Who's Coming Along:
Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton and Collaboration Today
Kristine Snodgrass
Denise Duhamel is professor of English at Florida International University and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Blowout, Ka-Ching, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. Duhamel has written five chapbooks of poetry and coedited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including Penguin Academics: Contemporary American Poetry; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; and Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Duhamel is the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013.
Maureen Seaton is the author of fifteen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her most recent is Fibonacci Batman, New and Selected Poems (1991-2011.) Her work has received numerous awards, including the Iowa Poetry Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Society of Midland Authors Award, Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, and the Pushcart; and has appeared in Best American Poetry and in numerous literary journals. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, also garnered a “Lammy.” She teaches poetry at the University of Miami.
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been collaborating for 25 years; their poetry has been published in numerous literary journals and collections including Oyl (2000), Exquisite Politics (1997), and Little Novels (2002). They have also co-edited (with David Trinidad) an anthology of collaborative poetics: Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. With a new poem up at Plume, an online journal, they continue to be at the fore of collaborative American poetry.
Collaborative poetry (defined here has poet-to-poet or poet-to-artist more loosely) has definitely gained ground in the past twenty years in terms of willingness of editors to publish collaboration and the number of poets writing collaboratively. When Duhamel and Seaton (name order is alphabetical) published Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press) in 1997, they claimed that few journals would accept collaborative poetry. Poetry was seen as a singular work.
Today, collaboration is embraced by many journals (online and print) and small presses. And it matters. Collaborators are writing chapbooks and books, interviews and blogs. They are publishing in journals (like Plume) and with presses (like Coconut Books). New collaborative work can be found on blogs like newcollaborations.wordpress.com or Tracy Brimhall’s wearehomer.blogspot.com has devoted space to interviewing and showcasing collaborative poetics. The St. Mark’s Poetry Project, started by the New York School, commits itself to collaborative poetry readings. More and more, collaboration is being used in creative writing classrooms through the use of Japanese and Surrealist forms or games. And collaboration with artists, concrete and digital, has flourished. Collaboration is ubiquitous. All the young, cool poets are doing it.
I had been writing collaboratively with Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton for about eight years when our book, Two Thieves & a Liar, was released in 2012. To me, collaborative poetry is an outlet to search for duende and manipulation, palpability and personality, salience and voice. For me, collaboration is satisfying. It is dialogic. When we write, there exists a momentum that I have tried desperately to achieve with singular writing. As a student of Duhamel, and later Seaton, I was taught collage and collaboration. I have known Duhamel and Seaton as teachers, collaborators, and friends. This interview reflects those perspectives.
Kristine: You two have been writing for over twenty years and have several books and dozens of publications. How do you think collaborative poetics have changed, and how valuable is collaborative poetics to American poetry today?
Denise: I guest-edited The Best American Poetry 2013, and for the first time a collaborative poem appears in its pages. Two young poets—Angela Veronica Wong and Amy Lawless—wrote a very sassy, insightful poem about the push and pull of romance called “It Can Feel Amazing to be Targeted by a Narcissist.” The poem first appeared in The Common, a beautifully produced magazine. I read many small press magazines in preparing the anthology, and I came across many more collaborations than I thought I would have. The stigma seems to be, at least to a degree, gone.
Maureen: I’m thrilled to see the increase in publication opportunities, too. Synergies between editors and collaborative contributors have strengthened, perhaps radically, over the past twenty-five years, and I really like what I’m seeing in journals and from small presses. Collaborators are taking the work more seriously (now there’s an oxymoron!), partly as validation by editors increases, and partly as traditionally “low art” attracts more of us for its breadth and possibilities. I’m so biased when it comes to the value of collaboration for both practitioners and readers/viewers/listeners that anything I have to say on the subject is suspect. But art, for me, in any form, requires and deserves a relinquishing of ego on the part of the artist. I know of no better way to lay down ego than through collaboration. Once I allow someone else’s voice to change my own course, I’m on the way to something new, something that might even astonish me.
Kristine: Why do you think collaborative poetics is so acceptable today?
