenage boys that ‘drew / on almost everything’ of Burt’s “Rue”, ‘the ruin of boy is man’. And in my favourite lines, one boy wants to be a girl because, it seems, girls can ruin themselves better:

What else I heard I would not say,

.

wishing I were a girl,

or had ever been a girl,

or like a girl had secrets for some body to betray.

The ‘old rocker’ in Paterson’s “Like, so” has no secrets left. There is also subtle gender and sexual ambiguity here, in the bleak and funny end that the man (whose father was Burt’s boy) comes to:

[...] found dead

in a hotel room in downtown Vladivostok,

his czarina-sized bed stacked with empty

vodka bottles and the kind of Russian

who knocks at your door in the small hours

wearing nothing but a bad fur coat…

Burt’s “For Avril Lavigne” inverts Paterson’s relentlessly relaunching washed-up star. Lavigne wonders who she should be, and in the final stanza, covets the person she was before she was famous. In contrast to the rocker who ‘can’t let go’, she wants to keep the ‘planner in the mirror [...] who wanted to learn’. In these last lines, the regular rhyme breaks down: itself back in training.

Responding to the superabundant personalities of Lavigne, Paterson’s “Exile variations 1-3″ has its own, restrained list of brilliant particulars. They suggest the people those in exile might previously have been, and remind me of Robinson Crusoe’s knife that ‘reeked of meaning’ in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem  (except Crusoe was back home). Lavigne is defined by her ‘black lace / and tennis shoes’. The poem of exile looks for lessons in a mouth-organ, a song, the river, pickle, seeds and tomatoes. Nobody is named here and the objects become archetypal rather than singular – an elaboration on Burt’s theme: identity as a choice between types.

But all these poems, and the sum of their reciprocal parts, don’t reduce easily to themes. How then to end the exchange? (Ruining everything must have been tempting.) Part of the pleasure of reading a poem comes from knowing it is going to end. The poem is always running out. So is an exchange – and here the final poem has to speak for two poets. It ends all the other poems as well as itself. Burt’s “To Aphrodite” has a wonderfully light touch in what I take to be a description of characters and their attitudes from the previous poems:

And at the camp

fire where you will make your

debut—forever

renewed, forever

naive, or pretending (nobody can tell) [.]

Its Greek gods also hark back to Paterson’s great (and probably marketable) idea of a sequel to the Odyssey – itself a sequel -, in which ‘blind Homer rattled to his feet [...] to launch Odyssey II’. “Like, so”, that poem’s title, is both something that the teenagers of Burt’s poems might say, and a description of Paterson’s poem’s structure – paragraph-long stanzas which begin with ‘like’ then ’so’. This is more than neatness. Both poets are writing about enjoyment (and what might ruin it); both are clearly taking it in what they write. Between Aphrodite – the god of sexuality and beauty – and Hephaestos, the gods’ blacksmith – , between desire and craft, lie these poems.

Thanks go to both poets. And to Burt for ‘camp fire’, which seems a great metaphor for Likestarlings itself.

Speaking of endings, I am looking forward to the final poem of the conversation between Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Gregory. More thoughts on that excellent conversation when it is over.

And, finally…new conversations will be starting soon. Do send us an email with some poems if you would like to be considered for the site.

Another transatlantic pairing has also just started between Stephen Burt and Alasdair Paterson. Poems will follow very soon.

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]

Jane Yeh and H.L.Hix are distinguished American poets living on either side of the Atlantic (Jane is based in London). Their conversation began with baseball and has moved swiftly onto airports and crossing the sea that separates the two poets.

Vidyan Ravinthiran and Jenny Holden are young English writers based in Oxford. In a first for the site, it is a pairing of poetry and prose. We’re excited to see how it works, and may pair more writers of different mediums in the future.

Many thanks to the writers for agreeing to join in. I look forward to seeing where the conversations take us.

–

*of the early release of the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs.

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/1184 http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/archives/1184#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:33:27 +0000 Caleb Klaces http://www.likestarlings.com/palaver/?p=1184

We were  recently asked by Chris McCabe at the Saison Poetry Library (Southbank, London), to write a little something on collaboration in poetry for their open day. For those of you who were there, I thought I’d post our thoughts up here too.

Almost two years ago, David Hawkins and I established Likestarlings.com to see what would result if poets were asked to have conversations in poems. This sort of collaboration, in which two poets write poems back-and-forth in response to one another, isn’t new. What excited us was the distance that the internet now allows collaborations to span and be read almost instantly anywhere in the world.

It’s a great pleasure to trace the steps of the poets as they lead and follow. Locked doors are opened, characters born and assassinated, vehicles become new timbres, with endings made into beginnings, forms turned inside out. We begin to see how each poet is accommodating, or kicking against, the other. Sometimes poets slip into each other’s accents like new friends; sometimes they seem to speak in a private, shared language. Writing in response, they, and we, find out what they sound like in new voices.

Which is to say that collaboration opens poets up to welcome, but challenging contaminants. They must inhabit an unsettling territory, often having to find unfamiliar means of making and responding. Mostly, the poems don’t fall into easy categories. And they never would have happened otherwise.

The speed of the conversations (ideally a week for each link) encourages candour and spontaneity, and a delight in the process of writing in sequence. But the six-poem conversations often have surprisingly complex and satisfying, though only partially designed, structures. Like the movements of crowds or stock markets, they are a record of the interaction of more elements than it is easy to keep track of. More often than not, they aim for synthesis rather than fracture or exclusion.

There are many other websites which curate such leaps between texts, to create larger composite texts, both within and between sites. By putting the internet’s uncanny effects to use in expansive collaborative projects, where intention and accident are often difficult to disentangle, they keep expanding the range of what’s possible.