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?

…

In the expansive and marvelous new conversation between Valerie Witte & Aidan Semmens (now complete), Witte’s first poem is funny and tense, putting minor and major disasters, including the threat of flood, alongside one another in the form of a missive. In his response, Semmens introduces 18th-Century natural philosopher Allesandro Volta into the conversation (whose experiments into muscle contraction in response to electric currents led to the invention of the battery – see picture courtesy of Wikipedia above).

Semmens’ short, latinate lines are then expanded to a paragraph by Witte, who spins them into a speaker’s reminiscences. “An Experiment in Galvanism” could be a disaster itself (lightning strike?), a religious experience, sex…all of which becomes, in Semmens’ response, Likestarlings’ first sestina, if I’m not mistaken, and a brilliant one. It is a form appropriate to the overlaying of repeated elements, which are now video games, muscle memory and the still-present natural disasters. The poem draws together virtual realities, learnt behaviours and violence.

Witte’s response mirrors Semmens’ poem in its stanzas, but discards the repeated words. And again, the poem turns to the personal, to memory, but in a way which seems to me uncannily consonant with the impulse of Semmens’ poem. It is wonderful when poets seem to have got under each other’s skin – each seeing into what the other is doing and extending it, making it their own.

Current events appear to seep into Semmens’ final poem, which ends in just as unsettled a place as Witte started them off. But this is somewhere neither poet could have got to without the other. These lines, from “The age of insecurity”, might apply just as well to the process by which poems are transformed in the back and forth, too:

blurring the continuities
we take one element for another,
water for breathing, plutonium for fire,
catastrophism as a way of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firstly, I wondered why we’d divide up poetry at all. I suppose the most obvious reason is that it tells a reader what assumptions they should bring to a poem – their reading kit. It must help readers choose what to read in the first place. If we can place poems in certain traditions, it might allow us to make connections which help explain how they have come about and which other writers and ideas they are talking to. Lastly, like political parties – or the idea of them – categories might allow us to have meaningful debates without having to reiterate our premises and beliefs all the time.

Since vers libre appeared there has been a seemingly straightforward way to divide all poetry up: metred and unmetred (assuming that as the least controversial definition of never-quite-totally-free verse). This, though, is a rather limited binary, since it only describes one aspect of the verse (even if we include other formal properties in the metred category). And description always seems to slip into evaluation. For many on one side, metred means conservative; for many on the other, free verse means unthoughtful, too easy even. Poets seem consciously or unconsciously to be aligning themselves with others when they write with or without certain structuring devices – but this seems often not the best indicator of the most important things about a poem or poet.

Recently I’ve come across a couple of lineage poems – one by WS Merwin (in The River Sound) listing poets that have meant a lot to him who have died in his lifetime, the other by Seamus Heaney (in Landing Light). Both place the poet in relation to a range of poets across the formal divide. This literary kinship, as a friend put it, seems to be the way many poets think about what they are doing. They think of themselves as participating in a conversation or shared endeavour with others from theirs and other ages. The exact nature of what is kindred here only comes through from triangulation between writers, and probably never very easy to pin down. But it is often, I sense, more to do with the impulse rather than the line breaks.

Another large basis for categorisation I can see is theme. As someone – I forget who, if I ever knew – said: ‘a poem is about something as a cat is about a house’. They’re usually shifty and diffuse, not expository. Having said that, with the necessary caveats we can, I think, usefully say certain poems and poets have similar concerns. This gets mixed in with characterization by certain common gestures and movements: the anecdote-leading-into-statement poem, the chain-of-linked-images poem, the free-association poem, the updating-mythical-figure poem. (These off the top of my head; I wonder if you recognise them as types – and what others you might add?)

Finally, there are the categories which usually only come retrospectively, although occasionally they are defined by practitioners in manifestoes (often more hopefully than accurately). These are the schools. I wonder which, if any, of these, are still alive. I’ve heard several poets suggest that in both the US and US, there is no solid and coherent enough living tradition in poetry for an avant-garde to define itself in opposition or at a tangent to.

