I’M
STILL IN BURLESQUE
with
Meaghan Acosta
Shaggy boots wiggle
from
underneath the
desultory conclusion.
Freely Horowitz plies
constables into
constricted aortas,
thereby withholding
vital persecutions. Who
can blame
Horowitz? Who shunned
Horowitz’s
elation? Why Horowitz?
The ragamuffin muffled
rags,
thereby unruffling
snuffling
constables. Who saw
the jagged eyebrow’s
raise
tumble promiscuous
nuns?
Nuns always defer to
women
with ladies dangling
upright
from clever
autobiographical clashes
with unending desires.
What is tumbling from
pillars
depicting nuance?
Whenever
pioneers crush fair
prices,
none of us resist.
It
would seem that the benefits of literary collaboration, in part, is in how the process,
when done properly, can’t help but force a writer to broaden their range. In Our Days in Vaudeville (Toronto ON:
Mansfield Press, 2013), Cobourg, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross has collected a book’s worth of collaborations in the short poem he’s
composed over the past couple of years with twenty-nine different
collaborators. His list of collaborators includes poets well-known and
emerging, as well as some who really haven’t published previously, and include some
expected and unexpected names, such as Mark Laba, Cameron Anstee, Gary Barwin,
Alice Burdick, Michael Dennis, Dani Couture, Jay MillAr, Peter Norman, Hugh Thomas, Paul Vermeersch, Sandra Ridley and Jaime Forsythe. As Ross writes in
his introduction, “This book contains collaborations with more than two dozen
poets, all of whom are also friends of mine. […] Sometimes we write a word at a
time, or two; sometimes a line at a time or a stanza; sometimes we just write
for a while and then let the other take over.” In an introduction to the
collection, Ross discusses his history of collaborating, both generally and
very specifically, working through his lengthy collaborative histories with
Mark Laba and Gary Barwin, to more recent projects, and commentaries on a
number of the pieces included in this book. The introduction opens:
Collaboration has been
part of my practice since I was a little kid. My first collaborator was Mark
Laba, who lived in a triplex on the other end of Pannahill Road, where we both
grew up in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighbourhood. As children, Mark and I collaborated
on a cotton boll weevil cemetery; on drawings on sheets of cardboard we pulled
from our dads’ laundered shirts; on Man
from U.N.C.L.E. scenarios in my backyard that inevitably included us
jumping repeatedly off the back porch into the grass.
In the experimental high school we both attended—the Alternative
and Independent Study Program (now Avondale Alternative)—we began our literary
collaborations. Inspired by Joe Rosenblatt, bill bissett and the Four Horsemen,
we began creating sound poetry together. At sixteen, in the mid-1970s, we were
doing readings at our school, and downtown at the Axeltree Coffee House in
Trinity Church. We also wrote stories together, on yellow foolscap fed through
a manual typewriter. A decade later, in the computer era, or maybe it was just
the electric-typewriter era, Mark and I wrote a novel together, The Pig Sleeps. Broadly speaking, I provided
plot and Mark provided the most bizarre similes in the history of Canadian
literature.
