Collaboration: North and South

We’re always writing Haiku. One morning I’ll wake up with a headache and I’ll email Shafer the line “Half a percocet.” Half a percocet would more then fix me up, and I wish I had one. An hour later, he’ll arrive at work and send back, “later I’ll fill my tumbler,” and I’ll be frustrated because here he’s just introduced a tumbler into a perfectly good poem about percocet. I’ll make some coffee, wash the breakfast dishes, and write back:

Half a percocet
later I’ll fill my tumbler
with cool garden air.

And back and forth. We’ll do two or three more haiku if I’m working at the computer that day, and maybe most of a sonnet, or a pantoum. We tend to write formal poems in groups of twelve, usually trying out forms we’re not too familiar with. Some of the series are better then others. The pantoum series was, to say the least, not entirely successful.

Now, it’s been nearly nine years since Shafer and I lived down the hall from each other at Emerson College where for a long time, as he puts it, “we were plagued by the classic college-boy paradox of at once taking ourselves very seriously and seriously indulging ourselves.” I met Shafer during a formal introductory talk for everyone on our floor of the world famous Charlesgate Hotel. We were told to bring some object that was dear to us and talk about it. It wasn’t a bad idea. I held up a picture of William Burroughs I’d cut out of RE/SEARCH magazine and framed. I talked about how I’d discovered the beats in High School, how much they meant to me. Later that evening, Shafer knocked on my door.

We kept in touch and sometime in late 1999, Shafer called me from the concrete slab of his porch in Houston (which he’s since decamped for Brooklyn) and we started talking—for some reason—about representations of Ophelia in art. I thought she was overplayed. “Yeah,” Shay said, “She may as well be an angel.” I thought it sounded like the first line of a poem and, as we pushed it around for the next couple of hours, it eventually became one:

(click here)

Neither Shafer or I read much in the way of beat literature these days, or the sixties stuff that grew out of it, but since our creativity was separately nurtured there, I think both of us know it’s a place we can come back to. It probably formed an early bedrock for our collaborations, although I’d like to think we’ve buried it pretty deep.

Beat influence caused some problems early on, though. It’s hard to write collaborative poems without any rules, and unless there’s a form to fall back on, the work can get sloppy. Some of the earlier poems had nice titles, “The Mother Goddess Measures Mercy,” and “Locked Smith,” but they were poor literature. Finally, one of us (Shafer I think) picked an arbitrary form: four stanzas, four lines each, one sentence—more or less—per stanza. Neither of us specialize in strict-form when we work independently, but for joint work, it was just what we needed.

The bad poems arrive
inoffensively, alone,
familiar as this room
friendly as fire.

It’s probally fair to say that we’re both good collaborators, in the sense that we know when to get our elbows out of the way. Writing is lonely. When my friend Kevin asks me to write him a short comic, I jump at it. This gives me the opportunity to call Kevin long distance, talk about art, and consider it work. Shafer’s recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a collaborative poem he wrote with his friend Jamison. Both Jamison and Kevin are people that Shafer and I have known, respectively, for at least a dozen years. I’ve tried collaborations with more recent friends and, I have to admit, find less success. I might even theorize the most useful thing is to know someone well enough that there’s just enough distance between you to feed an electrical current, but not so much that it becomes lost—or worse—weakened.

Shafer and I work over email nearly every day. It doesn’t take long to write a line or two, in response to whatever shows up in the IN box, and it’s a way to keep at it, stay in practice. As Shay says, “even if I’m struggling on a piece of poetry of my own, I can always add a line or two a day to one of our collaborations, and it keeps my thoughts on poetry, maybe helps me find the solution to my problem a little faster.”

We’ll be writing ghazels, one line each, and one of us will start off:

What’s on the boat? What’s a strong image line? What’s a good counterpoint?

We challenge each other, pose small problems:

Of all the stanzas we come up with, some of them may be cut (like the couplet above), or changed around. The chances are, even after we title and edit the poem, passing it back and forth, arguing over punctuation, it’s not going to see the light of day.

We’ll have decided how long it’s going to be before we started, and what the form or rhyme scheme it’ll be; so we’ll know when it’s done, and we’ll move on to another right away. I imagine we must have at least a hundred poems by now, and in a few years, I hope we have hundreds more. Maybe some good ones.

John Cotter and Shafer Hall’s collaborations have appeared or are forthcoming from taint, Snow Monkey, Can We Have Our Ball Back, failbetter, and Shampoo Poetry. John collaborated with artist Kevin Caron on a short comic book, which will appear in the Spring 3rd Bed. Shafer’s collaborative poem with Jamison Driskill will appear in this Winter’s Lit.

[ j.cotter@att.net ]

Shafer Hall

[ shaferhall@hotmail.com ]