qarrtsiluni

The accelerating street was wet light
and we were, impossibly, on ledges
talking down the suicides,

disarming the shooters on their way to school,
the night’s echolocation
giving way to

the heart’s,
and though a signal is not an answer

sometimes even a glimpse of the Divine Yes
is enough,
the quick of it
almost mocking

a life laboring to break
bewilderment’s code.

What if we took in the street preacher?
Silenced the fortune teller?
Laid off
each sure thing?

Maybe all we need to remember is how
to call the sun up
or pin down the moon.

Maybe we’re merely steps
away from nowhere.

by Susan Elbe and Ron Czerwien

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Process notes

The process began one evening while we were browsing the fiction display at our local Borders Bookstore. One of us suggested that some of the book titles might make good titles for collaborative poems. Ron chose the title from that list and also submitted the first line. We then composed the poem strictly via e-mail. Early on Ron asked if we should offer edits during the process, but Susan felt we’d lose the energy of the exchange. So we simply continued to alternate lines. The varying line lengths and freer use of white space were Susan’s ideas. Ron followed her lead. Susan’s poems are replete with words that are surprising but never arbitrary. Ron offers as a good example of this her use of “echolocation.” Ron’s post-modern leanings stretched Susan’s approach.

Our biggest stumbling block was sticking with it. Our busy lives and other work intruded, and we constantly had to prod each other to come back to the collaboration. There were long periods when both of us struggled to come up with the right line, one that would not only carry forward what came before but also lead towards a felt, though always unknown, conclusion. The poem even includes a line Ron appropriated from a poem by Rae Armantrout, who he was reading at the time of the collaboration. Oddly enough, all of our lines survived editing! We each thought very carefully about what psychic gift we were sending the other person. Susan loved anticipating what the next line from Ron would be. Both of us think it’s important to collaborate with someone whose work and sensibility you enjoy and respect, but having different styles makes it more interesting. We hope to do more together in the future.

On the zócalo in Puebla, la ciudad de los ángeles,
flocks of shiny balloons rise and fall and rise
again with the coruscating spray of water
spouted from the mouths of fountain
fish misting birds who flutter

above human voices

peddlers, priests, tourists folding
maps, laughing children playing chase,
rumble of taxis, buses, cars, clink of glasses in
sidewalk cafes, scrape of chairs as the band begins
the danzón, hum of horns, scuff of cellos and violins,

lyrical silence of pigeon wings.

by Arturo Lomas Garza, Robert Skiles, and Katherine Durham Oldmixon

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Process notes

Robert Skiles and Arturo (“Turo”) Lomas Garza have been friends and collaborators for almost thirty-three years, together performing Robert’s musical compositions for recordings and live concerts. Poet and photographer Katherine Durham Oldmixon and Turo have also worked together and supported one another on many artistic projects. So it’s no surprise that Turo, the editor of this project, is the nexus of the collaboration.

When we launched this project, we agreed that we wanted Robert’s music to be central, but we began with Katherine’s poem “Puebla de los ángeles” as a basis for the idea. Robert had read the poem before and expressed an appreciation for its sounds and images. We didn’t want the poem to become lyrics accompanied by music, but the music to be its own interpretation and representation of the idea, and the poem and images to complement. So Robert wrote and recorded his piano solo, “Puebla de los ángeles,” and Turo selected and edited Katherine’s photographs of Puebla, Mexico to create the visual media, integrating the lines of the poem as he heard them and saw them in the song.

alleys(have no fixed addresses):
no front door stoops;

# shortcuts coding the city
# with their pragmatic and dirty

/* kind of beauty. an apothem’s
relentless straightedge */

functions() of a hyperbolic map
where roads only turn right;

<the> alley fails a pi[d]geon-faced dealer
his bicycle navigating </crowds>

whoDwellBehind theNormals in
life. thisMetaspace of precariousCables;

dumpsters_and_bugs crashing

among-the-crows, the-circuits
of old-benches, where travellers
chalk their-secret-language

(on (the (underbelly (of) the) city)—here)

a thousand: kilometers of: short cuts
threading the: longest path: through

defeatingspaces

to {the | pharmacy} with {no | pain} killers

by Dethe Elza and Daniela Elza

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Process notes

Dethe writes:
Hearing Daniela every day for the past few weeks talking about one collaboration or another, it just seemed natural to try one together. I sent her a poem about the alleys of Vancouver.

Daniela writes:
The alley topic sat dormant in my head for a few days. One night we brainstormed around alleys: these shortcuts, like in coding, and suddenly there was an explosion of ideas. Especially after the lights went out. To the point that we wrote notes under the light of a cellphone, thinking that was it. We laugh now, why we did not turn the light on.