Denise: This is a stretch, but I think younger people are less concerned with “ownership” of words and images. In music, there are a lot of mash-ups. There is a sense of play and appropriation and making the old new.
Maureen: I agree with Denise. And, in addition to our young poets and editors, there are people writing and publishing poetry today who were still in the margins not long ago. When I went to grad school in the nineties, I’d rarely been assigned a book of poems by a woman or a person of color to study, so that’s what I assigned myself for the duration. Plus, with more inclusivity in publication—largely through grassroots efforts of our poets—I believe there’s been an emergence of an expansive creative spirit. That would definitely include collaborative poetics.
Finding The Third Voice
The idea of a “third voice” is not new. T.S Eliot wrote, “The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself–or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse.” Eliot claims his third voice is the most difficult voice to write. Nikki MacDonald interviewed Duhamel and Seaton, writing, “Denise and Maureen define this third voice or ‘created voice’ in the introduction as ‘a voice that is at the same time both of us and neither of us, the mysterious voice that sings between us” (Painted Bride Quarterly).
In their first book, Exquisite Politics (1997, Tia Chucha Press), what is evident in reading these poems, except for the notes back and forth, there exists one voice: a collaborative third voice. This is not Eliot’s third voice: this voice is not wholly Denise nor Maureen—a melding of two separate voices (a+b=c)—rather an entirely new voice in addition to singular voices (a, b, c). Duhamel says, “Something magical happens when we write; we find this third voice, someone who is neither Maureen nor I, and our ego sort of fades into the background. The poem matters, not either one of us” (American Poet).
Kristine: In much of your work, there is only ONE voice, the “c” voice as I have described above. Which of your poems do you think exhibits also the “a” and “b’ voices? What work allows your egos to enter the poem and why do you think this happens?
Denise: Maureen and I most recently are working on poems in which there is an (un)identified “a” and “b” voice, by which I mean we are writing back and forth in larger chunks, whole poems you could say, that blend back and forth. This is relatively new for us and it has been a pleasure! One such collaboration, “A Poem Cycle,” appears in the online journal Plume. I guess such poems do allow a bit more of the “ego” in, as though each one of us is having the other do some crazy drum soloing.
Maureen: I really enjoyed “A Poem Cycle,” which, as Denise mentioned, was a departure from our usual process. Crazy drum soloing, indeed! I think the only other time we identified ourselves as ourselves was in “Baby Democrats,” from Exquisite Politics. The material we’d accessed seemed too individual to meld. In “A Poem Cycle” we often addressed each other in the poems, as if they were letters. I loved it!
Creating the Third Wave
In Duhamel and Seaton’s collaborative poetry, the politics of gender, sex, and identity are like over-sized Legos dumped on the floor in front of the reader. As readers, we are bound to touch, fumble, and build. In Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press 1997), the poets use the now familiar form of Exquisite Corpse to render a “gendered” agenda. The exploration and raw expansion of sexuality and sexual identity is bolstered by the co-authorship of sonnet spells, prayers, and notes to each other. In their plurality, the poems are exemplary of third wave feminism. Consider this line from The Femme Diaries: “That is her favorite time in history—before she lost her virginity,/before she lost it again to a girl.” Sexuality is not narrowly defined nor is it ignored nor is it working without an agenda. In this work, sexuality has agency.
In Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002), collaboration is political and political is personal. The act of subversion of the canonical status quo is also a political act by the writer(s). Duhamel and Seaton take novels from the canon and re-write them. In this process they are creating a feminist re-memory of the historical and societal texts representative of second wave feminism that have traditionally marginalized women and folks of color. Women re-writing the space of the poetic canon places emphasis on collective memory, and collective memory is thus inclusive. In this work, “you” are no longer docile when you collaborate with the canonical texts, with each other.
Here is an excerpt of an exquisite corpse sonnet, To Kill a Mockingbird (from Little Novels, p. 12):
“Scout was the kind of girl who loved boy games.
Sometimes she’d hang upside-down from trees
and pretend people’s foreheads were chins. Seas
often churned in her belly. Race relations,
tricky as kick boxing, the perturbations
of great and little minds, played a major role.”
