October 2020: Hamilton writer and musician and poet and visual poet Gary Barwin and I spend a week or two working on a collaboration of our own, at his suggestion. He would send a line, I would send a line, he would send a line, etcetera. It was only a matter of days before we ended up with “SOME LEAVES,” a poem in ten sections, produced a month later as a small chapbook through above/ground press. I’m not sure how it began, but I very much enjoyed the process. In his post-collaboration “Always Already,” a short prose piece around our shared process, he writes: “Interesting how it doesn’t sound like regular rob. It is a bit of rob doing his Gary imitation. And I’m thinking about what might engage rob, what might take us both outside of our usual zones, A two-headed monster, a Y, two rivers which converge.” I envy the speed of his thought, and the fearlessness of his ability. Our poem begins:
One takes one’s computer into the woods and types “bird."
Birdsong; prerecorded, playback loops.
One takes out a photocopy of a leaf.One harvests the sentence. One pulls at weeds.
One removes one’s tongue and plants it where the weeds once wereagainst an architecture of trees. Against the underbrush of syntax.
This long screen-capture of the sun; a sense of shade, and thistle.
Honestly, say the birds. You humans. It’s not about language.
One could argue that the entire purpose of continuing to produce art is to deliberately work to move beyond our own comfort zones. I think of the band U2—each album was different than the prior, and pushed the boundaries of what they were doing, yet each album was clearly produced by them. To expand the universe is still within the bounds of the universe. It becomes a different universe. Another argument presents that ‘we paid attention to the work of Greg Curnoe because we didn’t know what he would do next.’ There’s an enormous amount of value in that, and there are few artists, literary or otherwise, who exist within this realm. Across the past thirty years, I would the suggest a shortlist of other writers in the same position would contain Christian Bök, certainly. Lynn Crosbie. Michael Turner. Sina Queyras. Jordan Abel. Lisa Robertson.
I enjoyed how easy and straightforward it felt to work this poem, one line sitting directly beyond another. I attempted to simply follow his lead, furthering the tone and cadence I caught from his opening line. It was a very different process than the other collaborations I’d worked on over the years. The first was with Lea Graham, resulting in the 2011 chapbook metric. And then there’s the stalled collaboration with Christine, which we’ve excerpted so far as two small chapbooks. The bulk of what we’ve written-to-date was prior to the birth of our first child, Rose, back in 2013. I keep hoping we’ll return to this project, for the sake of potential book publication. Honestly, I can’t even remember the structure of how the collaboration with Lea Graham worked, although I suspect it closer to what Gary and I did: a back and forth of lines. Christine and I traded a .doc file between us via email, adding two or three new poems each time at the end, composing poems-as-responses to those that had come before. From her mother’s cottage in Sainte-Adèle, Quebec, Christine worked on the main floor, and I in the basement, sending emails across the small structure. The idea was that we were wrapping poems into and around each other, and both times we’ve read together publicly from the project, we would each read from a different random swath of manuscript pages, not entirely sure who might have composed each, although Christine said she always knew which were hers and which were mine.
Although I should count, I suppose, the single-poem collaboration Christine and I composed around 2008 or so. It was a clunky attempt, constructed as much out of our hesitations and uncertainties as anything else. And whatever happened to those two poems I wrote with Matthew Holmes during an afternoon in Toronto’s late, lamented Sneaky Dee’s? I forgot about those, although it happened long enough ago, somewhere during the summer of 2003. I really need to dig those up, although I suspect Matthew might be the keeper of the final versions. Why did I never receive copies of those? As Gary opened his prose piece:
SOMETIMES one stumbles into writing. Sometimes one sends a line to someone else and suggests they add another line. “One takes one’s computer into the woods and types ‘bird.’” And then they add another line. And we’re off! Something has begun. What? We don’t know but we’re going to go with it and see what it becomes. I’d said, let’s write a prose poem but rob answered with a linebreak. Oh well, so not a prose poem, a linear poem. Ok. What comes next? Is this a single poem? Ok. Let’s keep going.