But collaboration is also a question of conformity. What normally goes on
here, Dialogue, is not collaboration because it doesn't demand a sinking of
the individual psyche in a common process. It's a confrontation with a
different brain, as the best poetry is to the reader. Collaboration is some
kind of merging of brains. I think it's wrong then to make anyone who does
not wish to collaborate in collaboration feel they are being egotistic. The
society we live in is increasingly conformist and I look upon it as one of
the functions of poetry to resist that and re-assert difference which is
quite different from asserting selfhood.
After all why is it that the most succesful poetical collaborations (such
as Bean Spasms) usually end up being humorous or light verse? Because only
at that level can the individual spirit be subsumed into a collaborative
language, eh, don't you think? Anti-seriousness was a fundamental condition
of the whole second-generation New York poetry business.
In mediaeval Japan on the other hand the contract by which poetry was
recognised was very strict and collaboration was enabled according to
rules within absolute conformity. Each collaborator wrote something
complete in itself and the whole accrued on a principle of additionality. A
renga is more like a linked anthology than a collaborative single text.
I find it very interesting by the way how the Simmers cut-up takes a
(affectionately humorous I thought) parody of minimal-engagement language
(flat, emotionally confined, self-hypnotised, close to autism) and by
disjointing it turns it into Gertrude Stein. It says a lot about the
literary climate of bohemian 1920s Paris.
What happened to Summer while I was away? Did someone collaborate it?
PR//
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