This passage provides a safe space to discuss “girl” politics. Both the collaboration with the text and poet-to-poet are creating a new space for women to define ourselves within the realm of poetics.
Exquisite Politics is created with the Exquisite Corpse form. As the title argues, politics, here both of democracy and of the body, are indeed worthy of special or even equal attention in our American culture. Below is an excerpt from “Exquisite Independent” (p. 36):
"Politics comes along when you least expect it,
It hides inside stories and fairy tales, fucking with the princess
who won’t cry sexual harassment.
Its TV face is big and pink and puffy,
not the mother-loved face we all voted for.
Singular or plural, politics is/are unavoidable
in the womb and schoolyard and parking lot."
Kristine: Would you use "feminist" or "political" to describe your work? Do you think collaboration is inherently feminist? Has it become “taboo” in contemporary poetics to define work as “feminist”? What is your assessment of Third Wave Feminism and contemporary poetics and how does collaboration fit in that sphere?
Denise: I grew up with a feminism that was part of pop culture…Helen Reddy’s song “I am Woman,” The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Julia, a TV sitcom which featured an African-American single mom. In the late sixties and early seventies, feminism was cool. I kid you not. The year 1975 was declared “International Women’s Year” by the United Nations. I was sixteen. I truly thought change was coming. The backlash is/was discouraging, to be sure, but I am still proud to call myself a feminist and never eschew the term. Third Wave Feminism is exciting to me because of its inclusivity, which relates to collaboration in poetry.
Maureen: I was pregnant with my second child during “International Women’s Year.” Because my first birthing experience (1970—yes, I’ve always been a slow learner) had been barbaric and because there had been so few choices for me (I was warned against breast-feeding by everyone I knew, for instance), I was determined to do exactly what I wanted the second time--natural childbirth, breastfeeding, the works--without family support. I think about my kids a lot when I write. Denise and I both write that way; we’re hyper-aware of who’s coming along. So, naturally, our work is feminist and political, even when it’s play. Collaboration fits in any sphere, don’t you think?
Teaching the Art
Both Duhamel and Seaton have taught collaboration and collage à la French Surrealism (Breton, Carrington, Magritte, Duchamp). As a student of poetry, I practiced collage as a way to put down my disconnected thoughts and not worry about lineation. Now that I teach creative writing, I see the same value for my students. Students (especially young poets) are freed from previous notions of “what poetry is” and able to gather the material form of the subconscious to create unexpected and fresh texts. When students use forms like chain games (exquisite corpse, for example, where each poet writes on a sheet of paper and that writing is concealed from the following poet to write after), they are opening themselves up, looking with a different lens. There are possibilities. Just like any other assignments, some turn out good, and some fail.
For example, in my poetry classes students will do a conflation of the Exquisite Corpse and Ford’s chain poem (borrowed from Duhamel). I will write two lines on a piece of paper, fold over the first line so the next person can only read one line, and then pass it on. This is done until all of the participants have completed a line. Sometimes I start two or three of these to keep everyone busy and garner more writing. At the end I ask a student to read the result. Of two poems, one is usually funny, exciting, and especially different from their previous ideas of poetry. Students are thrilled to see that some of the poems share similar threads.
Kristine: Do you both teach collaboration in your classes today? What do you see as the reasons for failure or success in your students’ collaborative poems? How is collaboration a good teaching tool?
Denise: I love to teach collaboration. I think, in terms of success and failure, it teaches young poets that not everything is worthy of a poem. It’s OK to write a bad poem. It’s OK to write a poem from which you can salvage one line only—or none. I am firm believer that you have to write a lot in order to push through and get to something profound and interesting. Collaboration also teaches students the element of surprise that is so vital to poetry, how a poem can turn away from a writer’s initial intent when a collaborator adds a line. When writers go back to their own solo work, I hope that they try to capture the surprise that came from their collaborator’s imagination and to avoid the expected.
