by Deb Scott
This week we feature an interview I orchestrated with Dana of My Gorgeous Somewhere and Blythe of Pro Tempore. Read Write Poem readers know them both as participants and brought-to-you-by-ers. Dana created Read Write Poem last fall, and as this discussion reveals, both the interview and Read Write Poem were an entirely collaborative process from the beginning.
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Deb Scott: Dana, you’ve been interested in poetry collaboration for a quite a while. The very first RWP prompt was about American Sentences and it included ways to collaborate. Many, if not most, of the following 36 prompts included tips on how to collaborate with other poets, and RWP shared your Read Write Interview with Matthew Rohrer, a poet well-known for his collaborative work with Joshua Beckman. Just a couple of weeks ago you wrote a poem with Brent Goodman, which you shared as part of your Read Write Interview with him.
So what is this obsession with collaborative poetry? Where’d it start and what draws you to it still?
Dana Guthrie Martin: Poetry collaboration is nothing new. As I wrote in an article for Poets Who Blog, collaboration was intrinsic to oral traditions. It was part of Japanese court life as early as the 12th century. It was part of the early 1900s French Surrealist movement. A group of Japanese poets called the Vou Club wrote together in the 1930s. The list goes on and on. Coleridge and Wordsworth. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Beat writers. Some feminist poets, who have used collaboration as a way to access a collective female voice. (This is all detailed in Saints of Hysteria: a half century of collaborative American poetry, a book everyone who’s at all interested in collaborative poetry should check out.)
As an English literature student, I was aware of how many poets and writers worked together. I’ve also been around enough contemporary poets and writers to know that many like to send collaborative poetry postcards back and forth and play other collaborative writing games.
But I didn’t really give it much thought, or at least consider it as more than wordplay, until I attended a workshop and reading given here in Seattle by Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman a couple of years ago. I went to high school with Rohrer, and he managed to flee the state of Oklahoma unscathed, so I figured he must be a smart guy who knows what he’s talking about. So when he and Joshua explained how deeply and fundamentally collaborating with each other had affected not only their individual poetry, but also their views about poetry and how poetry should be approached, I figured I should listen to him.
That’s when I got serious about collaborating. I am still drawn to it because of Blythe. She consistently amazes me. We work really well together, and I think we do good collaborative work. It’s lovely to have that kind of coordination: to feel as though the two of us are one mind and one body making these poems. But at the same time, the right arm or right hemisphere of the brain might do something, and the other half says, “Wow. That’s entirely not what I expected you to do. But it’s interesting!”
DS: I always assumed RWP was created to fill the void when Poetry Thursday pulled up its stakes. Is this true?
DGM: RWP was actually an outcropping of the collaborative work Blythe and I were doing. We had many, many hours of discussions about starting a collaborative project. I owned the domain name Read Write Poem and had it in mind for some kind of project, but I didn’t want to create a Poetry Thursday clone.
I didn’t know what I wanted my next group poetry project to be. Then, Blythe and I started collaborating together, since collaboration was near and dear to me, and it just clicked for both of us. We fell in love with the process, specifically with working together. One day, and I might actually have the IM conversation, one of us was like: “Wouldn’t it be great to have a site like Poetry Thursday but with an emphasis on collaboration?” And the other one was like, “Yes, wouldn’t it be fabulous to bring this way of working to a larger group, so they could experience the kind of pleasure we’ve found working collaboratively?”
I could be paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it. So Blythe didn’t just participate from the beginning. She is half, if not more, of the reason RWP was started. Even though I technically founded the site and pulled in a lot of elements I’d developed on Poetry Thursday, Blythe absolutely was the inspiration for it. Her energy and enthusiasm, her ability to work intelligently and emotionally with me on collaborative pieces, our reciprocity, that is why RWP came to be and came to be with a collaborative emphasis.
In fact, the Read Write Poem project was actually all built and ready to go but hidden for a couple of months before Blythe and I decided to officially take the plunge and move ahead with it. That’s when we brought Carolee, Jill and Tom in, reaching out to them to share: 1. what we had learned about collaborating and 2. the conceptualization and design work Blythe a I had done on the project. We then brought in Christine, January, Jessica, and Juliet, once we’d hashed a lot of details out within the core team. And then others came along. And of course I should point out that you saved the project when I had to bow out for a while, and you’ve been running it since January.