Dethe:
I have often wondered how to put computers and technology into poetry. Poetry has had a big influence on how I write code, but the influence hasn’t gone the other way very much. The sparking of these ideas helped to bring the two together.

Daniela:
I could not go to sleep. I got up and wrote trying to give shape to what had just happened. It was 2am when I finally settled down. I sent that to Dethe the next day.

Dethe:
When I went through it, each line triggered new ideas. Under each line I wrote the line it inspired: a re-working of Daniela’s line, and sometimes a more drastic change. The result was like taking the poem through a looking-glass, basically the same, but also entirely different. I thought it was really shaping up.

Daniela:
When I got his email, I was shocked. It felt like he did not keep a lot of the phrasing. I felt like I introduced stress in the process by commenting on that. But when I looked at it the next day, I realized what he was doing. He was riffing off, tightening up, taking out what he did not want. I rewrote the poem using my lines and his lines.

Dethe:
With a couple of very small changes, I was happy with it. At this point, the poem felt done to me. There was one word that was misspelled (“pidgeon”) and I wanted to keep it because we were using a pigeon both as imagery and as metaphor (alley denizens), while we were also playing with language, especially the simplified pidgin language of computers. I resolved this by putting the “d” in square brackets, then mentioned that it made it look kind of like code.

Daniela:
At this point I wanted it to look more like code, and asked Dethe to go further, to introduce different aspects of coding.

Dethe:
The result isn’t really code, but it carries the feel of various programming languages. A different programming language or construct is reflected in pretty much every stanza. Trying to work those constructs in without destroying or distracting overly from the poem was a challenge. I still don’t know if it was successful or if we pushed it too far.

(Click on image to see at larger size.)

by Andrew Topel and Jim Leftwich

Process notes

Andrew writes:
Collaboration is an important, vital part of creating for me. Both art and writing are acts of creation usually done in isolation. It can be intimidating to stare at a blank canvas or an empty sheet of paper, seeing nothing but white space. Collaboration allows one to break free from the isolation and generate new ideas. Through collaborative work, the artistic act becomes a process of give-and-take, a dialogue opening up between two or more people, and brings a tremendous amount of heat and surprise to the creative process. It can lead one down new and unexplored neural pathways. I highly recommend that everyone share his/her vision with another/others, and let another’s vision seep into their minds, intertwining and super-congealing brain-cells, then create together and shield your eyes from the potential explosion.

Jim writes:
1 – consensus reality is always collaborative
2 – the construction of meaning is always collaborative
3 – subjectivity is always collaborative

Like a flock of confused birds,
Thigh finds herself running head
long into the dark, the sky a shawl
of witches, caught in this spell
of minutes repeating, corners
without edges or names,
street lights blown out, the wind
like an unnamed thought.
Even the bright seeds of stars
are planted deep tonight;
this is how it feels to be planted
deep, buried alive.
The path once seemed so clear
the shuffle of her feet, shift of hip
clutch   brake  shift  clutch
to get a grip, to remember this
is only a temporary loss in the suburbs,
this is not the detour of her life.

by Karla Huston and Cathryn Cofell

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Process notes

This poem was inspired literally by getting lost in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a city with which we were unfamiliar. Trying to drive home after a late-night poetry reading, we were hopelessly turned around and not for the first time. One of us made a joke about writing a poem in which our Thigh character was also lost, when we arrived home (finally), one of us took up the charge by writing the first couple of lines. Since we’d often used Exquisite Corpse to collaborate, we wrote two lines each back and forth by email (with the first line xxx’d out) until we agreed upon a line count and an ending. This one came out with few changes — pretty amazing!

For general notes on their collaborative process, see Miracle Fish. —Eds.

I’ve been collecting
ghosts, stamps, pins
my coins of doubt

even though all they’ll
buy are more ghosts, real
only in the way

that small things
can be, our imperfect
worlds hung up

on tired clothes
lines.

-

the girls joke that soon
I’ll need a second room
that no one

should need this many
memories, so I pinch my
arm between

waltzes to be with
them, they’re kind
and I can.

-

so here I am
another pair of pearled
hips at 3:00 A.M.

praying in the fickle
manner of soldiers for
the sphinx to open

his wavelength
in my skull.

-

can you see me?
I’m prone as a telephone
trading gridlocked

bodies for infinite
rows of dreaming

awake but never
more than six feet
from my bed.

-

I’m pretty in this—
my little prison
of the obvious

the visitations
have changed, they’re
threadbare

like the house
negligee I wear
and don’t

like anything left
out in the animal
kingdom.