Maureen: I include opportunities for collaboration in every class I teach. It’s one of my mainstays along with collage, translation, and creating a community of writers within the workshop. I tell my students that it’s not for everyone, and they can take it or leave it after the course; but they love it, and I’ve never read one of their collaborations I don’t enjoy. Truthfully. I often get to see a whole different side of my students when they write together. They do too. There’s less pressure and perfectionism, more play and a delightful energy of discovery. Like Denise, I hope they'll carry this relaxed impulse with them into their solo work; and/or, I hope they’ll continue with the duet impulse and take their collaborative show on the road.
Duhamel and Seaton outline their “Ten Commandments of Collaboration”:
1. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's art with thy whole heart.
2. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's judgment with thy whole mind.
3. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's integrity with thy whole spirit.
4. Honor thy own voice.
5. Honor thy collaborator's spouse.
6. Thou shalt not be an egotistical asshole.
7. Thou shalt not covet all the glory.
8. Thou shalt love the same foods as your collaborator.
9. Thou shalt eat and tire at the same time.
10. Above all, honor the muse.
Kristine: In your previous musings on collaboration, you have stated the Ten Commandments of Collaboration. How would you define those today? Would anything change? Where do you see collaboration in ten years?
Denise: I have to say I think we did pretty well with these commandments. I will leave any changes of The New Testament of Collaboration to Maureen. I see collaboration only expanding over the next ten years, as identity/identities become more inclusive and fluid.
Maureen: Ditto!
Maureen Seaton is the author of fifteen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her most recent is Fibonacci Batman, New and Selected Poems (1991-2011.) Her work has received numerous awards, including the Iowa Poetry Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Society of Midland Authors Award, Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, an NEA, and the Pushcart; and has appeared in Best American Poetry and in numerous literary journals. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, also garnered a “Lammy.” She teaches poetry at the University of Miami.
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been collaborating for 25 years; their poetry has been published in numerous literary journals and collections including Oyl (2000), Exquisite Politics (1997), and Little Novels (2002). They have also co-edited (with David Trinidad) an anthology of collaborative poetics: Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. With a new poem up at Plume, an online journal, they continue to be at the fore of collaborative American poetry.
Collaborative poetry (defined here has poet-to-poet or poet-to-artist more loosely) has definitely gained ground in the past twenty years in terms of willingness of editors to publish collaboration and the number of poets writing collaboratively. When Duhamel and Seaton (name order is alphabetical) published Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press) in 1997, they claimed that few journals would accept collaborative poetry. Poetry was seen as a singular work.
Today, collaboration is embraced by many journals (online and print) and small presses. And it matters. Collaborators are writing chapbooks and books, interviews and blogs. They are publishing in journals (like Plume) and with presses (like Coconut Books). New collaborative work can be found on blogs like newcollaborations.wordpress.com or Tracy Brimhall’s wearehomer.blogspot.com has devoted space to interviewing and showcasing collaborative poetics. The St. Mark’s Poetry Project, started by the New York School, commits itself to collaborative poetry readings. More and more, collaboration is being used in creative writing classrooms through the use of Japanese and Surrealist forms or games. And collaboration with artists, concrete and digital, has flourished. Collaboration is ubiquitous. All the young, cool poets are doing it.
I had been writing collaboratively with Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton for about eight years when our book, Two Thieves & a Liar, was released in 2012. To me, collaborative poetry is an outlet to search for duende and manipulation, palpability and personality, salience and voice. For me, collaboration is satisfying. It is dialogic. When we write, there exists a momentum that I have tried desperately to achieve with singular writing. As a student of Duhamel, and later Seaton, I was taught collage and collaboration. I have known Duhamel and Seaton as teachers, collaborators, and friends. This interview reflects those perspectives.
Kristine: You two have been writing for over twenty years and have several books and dozens of publications. How do you think collaborative poetics have changed, and how valuable is collaborative poetics to American poetry today?