Can we talk about a Cambridge school; martianists; post-postmodernists; new-new formalists; an avant-garde; others? Would we want to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we answer, simply, that poetry is talking to anyone who’ll listen? Of course, there will always be layers of understanding. Poetry has a long tradition and knowing something of it will likely deepen a reader’s engagement. There may be allusions; poems might be having conversations that many, even avid, readers will miss. But we have to imagine, when we write, even with a certain didacticism, that we are writing for people, all of them; why not. This is not to indulge a delusion that everyone is reading poetry; we’re often reminded that they’re not. When we advocate poetry because we think it’s a good and noble thing, we should know who is coming into contact with it, and what their experience is like, but we shouldn’t obsess over it. If we write out of a depression over who is reading, what good does that do us? We have to write with the widest possible empathy, don’t we? And all writing which truly reaches for something is a provocation: to see more clearly, to understand in a different way, to feel…I realise that, once again, I am writing as if to rectify assertions you have not, in fact, made. I’m interested in how poets think of their ‘audience’. Do you have a definite sense of people in mind when you write?

The new conversation we’re really pleased to welcome to the site, between Brandon Krieg & T Zachary Cotler, is germane with reference to such questions. The first two poems are, I think, powerful, finely-made pieces which embrace complexity without obfuscation. They reach across time to first causes with seriousness and delight. Any poem which rhymes ‘Derrida’ and ‘esoterica’ is going to take some reading; but it is inclusive in the broader sense of letting as much life as possible into its scope.

I’ll leave it to them to continue with that investigation. And to you to make some more sense of all of this, as ever.

CK

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

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

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

The other day I was discussing Jorie Graham’s Sea Change and someone said that they were put off by its didacticism. The judgement surprised me because, as a collection of poems handling climate change, I had thought of it as trying to keep open some space which is usually closed (on both sides of the ‘debate’), as conversation falls into well-dug furrows (denial/apocalypse). Another person had no trouble with the collection being didactic, but was offended, to the point of feeling unable to read it, despite being a big Graham fan, by the apparent arbitrariness of her line breaks (alternating very long/very short lines). I wondered whether the two things were connected. Is it a self-consciousness about entering into a contentious discourse which led Graham to impose such an obvious constraint on herself? Are the frankly obtuse – but regularly so – line bre-/-aks a protective mask when saying something, as a poet, somebody else might disagree with?

I wonder whether we (I’ll speak for the air) have got rather too worried about didacticism. Or, more precisely, that it is only lazy didacticism that is a problem. That is, if a poem is written as if it knows everything, it is likely to feel predetermined and boring. If a poem asserts the poet’s view as inherently better than everyone else’s it’s likely to be boring and troubling. But a being-didactic which assumes that any poem is in conversation with the world, which asks for a response, but which asserts a moral position which it is not afraid of being disagreed with over, that seems productive. Peter Reading, who you mention, tells his readers off in -273.15: they should have listened to him more carefully; Milton was certainly trying to instruct…

The possibility of disagreement asks for some other useful attributes too – someone must be able to be let into a poem to disagree with it (even if it’s difficult). This doesn’t mean that all poetry must be reducible to argument – yuk – but it does mean that we are in the business of communicating. Of taking seriously the collaborative part of ’reality, our great collaboration’, as you put it so well.

It may be that this is not at all what you meant by didacticism, so apologies if that’s so. What were you thinking?

Also – what part can provocation play in this collaboration? What does a risky poem look like now? What about a shocking poem? Perhaps this is to miss the point. I’m often shocked simply by a brilliant line-break, or a moment of glorious concision. Difficult to think, though, when I’ve been morally challenged by a poem recently…you?

CK

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

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

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

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

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

DEH

This is another transatlantic pairing and we’re really pleased to welcome both poets to the site.

Poems will be added as they come…