-

in the end, even
the power of my
nakedness

is denied; I’m mute
wallpaper, whispering
just to catch

my breath.

by Peter Schwartz and Colette Jonopulos

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Process notes

Peter writes:
Colette Jonopulos is my best friend in the whole world. What’s odd about that is I’ve never met her. I came into contact with Colette when I submitted work to Tiger’s Eye (which she co-edits) in Spring of 2007. She was kind and wise and funny, so I kept writing her back and never stopped.

I came to poetry seriously at about the end of 2003. Well, that’s when I started publishing. I don’t think I was very good until about 2007. Anyway, Colette was born writing poetry and has attended and ran many workshops and seminars. She’s a true student of the craft. So, I often read her my work over the phone and she points out the one or two lines that are utterly ridiculous. Gently, of course.

So it was natural that I came to her with “in the trade,” one of my truest “character” poems to date. It’s from the point of view of a lonely prostitute and since I’m not even a woman, I thought maybe Colette could add some reality to the piece. And she did. I won’t tell you which lines were hers but if you love one in particular — it’s probably hers.

Words may not refer to anything, but if they do
they TV the objective world, white noising
over what might’ve been a nice view. On TV
membership has its privileges. In the library
I try to “get lost” in a “slender volume” but
the volume’s too low. Sarcastic & bleak,
TV gets me. Even though TV doesn’t know
how to love me. How I want it to watch me.
No one can keep track of my saccades,
but “Vide” can be used to direct a reader’s
attention to what’s on TV: basically
a forced obliteration of the landscape
w/ TV music. Allowing yourself to be used
is the best way to be used. Shibboleths
issue forth from the muted TV.

by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney

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Process notes

Kathleen and Elisa have been collaborating on poems since February of 2006. All collaboration has taken place via email while Elisa has been living in Boston and Kathleen has been living in Provincetown, Tacoma, and now Chicago. They tend to kick off each round of collaboration by deciding to work in a particular form, either a pre-existing one such as a sonnet, or one of their own devising, such as a backwards poem. They usually compose line by line, with each of them reserving the right to veto or call a do-over on her collaborator’s contribution.

One of ten selections from the unpublished manuscript Flying Home. (Click on image to see at larger size.)

by steve d. dalachinsky and Sig Bang Schmidt

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PAT: How easily a sight of anything distracts a thought of a lover. I would, if I could, shut down the world.

FRANKIE: Don’t talk crazy talk. You would shut down the generators that make the electricity that sends the lift to my flat? You would shut down the factories that make the sheets on which we lie? You would break the pipes that bring us water for us to brew tea and brush our teeth? The whole world is in a conspiracy to support our love.

by Tammy Ho Lai-ming and Reid Mitchell

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Process notes

Tammy writes:
Reid and I have been writing together for about three years now. We write what could be called “literary dialogues,” although someone has commented that what we write are really “juxtaposed monologues” because the characters are often engaged in displaced conversations with themselves. We have also tried writing poems together and found the Villanelle works rather well. Since we live in two places, we write via the internet. Maybe one day we can write together for a longer period, sitting face-to-face.

“Debating Love” is a brief exchange which shows two people’s collaborative effort to delude each other: Pat thinks the world is an obstacle to love, Frankie thinks the world is a confidant of love.

Part 3 of a series of 7

Dear Mary—

I would like to talk about rooms. William Gass proposed that a book is a building for what the brain has spun. So a letter is a room. Your husband’s letter to me was full of location, as if he and therefore I were rapidly beaming in and out of chaos: Captain Kirk and his obedient lackey. Basements and parking lots, orchestra pits and grocery stores. He is so active, your guy. (But when we sit at the table, he is stalwart at your side.) I want this letter to be a little sendable bag for what my sleepy Sunday brain is knitting. Wooden needles click.

I am writing to you from a new room. An old room in our 120 year-old house, the room that was first my son’s then my daughter’s and now refitted for the son again in preparation for his return from college. Everything is IKEA neat right now, the only muss the dust on top of the plastic fortune-telling Buddha, the one I gave him last Christmas, the one sitting on some glib western manufacturer’s idea of buddha responses, like look within.

Content as a mug of tea here, because Sam will return in a few days. We hung a long green batiked scarf in the window and everything is now watery green, my hands as I write you, my pajamas, his posters and books. A moist, dim green against the November outside.

If letters are little knitted compartments of saying, then I should hurry and say before I run out of yarn. Your daughter is a temple. My daughter is a swimming pool. Your daughter is an atrium. We are both splendid galleries within the museum of this city. You are a library stacked with real wisdom, truly. Your daughter is a volleyball court. My son is somewhere in Boston now, his body a concert hall, his eyes will be blue all the way back to Chicago.

Yours, Alice

PS Don’t show this to Mike yet, he needs to wait.

by Alice George

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For notes on the process, see the first letter in the chain.