Daniela Elza
After immigrating to Canada in 1999, and moving to Vancouver in 2003, I went to Word on the Street for the first time. I stopped by a book table. Overwhelmed with the choices, I asked the man minding the table for recommendations. I wanted poetry books, but didn’t know where to begin in this new city I had moved to. I wanted to connect to the poetry community. Without much hesitation he said: “This is one of my favourites,” and added something to the effect that it was unusual. He handed me Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei by Pain Not Bread (Brick Books, 2000).
I started reading and was both exhilarated and frustrated that I couldn’t tell who wrote which poem. Pain Not Bread was a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. On the one hand, I had to keep reminding myself this is a collaboration, on the other I delighted in the fact. I fell in love with the idea of giving up the I to create something egoless, something of a community of minds (in this case between the three minds writing the book, and those ancient minds of then). I was inspired by the layers of commentary within the poems on language and its relationship to the world, where words are like fish traps, but also where a single word can fill the air with birds.
For a while I referred to that book as my poetry bible. It made me pay closer attention to how I get inspired, and by whom. I began to put the quotes/epigraphs not in the footnotes, not at the back of the book, but in the righthand corner of the page with the poem, keeping those who visit me, who I learn from, resonate with, or haunt me, visible in the intimate room of the page. The poet’s lament that writing is lonely takes the status of a distant myth when we look at the experience this way. It is to say we are not acknowledging the wealth of conversations we are in. It is to say we are not reading, or giving a nod to each other in passing. I strive to remember this each time I sit alone at my desk and despair.
I began to think deeper about how it gets harder and harder to draw lines between what is yours and what is mine. How, perhaps, when we put our name on a book all we are saying is: I was here. And I gave it these words. It is a courtesy to acknowledge the conversations we are enmeshed in, the ideas we are contributing to.
The active nature of collaborating on a poem intrigued and mesmerized me. I had written papers in collaboration, not poems. Of course, we have found poetry and ekphrasis, different ways of working with what is found in texts, in images, on the air. Still, this is a passive, mostly one-way engagement. I wanted to write poems in active collaboration. Where there is give and take, where the space is navigated by two, where we have to finish each others’ thoughts and lines. What kind of openness to the other was needed for such an act? What kind of trust? What challenges lurked there? I kept hearing how impossible that is, how a poem is such an individual and private act, which it is. But it’s also dangerous when people tell me something is impossible. Poetry does not know the word impossible. It is already impossible, what poetry does. That has not stopped us from writing poems. I could not settle for impossible. Impossible is not part of poetry’s vocabulary.
Since 2009 I have written poems in collaboration. I extended the collaborations later to include dance, music, and visual art. This is reminiscent of the writing act itself—where I have to loosen my grip on what I am writing in order to feel the reward and ecstasy of creating something new. And just like a relationship, or friendship, it might not always be successful.
Have there been failures? Yes, if we think a few poems went nowhere, if we consider how some visions did not align. But those have been too few to speak of. And the ideas are recyclable and leave an infinitesimal carbon footprint. This is a practice in surrender, in turning attentively toward another. It is a practice in letting go, an intense listening, a transcendence of sorts. It is a risk too, of course.
I didn’t pick my collaborators for their reputations or accomplishments as writers. Sometimes they picked me. I wanted to step aside from the cult culture, from the celebrity, from the centres of power. I allowed the process to be organic, to play out as it may. I didn’t just want to work with writers I admire, I wanted to work with people I admire; people who might not call themselves poets, or are just emerging. There is poetry in each of us, if we choose to attend to it.
Over the course of a decade, poems were written in cafes, on jetties, on napkins, in emails, in bird sanctuaries, on PiratePad, in restaurants over borscht, and a few even began on Facebook. I am gathering them into a book. As unique as each encounter was, there was one thing in common: the willingness to play, experiment, let yourself go, send the ego out for a walk, and tangle your thoughts with another. “Like a brain in the gut, the collaborative process challenges the ego,” say Dana Gurthrie Martin and Nathan Moore in their intro to that mutating the signature issue, where the first batch of poems was published in 2009.
In each case my thoughts and process changed depending on the person I was writing with. We worked for the success of the poem. Sometimes I felt I was pulling, and sometimes I felt I was the one being pulled. After each collaboration I invited each writer to think about the process, and to record their thoughts, challenges, and surprises: an insight, an aside to the poem, a little glimpse into what unsettles, delights, disappoints, or thrills. It’s harder to observe ourselves as writers, when no one interferes with our process. Over time the mystery of poetry became less about the poet, and more about the process through which we compress words into ideas and perceptions. I wanted to talk about that. More importantly, I wanted to demonstrate it. The process with each poet was unique, intense, and intimate. Sometimes almost scarily so.