For
whatever reason, literary collaboration has long been treated as a kind of
parlour trick, an amusement that exists outside and yet alongside what might be
called ‘serious literature,’ even to the point of collaborative works ignored
outright in favour of a particular author’s works. Over the past decade-plus there
has been an enormous amount of collaborative poetry to appear in print in
Canada, including: Christine Stewart and David Dowker’s Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013); Douglas Barbour and Sheila M. Murphy’s Continuations
(Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012); Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s Sybil Unrest
(Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2008; New Star Books, 2013), Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Mouré’s Expeditions of a Chimaera
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009); Gary Barwin’s Frogments from the Frag Pool (with derek beaulieu; Toronto ON: The Mercury Press,
2005), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory
Betts; BookThug, 2011), and Franzlations: the Imaginary Kafka Parables (with Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas; New Star,
2011); Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe
(Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) and update
(Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010); George Bowering and Ryan Knighton’s Cars (Toronto ON: Coach House Books,
2001); Peter Norman and Stephen Brockwell’s chapbook-length sonnet-collaboration Wild Clover Honey and the Beehive: 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review
Press, 2004), as well as The Capilano Review’s “Collaborations” issue (3.4; Winter 2008). One could also mention derek beaulieu and Neil Hennessey’s TransCanada Research Team, various ongoing works
by jwcurry, earlier works by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery’s Toronto Research Group, Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie’s sound-collaborations, and sound-poetry
groups The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound, as well as an earlier collaboration
between Stewart, Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang produced as The Barscheit Horse (Hamilton, ON:
Berkeley Horse, 1993). Given just how prevalent the form (or the act) has
become, shouldn’t collaborative works be taken more seriously? Ross, in his
introduction, continues:
I recognize that this book is insane. And I think it’s
the second book of its kind ever published in Canada—one poet collaborating
individually with a couple dozen friends. (The first was If I Were You, by Ron Padgett and twelve collaborators, published
by my Proper Tales Press.) For me, it’s a dream book. It appeals to both the
reckless experimenter and the commie collectivist in me. There’s beauty in
here, and beautiful terribleness. There’s adventure and head-butting and
collegiality.
Mostly, there is the vaudevillian unexpected—both in the
creation of these pieces, and in the reading—and the vaudevillian eclecticism: I’m
a devout believer in the incohesive poetry collection. My twenty-nine brave and
wonderful collaborators and I have done our thing: now we’re sliding the book
across the table to you.
I
know that there was a point during the late 1990s and early 00’s that Toronto poet Stephen Cain was working on ten collaborations with ten different poets,
including Jay MillAr, Sharon Harris and Christian Bök. Each of these works were
said to be deliberately constructed with entirely different structures. I know
a number of these works were completed, and produced as small chapbooks, with
the idea that once the ten works were completed, Cain would attempt to get the
entire manuscript published by a trade publisher. I know that the separate full-length prose collaboration between Cain and MillAr, Double Helix (The Mercury Press, 2006), saw print, at least. But whatever
happened with this other project?
DOWNSIZED
with
Jay MillAr
The sun enters the room
like a blade of music.
An earwig crawls up the
walls: a sudden aneurysm.
Whoever invented this
chair must perform miracles—
Levitation may
transpire in any cave. It’s easy to forget
A quietly brainwashing
trigger finger stuck
In the wall-hole that
holds the lost smile.
See how things look
from down here? That motion
Shakes spiders from the
ceiling, where they’ve
Been reminding the
other insects
Of tedious obligations.
But in the dark pantry
The organic
environmental babies count
Their bundles of cash;
their endless one two
Three fours keep time
for the day’s meaning
Some things are almost
too big for the sum
Of their parts to
comprehend.
As
with what Stephen Cain appeared to attempt in his seemingly-abandoned collaborative
manuscript, one of the strengths of the works in Our Days in Vaudeville is in its variety. For anyone familiar with
Ross’ numerous individually-authored trade collections of poetry, his “voice”
in this collection is quite clear, yet amorphous, as the poems progress. There is
something of Ross the shape-changer to the collection as well, allowing
different facets of his own work to shine through, depending upon whom he might
be working with. The shifts throughout this collection are quite subtle, with
some more overt, as the sound and score of his own writing weaves, eddys and
returns, while bringing in structures and other elements familiar to each
participating collaborator. In the poem “DOWNSIZED,” composed with Jay MillAr, one
can see both authors on equal terms, managing a collaborative space in which they
do balance remarkably well, and yet the poem would have been impossible by
either individually. In the six collaborative poems included composed with
Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, one can clearly see the conversations about writing
and form between the two, written in straight lines and straightforward patter.
In the collaborations with Gary Barwin, they eschew the direct statement so
prevalent throughout the rest of the collection for a more fragmented, even
choppy, line, breaking down phrases into a series of staccatos. What is
interesting in this collection comes in part from a familiarity with the names
within, and seeing how some pieces might have been triggered from conversation,
or a prevalence for a particular kind of stanza or line, watching each of the participants
share the tools of their individual practice in different ways.
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