The Missoula Collective
In February 2007, 12 writers in the University of Montana’s MFA program gathered anonymously in a live Webchat environment. These poems are constructed from line fragments selected from the chat transcript, arranged, and collectively revised by the 12 writers. The goal was to create composite works from the interaction of multiple writers, dissolving the boundaries of identity and ownership via Cyberspace-enabled anonymity.
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The Telling is a Psychosomatic Symptom
There was one boy, whose therapist, when he found a sixteen-year-old girl took her—
What kid would invent this story?
Later he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s.
When he saw the girl wave from the next building over,
the idea was to kill the president, an idea
that allowed him to leave his body
for therapy, which is practically a social occasion.
The idea of holding hands, for example,
without falling down.
No one questioned his veracity or his
narrativity or the God he conjured, whom he hated,
to tell the story as it emerged? My God, he built
his life around it. He jammed an ink pen
into his skin, hoping to leave
a tiny, beautiful blue prick. Then the skin
would heal over and be left
with a relic. Then he could drive offf
without paying. My God, what quantity
exceeds the allowable? When a dog’s running jump
sends it over the picket fence. Nose grazed
on the tip of the picket fence. Black spot
of a passing bird picked off the picket fence. The boy
was sick, there is no doubt about it. He built
his life around the sickness,
depositing sickness into the bank of his mouth.
The boy said I collected many flowers in the fields
and I am not changing.
The therapist was teaching the boy how to take flowers from the field,
transcribing the affair between
boy, field & flowers. The boy crumpled into his yard quilt:
I am not rich. I am never greedy.
Thus the narrative was begun. Thus the docile ranks of the
admitted illness, the admitted undone.
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The Missoula Collective is an anonymous assemblage of 12 writers from the University of Montana’s MFA program. Another of the poems derived from the Missoula Collective project, “Hereditary,” appeared in 580 Split #10.