I’m very pleased to say that poems from Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Gregory have just been added to the site. The conversation began with an entry from Gerard Manley-Hopkins’ diary and has already made its way to Tolstoy in the Summer Garden.

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

In a valuable sidestep from the usual call and response approach, Vincent Katz and Barry Schwabsky inaugurated the recent (and coincidental) series of fully collaborative conversations here on Likestarlings. In their guest palaver from August 2010 the process is made splendidly transparent. We see who wrote what in their first poem, as well as the interplay of critique and deliberation as two minds gradually craft a single work. Hints of that crafting emerge metapoetically in their second item, ‘The Line’, with

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]

A colossal flocking Likestarlings welcome to 2011! Fresh pairings coming soon so keep a weather eye. Meanwhile intricate, considered, interdependent verse has been creeping up on us from the recent chains, revealing poems that stand alone as organisms in their own right, but also function in groups as an ecosystem. As with any ecosystem, they exert their own peristalses on us as we pass through them, pressing us with muscles we didn’t know existed before, and which we may now – with attentive reading and absorption – be able to use ourselves.

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!

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.