Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Oklahoma. He earned a bachelor of arts at the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for poetry, and a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Iowa.

His books are Rise Up (2007), A Green Light (2004), Satellite (2001) and A Hummock in the Malookas (1995), which was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1994 National Poetry Series. With Joshua Beckman, he is co-author of Nice Hat. Thanks. and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.

My interview with Matt, conducted by e-mail, focuses on his experiences collaborating with Joshua Beckman.

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You collaborate with Joshua Beckman regularly. What was it that drew you to collaboration?

The simple answer is that we both wanted some way for our friendship and our writing to come together. Or maybe to not compete with each other. Because we were hanging out a lot, but we also wanted to be writing. It’s selfish. Maybe that’s the funny thing – collaboration might have started as a selfish act. But almost instantly we saw how liberating it was, how great it felt to lose control of writing. We had both been interested in collaboration before, and had done a little with other people, but we had never done it to such an intense degree, where it actually affected our own writing and changed the way we considered writing as a practice in our lives.

You mention collaboration as being liberating. Can you talk about that in more detail? Also, I think our participants would be really interested in knowing how your own writing and writing practice were affected by your collaboration.

Well, it’s liberating not to have to be responsible for everything. Not to have to approach the blank page each time and think “what am I going to do this time?” It’s tiring to be the same person all the time, and to write the same poems over and over again. So what happens is, your method is both forced to confront another person’s method, AND it is put under a microscope, and you see it, and all your tics, like you never have before. Because in fact all the things that really work for you, that you always rely on, are exactly the things you would NEVER question. Because they work. But when you engage in a collaborative project with someone, right away those tics you have, and those things you always fall back on, get exposed, and you just can’t keep doing them without the other person throwing up their hands and walking away.

I guess I should stress that I’m talking about the kind of project Joshua Beckman and I engaged in, where we worked together for hours and hours each week for months. Just sitting down with someone to write one collaborative poem isn’t really going to put your process into this kind of crucible. It can be great, and work, but the more important part of it is engaging in the long process.

And that’s the answer to how collaboration can affect your own writing. Because if you do it long enough, you will come to understand that any way of thinking about writing that doesn’t privilege the process of writing is ridiculous. Writing, I mean look at it: the word is a gerund or whatever. It’s a verb form of the word. It’s an action. It’s a process. And once Beckman and I understood that, we were opened up to working on our own poems in the same free, loose way that we were working on our collaborations, and despite what that might sound like to the uptight, it is the best thing that can happen to your writing. The best thing that can happen to your writing is for you to realize that it’s all a big process, and you can throw stuff away, you can try something crazy, you can fail, you can fail in public on stage even, and it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are writing.

In the book you and Joshua wrote, Nice Hat. Thanks., you have a piece about process where you describe working verbally and going back and forth one word at a time while recording the whole interchange. Is this the only process you use, and why is this the method that works for you? How well does the process work with longer poems, like “Architecture Believes in Formalism,” which appears in Saints of Hysteria?

We also wrote that piece on process at the back of the book in the way we describe, which was probably the hardest thing we’d done up to that point, because with the poems they could just go wherever they wanted to, but with that thing, we actually had a few general points we wanted to get across. But it was really a challenge doing that one word at a time.

That method is the one we used most often because it was the one that was the most radically different from writing “real” poems. We wrote little short haiku-like poems, or 2 line poems, some 4 line poems too — those are in the book as well. Those were written a line at a time. And they were fun for awhile but even that was not disruptive enough for us. The word at a time method was the most liberating, and I guess basically it was just the most exciting. So all of the longer poems in the book were written that way. Eventually we did things after the book that were really long — we wrote a poem in Oregon called Oregon while driving that took over an hour to write. Then later doing live performances we decided we would tell stories, with narratives, characters, etc. Of course, a prose writer probably wouldn’t recognize them as stories, but for us sitting at a table in front of a bunch of people and making up a story word by word was one of the most ridiculous things we could imagine doing, so we really wanted to do it.

I can imagine how hard the process piece would be to write. But I have to say, as a reader I don’t feel the poems you and Joshua write just go anywhere. They drift for sure and can pull a lot of things in along the way, but they come back to certain points, to something central. They each have their own pacing, feeling and logic. I frankly don’t know how you do it on longer pieces. I would lose my way and forget what had come before. How do you do it?

Well, we never did it stoned. That was one thing. I think another thing was that both of us, though our poems are different in some ways, write in a way that is thematic. By which I mean, we establish a theme or strike a chord or something in a poem and the poem progresses from that, rather than from a sense of narrative. So we were both used to doing that in our own poems — to returning to something we’d established beforehand. Sometimes it was frustrating because one of us would feel the poem moving towards a great opportunity to do that, and the other one wouldn’t catch on. And so the poem would move in a new direction. And eventually we realized that was the whole pleasure of the thing.

It was really great to watch the two of you perform last year at the Seattle Poetry Festival. What I liked about it, and what I think people respond to, is how you create a kind of performance art, but it’s very thoughtful and not at all showy for the sake of being showy. It’s clear you are working hard on creating the poem, and it’s wonderful to let the audience in on that process as it unfolds. I assume the performance aspect is as exhilarating for both of you as it is for the audience. But have you ever performed in front of an audience and felt it just wasn’t working?

Oh sure, that was part of the fun, failing publicly like that. It just seemed so counter to the whole idea of being a poet — trying so hard to craft your poems, and get published, and give high-profile readings all so that you become the superstar poet who is perfect. It was really exciting and fun to get up on stage and flail about in front of everyone and to publicly write something that was clearly bad and not doing what it was supposed to.

I think what we liked about this was what it could teach us about our own poetry — that worrying too much about perfection was stifling, and that there is a freedom, even in the privacy of your own home when you’re writing, to taking ridiculous risks and failing. And being proud and happy about it, if it was a glorious failure.

Do you have any advice for someone who is interested in collaborating but who hasn’t done so and doesn’t really know how to start?

Collaboration can be a million different things, so someone starting out shouldn’t go into it with a set idea of what is collaboration and what isn’t. Joshua and I went through several iterations of our collaboration — some of which have worked for others but weren’t working for us. So you never know what’s right. We happened to find something that worked, but you have to find it by trying stuff out. And it might be weird or unexpected. Last night at a bar we wrote a puppet play. I didn’t wake up yesterday thinking I was going to write a puppet play.

The only other thing I’ll say is that the longer you work with someone, the more rewarding it will be. So the idea of doing it once at a bar or at a party is fun, and can be exciting. But when you work with someone over a longer period, the collaborations are just better. So my advice is find someone who is willing to engage in this with you for awhile. Find someone else equally as nuts as you.

photo credit: Susan McCullough