Welcome to Poetry Awareness

This time around, I’ve enlisted two prominent genre poets to discuss the process and rewards of collaborations. David C. Koposka-Merkel edits Dreams & Nightmares and is one of a handful of editors who both write and publish poetry. Both have published several collections and collaborated numerous times. Both are Rhysling recipients. Please note the way they’ve approached the topic. I feel like we’re all sitting together in the same room! Thanks, guys.  – Marge Simon

 

 

DARK COLLABORATIONS by Kendall Evans & David C. Kopaska-Merkel

David C. Kopaska-Merkel and I have written over 20 poems together, and we are currently at work on another.  The poems range from sf to fantasy, to dark or horror poetry.  So when Marge Simon asked if we would like to write a guest column for the HWA newsletter, about collaborative poetry, it seemed a logical topic for the two of us to tackle.  And it struck me there are a lot of things David and I do instinctively, without really talking about them–and that we might even have different ideas about the process.  For instance, the motives and strategies for writing a poetry collaboration would be a little different from those for an author writing a poem alone.  And there are rewards and frustrations that are also most  likely different from those a lone writer experiences.  So, to kick things off, I asked David about this.

* * * * * * *

That sounds like Kendall is planning to interview me about our collaborations.  Considering our collaboration as a unit, that seems almost incestuous, or something.  But that might be a pretty surprising interview, for both of us.  So to answer your questions….

Motives!?  I didn’t know I would have to reveal my motives!  As for strategy, I usually originate a collaboration the same way I start any of my poems.  However, I choose for a proposed collaboration a fragment for which I don’t see a clear path.  Once the collaboration is underway I try to write in a style that is harmonious with my collaborator’s style.  For example, I normally use a lot of punctuation but Kendall doesn’t. I take this into account when collaborating with him.

Rewards?  First, I didn’t know any of my collaborators well when we started.  So one reward is making new friends.  Second, the result is almost always a poem I would not have written by myself.  Third, these poems sometimes end up in markets I would never have tried, or would not have gotten into, with my solo stuff.

One of the frustrations in collaborating is that sometimes a poem does not go where you intend.  I may have in mind a dark, brooding, unpleasant journey toward death, and Kendall may go all perky on me.  In “The Bus Stops Here,” which was published this past January in Strange Horizons, Kendall started inserting parenthetical stanzas using the voice of a narrator with a personal interest in the outcome.  I had envisioned a more dispassionate tone until the end.  But then, this is one I would not have written by myself and it seems to have worked.  On balance, the seamy underbelly of collaboration is dwarfed by its rewards.

And now it’s your turn.

* * * * * * *

Thank you, David.  Now I guess I’d better attempt to respond to my own questions.  Motives?  It’s been said that writing is a lonely task, but a collaboration allows you to interact with another author or poet, and you get to know each other a little better in the process.  I felt that David and I, working together to create sf/fantasy/horror poems, could not help but make at least a million dollars within the first six months.

While several years have gone by and we are still somewhat shy of that mark, I’m not worried.  More to the point, I thought it would be fun and challenging to collaborate with David on some poems.  I was right about that, and it’s my opinion that the two of us work very well together.  If there are darker motives somewhere down there in my unconscious, I remain blissfully unaware of them.

Rewards?  The rewards are pretty obvious I think.  I believe I’m echoing David on this; I’m able to take part in the creation of a unique poem that I would never be able to write on my own.  Collaborating introduces an element of unpredictability into the process, and I believe that this unpredictability is a valuable contribution to creativity.  David has taken a number of our poems in directions I would not have dreamt of.

Frustrations?  When an author goes solo on a work, he can put in anything he damn well pleases, but the contents of a collaboration need a final o.k. by both parties.  If I ever suffer such minor frustrations, I remind myself that the poem is our poem, not my poem.  Sometimes, too, I’ll write what I believe it the end of the poem, and David comes along and adds two or three more stanzas afterwards.  After about 30 seconds of panic, I adjust. And whatever minimal frustrations there might be, the rewards by far outweigh them.

Now I’ll bounce this back to David and see if he has some questions of his own, or additional thoughts on the subject.

* * * * * * *

I have collaborated with several other people, but none for more than a few poems and most for only one.  I think there is a difference when a pair collaborates repeatedly.  We develop a joint oeuvre and one can look at it retrospectively as one can at one’s own solo work.  Looking back at what Kendall and I have done so far I think the benefits of our collaboration are obvious.  And I guess that brings me to one more thought; in effect, we have created a new poet.  Our collaborative work forms a corpus that neither of us would have produced alone.

People might be curious about authorship.  What we have done is to give the first author slot to whoever started a poem.  That person is also responsible for marketing the poem.  I don’t know about Kendall, but when he has started a couple in a row I feel like I really need to start one myself so as to carry my share of the load.  Over the years I haven’t counted but I guess we have been pretty close to even in this regard.

* * * * * * *

And what is the result of these collaborative efforts by David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans?  A question best answered by the poems themselves.  Two Examples follow.