Denise: I guest-edited The Best American Poetry 2013, and for the first time a collaborative poem appears in its pages. Two young poets—Angela Veronica Wong and Amy Lawless—wrote a very sassy, insightful poem about the push and pull of romance called “It Can Feel Amazing to be Targeted by a Narcissist.” The poem first appeared in The Common, a beautifully produced magazine. I read many small press magazines in preparing the anthology, and I came across many more collaborations than I thought I would have. The stigma seems to be, at least to a degree, gone.
Maureen: I’m thrilled to see the increase in publication opportunities, too. Synergies between editors and collaborative contributors have strengthened, perhaps radically, over the past twenty-five years, and I really like what I’m seeing in journals and from small presses. Collaborators are taking the work more seriously (now there’s an oxymoron!), partly as validation by editors increases, and partly as traditionally “low art” attracts more of us for its breadth and possibilities. I’m so biased when it comes to the value of collaboration for both practitioners and readers/viewers/listeners that anything I have to say on the subject is suspect. But art, for me, in any form, requires and deserves a relinquishing of ego on the part of the artist. I know of no better way to lay down ego than through collaboration. Once I allow someone else’s voice to change my own course, I’m on the way to something new, something that might even astonish me.
Kristine: Why do you think collaborative poetics is so acceptable today?
Denise: This is a stretch, but I think younger people are less concerned with “ownership” of words and images. In music, there are a lot of mash-ups. There is a sense of play and appropriation and making the old new.
Maureen: I agree with Denise. And, in addition to our young poets and editors, there are people writing and publishing poetry today who were still in the margins not long ago. When I went to grad school in the nineties, I’d rarely been assigned a book of poems by a woman or a person of color to study, so that’s what I assigned myself for the duration. Plus, with more inclusivity in publication—largely through grassroots efforts of our poets—I believe there’s been an emergence of an expansive creative spirit. That would definitely include collaborative poetics.
Finding The Third Voice
The idea of a “third voice” is not new. T.S Eliot wrote, “The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself–or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse.” Eliot claims his third voice is the most difficult voice to write. Nikki MacDonald interviewed Duhamel and Seaton, writing, “Denise and Maureen define this third voice or ‘created voice’ in the introduction as ‘a voice that is at the same time both of us and neither of us, the mysterious voice that sings between us” (Painted Bride Quarterly).
In their first book, Exquisite Politics (1997, Tia Chucha Press), what is evident in reading these poems, except for the notes back and forth, there exists one voice: a collaborative third voice. This is not Eliot’s third voice: this voice is not wholly Denise nor Maureen—a melding of two separate voices (a+b=c)—rather an entirely new voice in addition to singular voices (a, b, c). Duhamel says, “Something magical happens when we write; we find this third voice, someone who is neither Maureen nor I, and our ego sort of fades into the background. The poem matters, not either one of us” (American Poet).
Kristine: In much of your work, there is only ONE voice, the “c” voice as I have described above. Which of your poems do you think exhibits also the “a” and “b’ voices? What work allows your egos to enter the poem and why do you think this happens?
Denise: Maureen and I most recently are working on poems in which there is an (un)identified “a” and “b” voice, by which I mean we are writing back and forth in larger chunks, whole poems you could say, that blend back and forth. This is relatively new for us and it has been a pleasure! One such collaboration, “A Poem Cycle,” appears in the online journal Plume. I guess such poems do allow a bit more of the “ego” in, as though each one of us is having the other do some crazy drum soloing.
Maureen: I really enjoyed “A Poem Cycle,” which, as Denise mentioned, was a departure from our usual process. Crazy drum soloing, indeed! I think the only other time we identified ourselves as ourselves was in “Baby Democrats,” from Exquisite Politics. The material we’d accessed seemed too individual to meld. In “A Poem Cycle” we often addressed each other in the poems, as if they were letters. I loved it!
Creating the Third Wave
In Duhamel and Seaton’s collaborative poetry, the politics of gender, sex, and identity are like over-sized Legos dumped on the floor in front of the reader. As readers, we are bound to touch, fumble, and build. In Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press 1997), the poets use the now familiar form of Exquisite Corpse to render a “gendered” agenda. The exploration and raw expansion of sexuality and sexual identity is bolstered by the co-authorship of sonnet spells, prayers, and notes to each other. In their plurality, the poems are exemplary of third wave feminism. Consider this line from The Femme Diaries: “That is her favorite time in history—before she lost her virginity,/before she lost it again to a girl.” Sexuality is not narrowly defined nor is it ignored nor is it working without an agenda. In this work, sexuality has agency.
In Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002), collaboration is political and political is personal. The act of subversion of the canonical status quo is also a political act by the writer(s). Duhamel and Seaton take novels from the canon and re-write them. In this process they are creating a feminist re-memory of the historical and societal texts representative of second wave feminism that have traditionally marginalized women and folks of color. Women re-writing the space of the poetic canon places emphasis on collective memory, and collective memory is thus inclusive. In this work, “you” are no longer docile when you collaborate with the canonical texts, with each other.
Here is an excerpt of an exquisite corpse sonnet, To Kill a Mockingbird (from Little Novels, p. 12):
“Scout was the kind of girl who loved boy games.
Sometimes she’d hang upside-down from trees
and pretend people’s foreheads were chins. Seas
often churned in her belly. Race relations,
tricky as kick boxing, the perturbations
of great and little minds, played a major role.”
This passage provides a safe space to discuss “girl” politics. Both the collaboration with the text and poet-to-poet are creating a new space for women to define ourselves within the realm of poetics.
Exquisite Politics is created with the Exquisite Corpse form. As the title argues, politics, here both of democracy and of the body, are indeed worthy of special or even equal attention in our American culture. Below is an excerpt from “Exquisite Independent” (p. 36):
"Politics comes along when you least expect it,
It hides inside stories and fairy tales, fucking with the princess
who won’t cry sexual harassment.
Its TV face is big and pink and puffy,
not the mother-loved face we all voted for.
Singular or plural, politics is/are unavoidable
in the womb and schoolyard and parking lot."
Kristine: Would you use "feminist" or "political" to describe your work? Do you think collaboration is inherently feminist? Has it become “taboo” in contemporary poetics to define work as “feminist”? What is your assessment of Third Wave Feminism and contemporary poetics and how does collaboration fit in that sphere?
Denise: I grew up with a feminism that was part of pop culture…Helen Reddy’s song “I am Woman,” The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Julia, a TV sitcom which featured an African-American single mom. In the late sixties and early seventies, feminism was cool. I kid you not. The year 1975 was declared “International Women’s Year” by the United Nations. I was sixteen. I truly thought change was coming. The backlash is/was discouraging, to be sure, but I am still proud to call myself a feminist and never eschew the term. Third Wave Feminism is exciting to me because of its inclusivity, which relates to collaboration in poetry.
Maureen: I was pregnant with my second child during “International Women’s Year.” Because my first birthing experience (1970—yes, I’ve always been a slow learner) had been barbaric and because there had been so few choices for me (I was warned against breast-feeding by everyone I knew, for instance), I was determined to do exactly what I wanted the second time--natural childbirth, breastfeeding, the works--without family support. I think about my kids a lot when I write. Denise and I both write that way; we’re hyper-aware of who’s coming along. So, naturally, our work is feminist and political, even when it’s play. Collaboration fits in any sphere, don’t you think?
Teaching the Art
Both Duhamel and Seaton have taught collaboration and collage à la French Surrealism (Breton, Carrington, Magritte, Duchamp). As a student of poetry, I practiced collage as a way to put down my disconnected thoughts and not worry about lineation. Now that I teach creative writing, I see the same value for my students. Students (especially young poets) are freed from previous notions of “what poetry is” and able to gather the material form of the subconscious to create unexpected and fresh texts. When students use forms like chain games (exquisite corpse, for example, where each poet writes on a sheet of paper and that writing is concealed from the following poet to write after), they are opening themselves up, looking with a different lens. There are possibilities. Just like any other assignments, some turn out good, and some fail.