For some it was a welcomed break. For some one poem was enough. Others came back for more, having tasted the feeling of welding two minds briefly in a word, image, thought exchange. Some stayed longer for more sips, or a fuller drink. Sometimes we were just too busy, even if the desire was there to keep going.
Questions began to emerge: Who owns the poem? How and where do we submit such work? In a culture where mine-mine-mine is the mantra, ownership is the law, and the individual is god, this, of course, is a troublesome question. I wanted to shake these ideas up, mess with them. Artists constantly sign their name to a product, and do not always acknowledge that we are all in a kind of collaboration, learning, borrowing, and sometimes plainly stealing. We’re constantly engaging with each other, be it in the pages of books, or banter over drinks. The poems here belong to each of us, and to both at the same time. These poems mess with the idea of ownership and property. Democracy itself plays out in a small way within the small room of the poem. The book is now looking for a home, but even publishers have not been too sure what to do with it, even if they have given praise and encouragement.
My interest in walking side by side with another is not just pedagogical, but also ecological. For a long time I’ve been interested in the We, in a multiplicity of voices, a kind of folding into each other—a conversation that requires active participation. This is even more relevant today when lines that connect us are truncated, and more lines keep being drawn with the purpose of dividing us. As this project gained momentum it acquired new purpose: to push on these tendencies, as I extend more lines of connections.
I am grateful for the time each and every one of the writers spent tinkering with words, fiddling with lines, allowing poems to come into being as they will. Even if the poems are not always perfect, we were better for writing them together. The poems taught us not just patience.
In the current moment of political, economic, environmental and social turmoil where we keep asking each other How do we weather through?, What can one person do?, this was a small answer—a sanctuary of connection, community, frivolity, and joy. A place that keeps reminding me that we love to play amidst our insanely busy lives, we love to be in conversation with one another, we love when someone gives us permission, we like to feel we deserve it, and it’s good for our hearts and minds.
Novelist Abha Dawesar says: “The digital world cannibalizes time, and in doing so threatens the completeness of ourselves. It threatens the flow of love.” I want to encourage this flow of love. I want to facilitate the rhythms of thoughts on the page and see them take shape in our commitment to creating something together. To think with each other, to dream with each other, even do the impossible. This kind of intimacy seems lost most days. It’s hard to accomplish over texting even with our closest people, or in front of screens that sever us from ourselves, claim every last drop of us into a techno-cloud that makes money for someone somewhere preying on our need to connect.
The pandemic exacerbated all that. More and more we are discovering the consequences and cost of the ruthless fragmentation of our thoughts, feelings, homes, and focus. The loneliness epidemic is real. The shattering of commonly shared truths is further fragmenting and segregating and dividing us. These are precursors to conflict.
Another piece that stayed with me from Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei book appears in the Afterword:
If (as one of the poems says) for the poets of the Tang Dynasty, “the use and reuse of traditional Chinese poetry” represented a way of allying themselves with the long tradition of that poetry, and, at the same time, “honouring the masters”, one could equally well see, in that combination of fondness and hubris, an admission that it is impossible to fully enter a text (even one’s own), no matter the language or century. As the subtitles to the poems (perhaps repetitively) insist, it is nonetheless possible, through reading and re-reading, to find a place for oneself, to stand, as it were, as if perpetually stuck, in some doorway which opens out onto those great works.
I found this to be a courteous way of addressing poetry. I fell in love with the idea that it is impossible to fully enter a text (even one’s own). And that perhaps our task is to stand on the threshold of the poem and keep looking in and out at the same time, and each time anew. How in the act of collaborating with another we are doing just that and becoming even more aware of this fact. Standing on each other’s doorsteps and extending invitations to step over each other’s thresholds.
An encounter, ever so brief as in the duration of a poem, or a serendipitous conversation on the bus, can link me right back to the centre, to this poetic space, a small moment of grace and hope. Where I’m reminded again what nurtures, what feeds, what creates, and reinvents us. I want to “belong to the nation of small things” as Rachael Boast put it in a poem in her collection Hotel Raphael. A mysterious place, and yet, as familiar as home.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” says Mary Oliver. Here was one way to briefly pay intense attention together, and to grow our devotion. This kind of work is in the service of life, and in return, it is life giving.