OF TIME AND THE TEETH OF THE BLACK DOG

Kendall Evans and David C. Kopaska-Merkel

(First appeared in STAR*LINE, July/August 2004)

I quickly assembled from my sister’s bones

A crude representation of the Door

It showed me nothing I did not already know or own

A few white shells

A book of many pages in an unknown tongue

A wine bottle drier than my mouth

There have been far too many days

Spent with the Black Dog

Deep under the bell jar

Gravity locked

On the dark side of the lagoon

Dregs of emotion / rationality

Edging toward dementia  As if I’m sitting here

With flowers gathered from my own grave

Hollowed out lich with blackening fingertips

Or palest ghost of former selves, a parody

I seem to be stranded at creation’s ebb

Where will and flesh disintegrate

As the Dog attacks its master

Perhaps I should divine my fate

With my lover’s toenail clippings

(Painted, each-by-each, in intricate designs)

Talk this over with my Landlord

And the Prince of the Air

Propitiate fierce adversaries

On the bottom of this sea

Of sky

Or are we all trapped

In far-flung locations

Of sacred entanglement?

The windblown sand stinging our cheeks

As we lie, bound and blind

In the ruins of a still-potent abandoned city

A wolf or dog howling in the dusk

Transfixed in a wave-dashed reef

Dogfish eating our kidneys

Which re-grow every night

In none of these incarnations

Can we utter the few spells we still remember

Your car breaks down

In the middle of an endless sea of grass

We walk towards the sun until it sets

And night’s dark lips bring our oblivion, a kiss

When I wake I am already walking

And I am alone

I come upon your bones

In a dusty draw

A hot wind stirs my hair

REEFS

 

David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Kendall Evans

(First appeared in MYTHIC DELIRIUM, Summer/Fall 2002)

Beneath alien stars in unnamed constellations

coffee is brewing and bacon cooking.

This arroyo makes a comfortable camp

where I savor the scent of the fire.

Thoughts of tomorrow’s field work

     recede like the tides of a lost continent.

* * * * *

Y’londra rolls up in her blanket, while I smoke on alone.

She hates this land; her kind are so much closer to the sea.

I love it here:

     stars everywhere but where the black cliffs loom;

I can almost hear the breakers 30 meters overhead,

crashing against the stony tubes that wove this ancient house.

The planet’s modern seas are brine, small, and reef-less,

home to a million kinds of almost shrimp,

and yet no reefs at all—not now.

Our landlocked corpse:

coral structures forged

before these seas became senescent,

formed by my now-vanished species,

passive while alive, yet now grown strangely restless.

Once many, we are now one,

a single, communal intelligence;

a ghost-like ever-presence

in the desert night.

Hear us!

Strange thought-dreams, these, yet suited to my mood.

I prop my foot on a cobble, then pick it up,

turn it within starlight and moonlight.

It’s a crusty coralline head, torn loose

in an ancient storm, perhaps,

And flung to the wave-swept pavement at the reef’s toe.

Y’londra dreams about water, sunlight, warm salty winds . . .

a hissing insinuates,

sand flashes moonshine as if it were the sea,

hurrying to keep an appointment it missed

millions of years ago.

She feels at home for the first time

since coming to this dry place.

What we can summon, come!

Return to this place.

And you!  Man from another world,

dream dreams, open closed ears,

closed mind.

Listen and obey.

Can you hear the tide from another time?

It’s coming with the speed of thought.

Reflections quiver on starlit sand, telling me

to run, now, for the high ground.

The illusion is so real I reach to touch ghost waves,

plunge my hand in blood-warm water.

I kick off heavy boots, take a quick breath, and I’m swimming:

higher, higher, as the tide boils up the ancient face,

dead no more but asquirm with colors.

Fragmented strands, biochemical chaos

of those who once were, and are,

and those who might yet come to be,

the spiral-chetes of inheritance, recombinant,

contend in vortices of quantum turbulence

for sea and sky; for fire and land

Something swims toward me, a dark torpedo;

I shy away and it flashes past.

I cast my gaze down towards the camp

where I had forgotten Y’londra,

asleep in sand half an eon away.

Y’londra metamorphoses as she swims.

Her cells remember, selkie-like,

strange alien from the isles of an ocean moon;

her flesh a garment that

                    she casts away,

dons another, one more suited to this place.

Bring me coral from the oceans of your Earth,

Aeropora, Diploria, Montastrea, genetically modified

to survive here in my seas.

I will guide it and enlighten it:

tell it of my world, my history

the million miles of coral tubes I wove

and teach it how to speak

in many tongues.

The waves hurl me into the reef

gashing my flank, spilling red

ink into the rushing water.

I grasp the knobs of coral—how they sting!

and pull myself, tattered, out of the bloody froth.

My eyes are burning, and my mind. . .

Y’londra breaches, hurtles over the reef,

Kersplash-landing on the other side,

trailing bubbles in her fishy dream.

Come back!  You’ve gone too far!

I cannot recall you from these

days before I died and my ghost

mind was born.

Awake!  Go to your star boat!

Do my bidding!

I’m drenched in water,

clinging to the living reef.

The waves pound me.

There is an island not that far away,

I could cross the lagoon with ease,

but something swims there now

and may be hungry.

* * * * * * *

A shark-like brute (parallel evolution,

skeleton all of cartilage)

dreams of land, of walking in the air,

and wonders: who would want to leave the sea?

A whiteness rolls upon the beach,

carried by the tide, and stares,

naked under empty sky.

An underwater mountain (its composite minerals

accrued like a seashell’s)

Strains its food, lives a myriad lives,

And does not dream.

Elektrik Milk Bath Press ($50 for collections) – http://elektrikmilkbathpress.com/submissions

Liquid Imagination (sem-pro) – http://issue.liquid-imagination.com/submission-guidelines/

New Myths (pro-rates) – http://www.newmyths.com/

Shock Totem (pro rates) – http://www.shocktotem.com/guidelines/