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

At least that’s how I’ve treated it, and I’ve been grateful to Caleb Klaces, our host, and to Alasdair Paterson for his poems as poems on their own, and as prompts for me. His “road to ruin” became the Ramones’ Road to Ruin, his terse consideration of advancing age, of a road all too securely taken, became for me an excuse to revisit the teen years when all roads seem scary, and most of them enticing, and none irrevocably taken. It’s also of course a poem about gender dysphoria, with more facts, about the Ramones and about myself, than I’ve put into other similar poems, though the details do not exactly fit my life (I wasn’t yet in my teens when the album came out).

Like so much, perhaps too much, of my other poems and prose, this sequence with two authors has turned into a way to think about the life course, about the overlaps and contradictions among its supposed stages—childhood, adolescence or youth, irresponsible young adults, supposedly responsible middle-aged adults, and those older than they. Thus Alasdair took, from my poem about Road to Ruin and the back of a teenager’s bus, a reason to address the back end of rockers’ careers, almost never the most illustrious part: adult poets may wonder whether we are more like historians, who tend to do their best work late (since they gather more data throughout their adulthood), or more like rockers or athletes. We may never know.

I wasn’t satisfied with my own “Rue,” because it seemed too thick with quotations, as if to armor an otherwise too vulnerable poem. Rather than set up another contrast between other people’s words and those supposedly all my own, for my next segment I wrote a persona poem, in which each word seemed mine but not mine. And after Alasdair’s references to pop stars who must have felt old in middle age (Julian Cope, Mick Hucknall), I wanted to speak for a singer who seemed at once too old and very young. Avril Lavigne, and her entourage, must have feared losing her fans, and her public image, by the time she reached the American drinking age. I really do like most of her songs, almost as much as I like the Shop Assistants and the Fastbacks, and for most of the same reasons. (The first sentence in stanza three is actually hers, from the booklet included with Goodbye Lullaby.)  I’m also interested in the way that her persona, any celebrity persona, might be like the persona, the created figure, behind the “I” of any poem; I think both might count as collaborations. We think of celebrities as manufactured, poetic voices as genuine, but is that fair either to the craft of poetry, or to what celebrity pop artists think they can do? Is it always fair? Is it ever fair? What’s the difference between a celebrity performer whose work comes from multiple collaborations (songwriters, producers, makeup artists, stage techs) and a poet who works as Eliot said poets work, by incorporating herself, like a catalyst, into a preexisting tradition? And where better to ask those questions than a venue that’s already collaborative?

Then Alasdair wrote another poem about music (harmonica music, “folk” music) that gets old while seeming young, that recurs and follows us through the years while seeming still unripe (like green tomatoes): and so I wanted to write another poem about adolescence, without any names for real people this time out (though it does name some gods). All poems involve an internal collaboration—there is the part of the poet the poem represents, the persona (the word means “mask”), and then there is the once-removed maker, producer, who must detach herself at some point from the work of art to make sure (are we ever sure?) that she got it right. I wrote about frustrated love and lust, resignation and friendship and loyalty, here again (I think the poem points back to “Rue”). I imagine a disconnection, here,  between the figures in the collaboration. There is the maker, the frustrated blacksmith god, the cuckold of myth, the responder, the sad boy who won’t mind if we see him as sad, as long as we like what he makes. And there is the figure who comes first, the performer, the beauty, the goddess, who may quarrel with all her lovers, who may never be satisfied with herself.

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?

…

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg specializes in interspecies communication. Currently sailing as part of the Arctic Circle project, here he answers some questions on the nature of process and inspiration.

Likestarlings: As a jazz musician and composer you were obviously familiar with making ensemble sounds. But what first alerted you to the possibility and potential of communication/ collaboration with species other than our own?

David Rothenberg: You know I think it started in high school when I heard that Paul Winter was playing with whale and wolf sounds. He had a lot of influence on me back then. After a while I started to think that he would bend natural sounds into his own very sweet and beautiful music, while I wanted my music to be more changed by the encounters with other species’ worlds of sound.

Ls: What was the feeling (if you can articulate such a thing in words) when you first KNEW you had a response, a musical response?

DR: I write about this in the beginning of Why Birds Sing and the end of Thousand Mile Song. At these rare moments, with some birds and some whales (though not MOST of them!), I feel as if I reach beyond my species’ lines, to communicate where words cannot. I don’t KNOW if it is happening, and don’t want to make myself the hero of any kind of grand story, but there are these humbling moments when it is possible reach just a tiny bit the edges of human understanding to make music with other creatures.

