Kevin McLellan & Sue Nacey/Karen Lepri
Kevin McLellan: All of the collaborations in this collection, except for one, were created by playing email tag: one started by emailing a fragment, say 2-3 lines, to the co-collaborator; the co-collaborator added a few lines and/or altered information (deleted or changed words or lines, adjusted line breaks, changed word order, eliminated or added punctuation, etc ) and emailed this to the creator of the original fragment; the creator of the original fragment added a few lines and/or altered information and emailed this to the co-collaborator; and so forth and so on until both agreed that they had written through the poem. Revision occurred during and after the creation of the first draft, and through this email tag method.
What I find to be most exciting about the art of collaboration is the heightened level of individual and shared accountability (while creating the collaboration and afterward) for a creation born out of more than one imagination, and that this knowledge of accountability, a memory, exists somewhere in the mind when one also creates alone.
Karen Lepri: The collaboration process, for me, is an ideal of what I want my solitary writing process to look like. Ideally, when you are writing alone, there is more than one of you, and the rules are, you can't judge any of them--what they come up with, the direction they go, the insanity that bubbles forth--you just keep writing it. Through collaboration, you are more likely to revise via addition than subtraction, a process by which a poem grows richer not more starved, as with typical revision. There is also the strange tension between feeling more responsible for what you write, because you want to live up to or impress your collaborator, and feeling less responsible for what you write, because really no one will ever know who wrote what. In the end, that line blurs for you the poet as well. You take credit for everything and nothing--you lose the process by the process and in the end remains the poem, ready to be experienced anew even by its makers.
Sue Nacey: The process of collaborating was for me a process of letting go. When Kevin invited me to collaborate on a poem I was in the midst of a serious illness and writing very little. A part of me felt so cognitively impaired that I questioned my ability to do it. And at the same time, I feared the lack of complete control of the poem. Perhaps I feared the lack of control illness was creating in every aspect of my life. When Kevin first sent words for the poem my first thought was damn, I don't know what to do with this. I lived with Kevin's words for several days and then sat at the computer determined to do something. Anything. And when words came, so came a sense of peace. Writing is always about throwing oneself into the dark. With a collaboration, I couldn't possibly already know where the poem as going, what it's ultimate tone would be. All I could do was throw some lines, an image, some new sounds, out there, and trust that Kevin would catch them. Suddenly I wasn't alone in that dark, which freed me to go deeper into it. By the time the poem was finished, I could no longer tease out of it my parts and Kevin's parts. We so naturally built on each other's ideas, words, revisions, that there were no longer individual parts. And this seems to me a fundamental of poetry. Not only is it a conversation with oneself, but a conversation with our shared past, our shared human emotions. A good poem becomes part of a person, carried with them and changed. The poem is changed and the person is changed. And that was my experience with writing a poem with another person. It changed and changed within me with every unexpected turn Kevin created, and by the end every piece felt like the crucial right direction.
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The Distance from Brooklyn
to Boston Takes Four Hours
to Bridge as Long as the Bus
Doesn’t Burst into Flames.
by Sue Nacey and Kevin McLellan
You still frequent the locality
of of and and
you placed on layaway. This
repeated remapping
of borders between you and
necessity. How you've had to
change your worn face
as if remembering yourself
from now backwards
or rather an attempt to. Repeat
after me: irony is worn thin
like the skin inside your lip
and either everything is
coincidence— or nothing is. And
who are you, you
say, to make rules
when there are none.
And there is no way
out of and — and
the strongest shape of you
that remains is the back of
your head as you
disappear
into the crowd.
Taking off the boots
by Karen Lepri and Kevin McLellan
Who let lasso loose? You are lasso.
Will hang yourself when the hemp
field is torched by a black-hood,
not from a Corona bottle & sun.
You are lasso hovering just before
the other one hoods. A drip snout,
a wet nib from a wrung knot & not
sorry to undo the fray. You ask
for assistance, but the tumbleweed
are banked, mending themselves
against the far fence. Kick small
stones. Kick dust. You capture
prickly pear arms for your jam-
maker he-wife who stirs
with one eye pinned to the wild
horse-heath, dark as he, part
wanton & bottled, in the lasting
coil and braid of their hovel.
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Kevin McLellan has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Exquisite Corpse, Hunger Mountain, Interim, Southern Humanities Review and others. His chapbook Round Trip, a collaborative series with numerous poets, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens (March, 2010). Kevin teaches creative writing at the University of Rhode Island in Providence, yet he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Karen Lepri is completing her M.F.A. in poetry at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2006, 42opus, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and Center: A Journal of Literary Arts. She is an assistant poetry editor for Inertia and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Sue Nacey's poetry has appeared in Conduit, RealPoetik, Salamander and Inertia Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a memoir.