Blythe: It is true that we spent a lot of time talking about a collaborative project and brainstorming about what that could look like. I fell for collaborative poetry as soon as Dana introduced me to it, but I still feel a bit like a novice when it comes to matters in the poetry world, and Dana has the talents of a visionary that I do not.
For example, the first time we wrote together, we wrote a piece about a plane crash, and we decided at the end of the night to each write a section for another plane crash poem, because we both felt there was a lot of potential material there. Well, I came back with a big, clunky, five-stanza poem, and was like, “Dude, I loused it all up, I’ve got too much poem, it’s never going to work.” And Dana just said, “Oh, well we’ll do a chapbook.” And I said, “Um, what’s a chapbook?” So she sent me a link to a site explaining what chapbooks are, and by the time I had finished reading it she had done a rough layout of the first few pages of our potential chapbook.
I don’t share this story to shirk off any ownership of the site, but rather to explain why I see it as such a gift that we’ve gotten to work together on several projects. She’s absolutely spot-on when she says we spent hours talking about collaborative poetry and thinking of different ways we could practice it together and share it with others, until one day one of us finally said, “We need something similar to Poetry Thursday, but with collaboration.” And then we got to it.
DGM: You crack me up, Blythe. “Dude, I loused it all up” has me rolling. Can we work that into a poem?
DS: Dana, some of the RWP community may not know you recently got hitched to Blythe in a Facebook marriage. Is this part of your collaborating process or is it just some whimsical diversion?
DGM: Not whimsical at all. We are married now. Our last name is Funnelcake. We are the Funnelcakes. We are a bona fide copula.
I can only speak for myself (because I like to let my wife speak for herself), but I think everything we (and by we I mean all of us) do, from waking to sleeping — and actually even while sleeping — is part of the process of being a writer. So, whimsical? Perhaps. Part of our writing? Absolutely. As are showering, walking down the street, lying in the grass on a sunny day, getting into a fight with a lover, feeling (an sometimes being) alone, harboring anger toward the President, wanting to help others, not always knowing how to help.
And Facebook marriages, for sure. Yes, it’s all writing. It’s all a way of collaborating with and being engaged with the outside world.
And after all, isn’t all poetry a whimsical diversion?
B: Just for the record, I am in agreement. We are married. Our marriage came out of our writing, and it has added to it. It’s a good thing. (Whimsical? A diversion? Maybe. But definitely a good thing.)
DS: Blythe, was it easier to say “yes” to Dana when she said it would be a one-month marriage than when she switched it up and claimed forever-Facebook love?
B: I didn’t consider the time frame much when I answered her proposal with a resounding “yes,” so it wasn’t a huge deal to jump to a forever-Facebook marriage with Dana. I did decide to make my profile only visible to friends, because I’ve had potential employers I’m interviewing with scope out my Facebook page, and the marriage thing makes it easier to find my personal blog, which I’ve tried to keep off the beaten path a bit.
And I spent a moment worrying that her other Facebook fiancés would be upset, but we’re hoping they’ll marry off to each other. And I was relieved, because I didn’t have any other Facebook brides lined up, and I had been worried I’d be a bit lonely when our nuptial ties were severed.
DS: So how did you meet Dana?
As of mid-2006, I had written exactly 1.5 poems in my adult life, but I wanted to write more. I had read the work a handful of poets extensively, and I had a small inkling, deep in my gut, that I had some poems to share with the world, too. So one day I took the bold step of googling “I want to write poems but I don’t know what I’m doing” (or something along those lines), and I immediately ran across Poetry Thursday, the poetry site that Dana was co-hosting at the time. And thus, I found her blog, and I was immediately hooked.
DS: Do you segregate your poetry ideas? By that I mean do you set aside one idea to work with Dana, or others, and save another that you want to try out on your own?
B: I don’t purposefully compartmentalize poetry subjects, themes or exercises, but some of that happens naturally. I write more confessional poetry and more poetry influenced by people I know/events in my life on my own than I do with the rest of the collaborative, obviously. And as far as subjects that aren’t autobiographical in nature, I tend to look around to see if there’s anyone who wants to poem with me before I delve into them on my own. Poetry is simply better when made together.
DS: It’s hard to quantify poetry-writing, but how much of you two’s current work is collaborative? How has it changed how you work?
DGM: I don’t know. I hadn’t been writing much at all between January and June, since I was dealing with thyroid problems and other health issues I had (and to some degree still have) as a result of the thyroid problems.