For example, in my poetry classes students will do a conflation of the Exquisite Corpse and Ford’s chain poem (borrowed from Duhamel). I will write two lines on a piece of paper, fold over the first line so the next person can only read one line, and then pass it on. This is done until all of the participants have completed a line. Sometimes I start two or three of these to keep everyone busy and garner more writing. At the end I ask a student to read the result. Of two poems, one is usually funny, exciting, and especially different from their previous ideas of poetry. Students are thrilled to see that some of the poems share similar threads.
Kristine: Do you both teach collaboration in your classes today? What do you see as the reasons for failure or success in your students’ collaborative poems? How is collaboration a good teaching tool?
Denise: I love to teach collaboration. I think, in terms of success and failure, it teaches young poets that not everything is worthy of a poem. It’s OK to write a bad poem. It’s OK to write a poem from which you can salvage one line only—or none. I am firm believer that you have to write a lot in order to push through and get to something profound and interesting. Collaboration also teaches students the element of surprise that is so vital to poetry, how a poem can turn away from a writer’s initial intent when a collaborator adds a line. When writers go back to their own solo work, I hope that they try to capture the surprise that came from their collaborator’s imagination and to avoid the expected.
Maureen: I include opportunities for collaboration in every class I teach. It’s one of my mainstays along with collage, translation, and creating a community of writers within the workshop. I tell my students that it’s not for everyone, and they can take it or leave it after the course; but they love it, and I’ve never read one of their collaborations I don’t enjoy. Truthfully. I often get to see a whole different side of my students when they write together. They do too. There’s less pressure and perfectionism, more play and a delightful energy of discovery. Like Denise, I hope they'll carry this relaxed impulse with them into their solo work; and/or, I hope they’ll continue with the duet impulse and take their collaborative show on the road.
Duhamel and Seaton outline their “Ten Commandments of Collaboration”:
1. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's art with thy whole heart.
2. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's judgment with thy whole mind.
3. Thou shalt trust thy collaborator's integrity with thy whole spirit.
4. Honor thy own voice.
5. Honor thy collaborator's spouse.
6. Thou shalt not be an egotistical asshole.
7. Thou shalt not covet all the glory.
8. Thou shalt love the same foods as your collaborator.
9. Thou shalt eat and tire at the same time.
10. Above all, honor the muse.
Kristine: In your previous musings on collaboration, you have stated the Ten Commandments of Collaboration. How would you define those today? Would anything change? Where do you see collaboration in ten years?
Denise: I have to say I think we did pretty well with these commandments. I will leave any changes of The New Testament of Collaboration to Maureen. I see collaboration only expanding over the next ten years, as identity/identities become more inclusive and fluid.
Maureen: Ditto!
Working notes
I have had several discussions with women about how we approach collaboration—are women different and more prone to collaborate? Even in my everyday life, without generalizing too much, it seems that men prefer to work independently and women turn to working together.
The intention for this piece was to garner an interview with Duhamel and Seaton. I’ve wanted to interview them for years. But, my interview questions turned into an exploration of my critical ideas of collaboration, feminism, and the third voice. Organically, the piece began to form as a hybrid critical interview; three women having a conversation collaboratively about feminism and poetry.
To read more collaborative poetry, I recommend Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press).
The intention for this piece was to garner an interview with Duhamel and Seaton. I’ve wanted to interview them for years. But, my interview questions turned into an exploration of my critical ideas of collaboration, feminism, and the third voice. Organically, the piece began to form as a hybrid critical interview; three women having a conversation collaboratively about feminism and poetry.
To read more collaborative poetry, I recommend Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press).
About the author
Kristine Snodgrass is the author of The War on Pants (JackLeg Press 2013). Her collaborative work with Neil de la Flor and Maureen Seaton can be found in the book, Two Thieves & a Liar (JackLeg Press 2012). Her solo poetry has appeared in decomP, Otoliths, Versal, 5_Trope, Big Bridge, Shampoo, Coconut, and others. She is author of the chapbooks Put the Pie Away Quietly and Without Fervor (Cy Gist Press 2012) and Fledgling Starlet (Grey Book Press 2009). Kristine is Co-director of Anhinga Press and Assistant Professor at Florida A&M University where she teaches poetry and writing and edits the literary journal, CaKe.