Saints of Hysteria:
A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry.
Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad (eds.)
(Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2007).
394 pages. Paperback: $19.95, ISBN # 978-1-93368-21-4.
Reviewed by Tom C. Hunley
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If I were to teach a class (or a unit) on collaborative poetry, this would definitely be the textbook. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad have done a fantastic job of gathering the best collaborative poetry written in English over the past half century. Additionally, they coaxed many of our nation’s best poets into producing new collaborations to include in the anthology. If you’re at all interested in writing collaborative poetry or learning about the various techniques employed in collaborations – techniques that, in many cases, could be profitably adapted for use in experimental single-author poems – everything you need is here: chain poems, exquisite corpses, syllogisms, echo poems, centos, renga, somonkas, renku, and more.
I’m fascinated by the composition processes of these collaborating poets, so I really appreciate the fact that the editors coaxed process notes out of most of the contributors. Some of them are merely quirky, such as the note from Eileen Myles about her collaboration with Anne Waldman. It ends: “I did want to have sex with [Anne], so I asked her on the typewriter and that was the end of the poem.” But others are more revealing, such as the note by Guillermo Castro & Ron Drummond in which they explain the rules of their own variation on the Exquisite Corpse, which they call “Delicious Lamb.” And others articulate what poets stand to gain from this kind of exercise, such as the note from Jane Miller, about her collaboration with Olga Broumas: “…the wonderful world of self-effacement. Everyone should consider disappearing for a while into another voice! Very liberating! …. I now revise more freely, and the process has become more pleasurable, less self-conscious.”
While these poets’ collaborative processes are fascinating, unfortunately, often their finished products leave much to be desired. Often the poems feel like exercises, like practice, and I don’t enjoy watching athletes training or musicians practicing nearly as much as I enjoy watching them compete and perform. In her December 2009 column in The Writer, Marilyn Taylor writes, “Too often, co-authored poems degenerate pretty quickly into jokes, games or good-natured mutual taunting. Nine times out of 10, collaborative poems can’t quite rise above the vaguely inharmonious elements of the two different voices.” I wouldn’t go that far, but a lot of these poems look like they were much more fun to write than they are to read. For example, here are a few lines from the twenty-six line excerpt of “Vacationland 2” by Carson Brock and James Brock:
Goodbye Atomic City.
Goodbye Boise.
Goodbye Couer d’Alene and Caldwell.
Goodbye Dworshak Dam.
Goodbye Eden.
This is a short excerpt of section VIII (“Goodbye Idaho!”) of a poem that apparently plods along in this tedious fashion, replicating the tediousness of travel, I suppose. I don’t mean to single out Brock and Brock; a lot of the poems in the book are just as unsatisfying. Sometimes the process notes reveal that the poets don’t take collaborations as seriously as they take their other poems. For example, a note by David Lehman begins “My son Joe Lehman, then ten years old, and I collaborated on ‘The Bus’ one April afternoon in 1994.” If a contributor’s note in a literary journal said, “The poet is ten years old,” I would likely skip the poem, puzzled about why the editors had selected it.
It seems to me that most of the collaborative energy in most of these poems went into invention. What’s missing is the kind of vigorous revision work that these poets put into the poems that they write by themselves. There are a few happy exceptions, such as “The Secret” by Cindy Goff and Jeffrey McDaniel. In the process note, McDaniel details the painstaking revision methods that he and Goff employed, and the poem is, as a result, one of the high points in the book. Here are the first and sixth (final) stanzas:
When you were sleeping on the sofa,
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams.
I don’t wish I was in your arms.
I just wish I was pedaling a bicycle
toward your arms.
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Tom C. Hunley is Poemeleon's Book Review Editor. Read his full bio here.