But before that, I’d say I was writing collaboratively about 1/4 of the time. Now, with the formation of The Poetry Collaborative, more than half my poetry-writing is collaborative, or at least based on prompts from the collaborative. That percentage might change dramatically over the coming months and years. I think the percentage will go up and down, depending on other circumstances in my life and in my writing.
And how has is changed my writing? It’s made it better, more lustrous.
B: As a very rough approximation, I’d say that about 1/3 of the writing I’ve done over the last nine months has been a collaboration of sorts.
Collaborating has changed how I approach poetry, even when I’m writing alone. Reading about how someone else tackles a poem is one thing, but going along with them, sharing their practice, that’s another. Poems look a little different now. They have more angles of approach. I’ve learned new ways to put words and lines together and have gained a lot of confidence about what you “can” do with a poem. Plus, collaborating has stoked my fires for poetry in general.
DS: Blythe, what was your wedding present to Dana?
B: Just me. Is that lame or what? And I got a collaborative poetry website and a new wife. I am clearly the slacker in this relationship.
DS: Dana, this site Blythe refers to, The Poetry Collaborative, quickly became a group site, administered by you and Blythe, once you invited the “wedding party” to first witness your collaborative poetry, then participate themselves. Why such a public setting? What it is about collaborative poetry you want visitors to witness?
DGM: It. I want them to witness it. In action. All of it.
DS: “All of it”?
DGM: I mean all of it. The whole gnarly, brilliant, iterative, process-oriented mess that is the heart of any collaborative artistic endeavor. I also want people to see that collaborative writing can be tough, wry, honed, gorgeous, life-affirming, life-altering, sinuous, brave, wrenching and achingly funny.
We’ve assembled a group of women whose individual writing possesses all these qualities, and in writing together we are creating a kind of collective voice and entity: this smart, sexy, witty, fearless and haunting presence who has all of our words coursing through her veins, but who at the same time is a kind of apparition. We know her, we recognize her but she is not us. She is a mystery. She is foreign. She is other. We are at once drawn to and a little afraid of her.
Being with her is like looking in a mirror and seeing someone who resembles us yet is not us. The journey with this collaboration, I think, is to learn more about who she is through a continual dialogue with her, through being brave enough to — over and over again — move into her space, her body. To inhabit her and wear her around like a living garment. To confront the “other” that is her and in so doing learn more about our own writing and in turn about ourselves. Our mission is to move from experiencing her as “object” to experiencing her as “subject.” To make her whole and to embrace her entirely.
DS: I think many people, myself included, always assumed the work of poetry was done in a very alone, isolated and private space. Based on one of RWP’s (very scientific polls) it seems that most poets are introverts. This collaboration idea turns that assumption on its head. On its head and then some. You both say you are introverts. (And I have to say watching you work together and reading your writing — as individuals and the Funnelcakes — doesn’t support that theory!)
B and DGM in unison: We are. Trust us.
DS: So why does collaboration work? Could *anyone* collaborate?
B and DGM (answering collaboratively): We don’t have monkeys in our basement, which keeps making Dana cry. But Blythe won’t fondle her minute men without a turkey baster.
So obviously we can’t give monkeys or turkey basters to our invisible pizza delivery team, unless of course they masquerade as Robert Downy Jr. look-alikes or prescription drugs. (Same difference, really.)
What we mean is: Collaborative poetry cantilevers hot air balloons above The Kon-Tiki Room.
And we only know this much: Collaborative poetry never turns on without robots singing show tunes. That’s the quixotic nature of collaborative poetry. But other than its imaginary quests, collaborative poetry is itself and also us. It is both a separate hedgerow and an internal labyrinth.
Collaborative poetry answers to every call, like a well-trained OnStar employee. Don’t you wish your poetry could be as obedient as ours? Look at Blythe put gummy bears all over Dana’s Pizzeria Combos. Our verses flow off course, flapping and flailing, of course. Have no fear.
The Poetry Collaborative is the Funnelcakes’ baby, although they have invited a group of women to experience the collaborative process with them. Since it is an experiment, it is small and will probably stay that way, not to be a clique but to focus the collaboration process they hold dear. They encourage everyone to check out the blog from time to time to see collaborative poetry prompts, read poems written using collaborative processes and watch new collaborative pieces unfold on the site. This interview exposes RWP readers to ways collaboration can occur and invites them to explore their own ideas, perhaps to even start their own collaboration sites. Blythe and Dana are happy to answer any questions about how to go about it.
