EDITOR: I'm happy to announce I have friends with adventurous souls - in this instance Sheila Murphy from USA and Doug Barbour from Canada (How strangely history has carved the world up!). These two are exceptional poets and prolific in their individual careers - yet have found time since 2000 to collaborate, a project appropriately named Continuations. We are privileged to read some of the continuing work below, plus a word or two about the process after-words.
Continuations XCIX:
find a way through mapped
or unmapped trajectories a
passage
way
beyond all sales
or under glass promotions just
walk
beneath
refracted sun or rain
wind or whether blown out of doors
in a fugue state walking
to
another face
a
wreath around darkness
through
doorways
map-less toward
mere
weather as a way
through reflection
sur
face
off ice or glass
family romance as culture
convenience stored
too long in sub
stance frozen there
cyclical venting of
one
or another rose
sketched
in the rough
a lass familiar with
chiseled
surface
strikes a zen pose
penned
those petals etch
each parse of page
a
kind of black
announcement means
not ends will flower
on
each blank(et)ed page
age does not repeat
a
moment
parsing
from petal
to point toward another
evening page upon
pacing
without end
less pulp more purple
(p)rose of taxing
tales
turned or des pointes
a dance of intellectualized
machinery a fake or
deke
un(der)written there
people drink a big gulp
beverage including slurpy
or
rose-tinted slush
lax tasteless test (less mind
ful
than on point
of
flow(e(r)ring)
a pointed rejoinder a fleur de
lies less loose lips
than looped flips flops
fall
into the red
slip(per)s sunk
in
thick piles (pilloried
slippage lops off
variations
on a them(e)
devotion: read to me
pooled cinch of an idea whose
time treads
upon
(what) lies (ahead)
of willowy surfaces
bread and circumstances w(h)ine
read & consumed pledge
seen
and returned be
neath a brow beat and
battered per
cussed as idea logged
sumatra flavored morning
rows
of succulents subsumed
under milder weather legible
dissent
here versus
the antithesis of mesh afar contagious
and not quite about ideas
read or ready to materialize
as
through a mesh starkly
mirrored thought less reflection
wind
ruffled trees bent
over the smallest white
caps tugged
begging
flecks of matter bend
as
treason chastens conscience
while
over a stark surface
wind roars as if to scrub
free
the thought of
bigger spheres of influence
affluence argues in fluent
tongues of fire(d)
burnt
out and turned down
a kind of fear as pain(ed)
expression(ism
harsh song (or soup) lines
a painting of fear collects
no
lines tongues merely spoken
run
parallel to the story
in flames upon the screen
removal
differs from art
with
nothing left before it’s there
northern borders from nada can
nothing
arrive a nod
ding head as empty of thought
as
awareness an old
rhetoric redoubled still
empty minded (the s(t)ore
bowl offered
hereby
configuring
pure
no
thingness arriving
without wares
thus believing unawares
as empty does fills with
nots too tied to
ever
unravel
plots to ride new
narrative twists turn
coated
lead(ers) to fools
id est lots
of wind
replenishing
lots of wind as if
a
scarce commodity too
constant
a story
constantly told
a mouth too wide deep
in
a big muddy
argument unsalvaged
the
cut cost cast
aside
a wide
and
winding read
dumb luck plummets
cults
of net yield(ing)
on-side
benefaction
to entrap the needy in false
arguments
read
under a mud surface
such a falling off but
ton from what push
pull
of power rep
resented as ever (since
sense
says solo
flight alone will do will to
speckle a fleet of ushers
in their pent-up phases
of severance using pin
light
lo and be
hold a number well done
the
wow factor hovering
a new ear all legislated hear all
never
listening listing
to starboard stars bored
st(r)ay
thought full
load of in (or ex)
cremental
logic systems
thought through stories
boarded
up to keep
light
in and out
stars reach pores
fill
outer surface
with
like slate
date(d) narrative slush a
slippery scope out(ed)
and
a way too far
to tell sell fell
or
full fury of
oil(y) fired
sincerity
although and yes
a
way to through
sails
or
species in or
outer
fields lush with
selves
~
Comments on Collaboration:
With collaboration, there is an even broader sense of subject, that is, less of tightly controlled ‘about-ness.’ ‘Concepts, referents, even possible sites of imagery,’ are alive, balancing the roles of receiver and sender in a two-way process. When one writes collaboratively, there's a comfort and a simultaneous ‘ready for anything’ sensation, as the spectrum of surprise and expectation is touched in various places. On seeing or hearing the collaboration partner's response, one is often stimulated by the passage just received and read, then drawn into the work by wanting to respond. The curious thing that can happen in collaboration is the blurring of lines between writers. In one view, the better the collaboration, the less evident the two (or more) writing styles. Not a lowest-common-denominator approach to writing. Rather, it would seem that at its most artistic, collaboration brings into being a new writer, different in many ways from either of the individual writers. Such a presence cannot be forced into existence. It comes with committed working together over time.
In Continuations, we agreed on a more or less fixed format of six lines, and have bounced the ongoing process of poem-construction back and forth over the years, since November 2000. It seems that in that time a ‘third individual’ has emerged, who writes differently from the way that either writer would be creating independently. Emmy Lou Harris, speaking of her collaboration with Mark Knopfler, makes a point that allusively applies to this poetic version: "When you combine two unique voices it creates a third, phantom voice."
- Doug Barbour & Sheila Murphy
