How did the collaboration begin? Did you have a vision of a book with three sections, one for each of the artists, or did the project begins with a smaller scope and evolve?
This project ultimately blossomed out of friendship and a curiosity about combining our very different writing styles. Initially, we were just fooling around with a “let’s see what happens” approach. That was so long ago! We have had to do a little excavation to even remember exactly how we started. Initially, we were both interested in the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, wanting to read more of his work, so we each took turns selecting a Vallejo poem and then separately writing a poem in response to it. We had the opportunity to give a reading at Naropa from that work and it was exciting to see the interplay of our ideas and language. Then we began writing responses to each other’s responses. Susanne put together a long poem that blended both poets’ offerings, but after that we seem to have moved on. We certainly didn’t have a finished book in mind, but we were enthusiastic about the collaborative experience.
How did you work together? Were you in a room writing together? Did you sometimes collaborate by email or text?
During the creation of this manuscript, Susanne and Elizabeth mostly lived far apart, with Elizabeth in Boulder, Colorado and Susanne in Albany, California. Much of the project was set up in phone conversations, done independently, and then exchanged over email. There are exceptions to this. While Elizabeth had a residency at the Djerassi Foundation and when Susanne was able to visit Colorado, we worked together on a long poem responding to the writing of Marosa di Giorgio. We have always loved the material that resulted, but readers did not seem to share our enthusiasm!
Did you write poems together in real time? Did you write poems separately and then combine them? Or did you use different methods at different stages of the project? Did you work by talking the project over and make joint decisions about where to go, or was much of the project simply writing and seeing what happened?
This part of the process was very conscious, though as mentioned above, we rarely wrote together in real time. After enjoying our earlier collaborative process, we decided to continue. This proceeded with a focus on one artist at a time. One of us came across Vivian Maier’s work—we were aware of the discovery of her work in a storage unit—and that launched the first collaboration with a woman artist. Again, we were physically distant, but we were each working with the same collection of Maier’s photographs and took turns choosing one to study and address in a poem.
How did you choose the three artists? The three could not be more different: a photographer whose work is mostly realistic and documentary, a painter who is committed to abstraction, and a representational painter who portrays a world of myth and magic. Did you choose the artists for their diversity, or were you simply drawn to the work itself? One of the joys of Rendered Paradise is the change in the writing as we move from artist to artist. Did you make a conscious choice to change the writing or did it just happen?
After completing our Maier project, Elizabeth mentioned that there was an exhibit of Agnes Martin’s work on view at the Los Angeles County of Museum of Art, so we met in Los Angeles (staying at Elizabeth’s mother’s house) and spent time together at the show. As we both left feeling inspired, we agreed that our next focus would be to write responses to her art.
While our poems to Vivian Maier’s photographs had been free form and independent of each other, Elizabeth suggested that for Martin’s work we should write a sonnet crown. We took turns composing either two quatrains or a quatrain and a couplet to a selected piece of her art and then merged them. Some of this work took place over email, and some was written side-by-side when Susanne was able to visit Elizabeth in Boulder.
The project at this point had its own momentum. We were conscious that we wanted to choose yet another woman artist’s work to respond to. Elizabeth stumbled upon Kiki Smith’s tapestries, which are rich and beautiful, and suggested writing to those as well. Drawing from images that were online, we sometimes got confused with regard to titles and found we on occasion were responding to pieces that were not tapestries. In both cases though, we each wrote ten lines of poetry to the same artwork, with the intent of interweaving them with each other, though that didn’t always work entirely smoothly. This was the part of the project that required the most reworking and revision. Also, by this time in the project, Elizabeth had moved to Oakland, and we were able to do some of the revising in person together.
We liked the challenge of responding to three such distinct artists: each one called something different out of us as we engaged with their work. Entering into each image became a unique and meditative experience. Vivian Maier’s work is often very narrative and that gave us a foothold into our poems. By contrast, Agnes Martin’s abstractions opened to something more tonal and philosophical. Kiki Smith’s tapestries create a mythic, world-making space: a lot is always going on and that elicited a kind of fecundity and a little (we hope productive) chaos in our writing to her art.
With each project, we used a different formal strategy because the artists were so distinct from each other. It seems important that we tried to engage with three very different kinds of images/artists in formally distinct ways.
Also, with each project we moved from writing separately to more deeply merging our writing and erasing traces of individual authorial voice. It’s really fascinating to have the experience of having two voices become a third voice. There’s the uncanny experience of not knowing who wrote what and that feels like a sign of collaborative success.
Sometimes the poems seem to proceed by dialectic, making a statement and then altering or contradicting it (not necessarily in the next line, but somewhere in the poem or book). Was this a conscious strategy, or was it something that arose out of the process of collaboration? Or am I wrong in saying that the poems sometimes proceed by dialectic?
We were not conscious of approaching the writing dialectically. We might, however, approach an individual artist’s work organically, with our own questions, and then when our writing merged there would be a kind of artifactual synthesis. We were also reading and studying other materials about and by the artists—for example, the film about Vivian Maier and biographies and art writings by Agnes Martin—so that added a helpful tension to what we produced.
Two women poets collaborating on the work of three women artists is an inherently feminist project. Was this part of your strategy, or did you choose the three artists based entirely on the aesthetics of their work?
We did intend to write to women artists. We both have a history of supporting other women poets through publishing, and so celebrating the work of women artists seems naturally continuous with our ethos. We wanted to legitimate the different kinds of work that any artist may do, and above all, we wanted to participate in this remarkable art. Maybe that element of participation is key to a feminist approach. It wasn’t just a collaboration between Susanne and Elizabeth; it was a collaboration between Susanne, Elizabeth, Vivian, Agnes, and Kiki.