Ls: These sorts of communications of course require a special kind of listening. To those interested in jamming with whales you say: ‘One piece of advice I would offer is: listen more than you play. If you can’t hear the whale, you’re playin’ too much.’ How does listening with a view to forming your own response inform the way you listen?

DR: It’s always important not to play too much, especially as an improviser. I imagine I’ve entered into a world of musical interaction where each of us is trying to contribute something…

Ls: And have there been any times when you’ve been silenced?

DR: Sure. By the moment. By people complaining. By the sheer fact that nature’s music is fine as it is, that it doesn’t need us!

Ls: The Peruvian singer Yma Sumac is, perhaps fancifully, supposed to have learnt to sing in response to the birds. What have you learnt musically from these sorts of collaborations?

DR: Well, Yma Sumac could do anything! Plenty of human musicians have learned from birds, and in my book I argue that as the human sense of music becomes more open to new rhythms, tones, and scales, it is better able to make musical sense of nature.

Ls: It’s great to read you on English poet John Clare and his close listening to and interpretation of birdsong. Have any of your own compositions been directly inspired by your unusual interlocutors?

DR: So many of them! Both Why Birds Sing and Whale Music are my CDs most inspired by encounters with these creatures.

Ls: There seems to be something profound about the fractal nature of some birdsong and of whalesong, its seeming endlessness, with minute and infinite variations. It’s both ephemeral and enduring…

DR: I’m glad you think so! How much fractals can help explain music is an open question, but they may help. I’ll have to ask Mandelbrot about it next time I see him at the Cornelia St. Café…

Ls: Finally, what’s blossoming in your brain as the next possible collaborative project?

DR: My next book BEAUTY SECRET: How Art Informs Evolution, begins with the puzzle of why is it that if you speed up a humpback whale song it sounds like a nightingale. Are there certain patterns in nature that have been produced by evolution to be simply beautiful, with no real adaptive purpose? Darwin thought so, and that’s how he came up with idea of sexual selection. But are sexually selected traits RANDOM, arbitrary, or might they reveal certain rhythms at the root of nature itself? More of a big concept book.
After that I think I’ll do something with the music of insects, their trance-like qualities, the way different species listen to each other in some great hive-mind kind of way…

David Rothenberg [felicitously pictured there with a starling] is the author of Why Birds Sing, also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His articles have appeared in Parabola, Orion, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Kyoto Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Sierra. Rothenberg is also a composer and jazz clarinetist, and he has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten CDs by Jazziz Magazine in 1995. His latest book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. His first CD on ECM Records, with pianist Marilyn Crispell, will be released in 2010. Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

www.thousandmilesong.com
www.whybirdssing.com

But poetry is always a kind of collaboration. As a poet you are using the expectations and, to different degrees of self-consciousness, the literature and other phenomena of the past and present, to make ‘your’ poems: you are collaborating with the strange structures of language which discipline you, channel you, force you into a give and take. You are also encouraging a reader to collaborate with you by bringing their voice (internal or external) into the auditorium of the page and the great freedom is that they can never read the poem in the way you can, they must be free to improvise the poem in the reading of it, they must ‘possess’ it as well as, for the moments of reading at least, be possessed by it. It, not you: “you” have already started to disappear.

One of my earliest collaborations in poetry was back in the mid-1990s with Leona Medlin, a fellow poet in the workshop we share. We took some already translated Rilke poems and began to work our damage. Why Rilke? – it’s only the zoo poems in Neue Gedichte I like, and that is only slightly. You can’t really go wrong with a panther. As for the rest of Rilke – angels, advice, transcendence, sacred-y classical references – I think poetry may have had enough of those for the time being (though of course each to their own… and I actually do mean that!). Then we mutated them so much between us that they became not Rilke, not Medlin, not Price. I found I liked that synthetic product – PriMedRil I suppose you could call it (normally used in industrial contexts – I think they have just banned it for personal use) and we soon found that the editors of the magazine Object Permanence liked them too, snapping them up before we’d done human trials. I found that collaboration wasn’t nearly as bad as sharing. It was more like mixing the ingredients in the fume cupboard together. In its solid form it was probably going to snarl the world’s oceans in years to come but you could make unisex day-glo clip-on ear-rings with it that didn’t hurt for the first twenty-five minutes and in a certain light made its readers look gorgeous. I’ve lost the texts of those now – I hope a national library somewhere has kept copies of the magazines – and my next collaboration wasn’t with a fellow poet at all, but with an artist. Some of the lessons I learnt with Leona and Rilke though were brought to bear on that project (I just can’t shake this didactism), but that’s another story for another time…

Richard Price’s Rays is published by Carcanet. Recently he collaborated with Luke Kennard for a likestarlings piece, here. He is the Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library. His official website is www.hydrohotel.net.