Preface Collaborations is a new series that explores the varied and provocative presence of artistic alliances in our culture. From livre d'artistes to poem-paintings to exquisite corpses, collaborations between poets and visual artists have, to a certain extent, always underscored the aesthetic questions of their respective times. In our time, they offer a challenge to the "romantic vision" of the individual writer/artist who works in solitude, interrupted only by the Muse.1 They also foreground the increasingly visual nature of poetry, as its orality is challenged.2 And, they emphasize the value of process in lieu of completion. The collaborations in this issue were chosen for their exceptional symbiosis and for the myriad ways in which they reflect these questions. Cinepoesia Euphrosyne Bloom (filmmaker) Julie Patton (poet and performance artist) Cinepoesia is based on a series of on-going collaborations between filmmaker Euphrosyne Bloom and poet and performance artist Julie Patton. As a visual artist herself, Patton has long been interested in the material and "vegetal" nature of the written word. She believes that her handmade books, which include loose topsoil and flower petals, emphasize "the natural processes of growth and decay, and the kind of random beauty and chaos, often found in nature." Her poems and books serve as catalyst and fodder for Bloom's process of handmade films, in which the reels are subjected to mold and other organic processes. The three films that they have created—"Palms," "Seam Dreams" and "Filigreen"—express their common project, which is "to let nature speak for itself." In "Palms," stills from which appear in the following pages, their collaboration accomplishes an incredible metamorphosis when Bloom's film of Patton's poetry is projected onto a "dress/book/petal/ leaf/sheet/ green thumb/stem/spine" that Patton wears on-stage in a multimedia performance. The People Database Annemie Maes (artist) Kristin Prevallet (poet) The People Database is a public art project conceived by Annemie Maes, a Belgian sculptor and installation artist. The database is an extensive and ongoing collection of passport Polaroid backflaps gathered from the artist's journeys throughout the world. Maes describes each scanned image as "an exhalation of sheer form, a sublimation of the body stripped of the heaviness of the flesh" and envisions the database as "a human network of anonymous faces from around the world that counter-represents the so-called 'global village'" which she believes is "working to alienate us from each other." Poet Kristin Prevallet first began her collaboration with Maes when she saw The People Database at the artist-run gallery MAP (Matrix Art Project). A selection from her collaboration with this project is being published in a chapbook by Second Story Books. To participate in The People Database, visit the website at: http://www.belgian-art.org/unamas. Collaborations Part 2 Collaborations: Part Two marks the second installment in a Crossroads series that explores the presence of artistic alliances in our culture. In this issue, Crossroads focuses on collaborative works that cross the threshold of the text and live in the provocative space of social action and performance. In the on-going exchange between C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster, this action takes the form of photographing and listening to prisoners, transforming the medium of the mugshot and the criminal record into something merciful and mutable. And, in the choreographic collaboration of Michael Palmer and Margaret Jenkins, this action takes the form of a dance in which poetry plays a shape-changing role, as musical score and as image structure. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana C.D. Wright Deborah Luster Introduction C.D. Wright Deborah Luster and I have collaborated on a number of projects. We fall in and out of step with one another's projects without much inducement. We spring from the same hills and hardwoods, the same idiom. We took classical dance and mime and poetry together; we waitressed at the D-Luxe; we spelled each other floundering and outgrowing some of our worst inclinations on the side of hope, solidarity and expression that would give a limn of definition to otherwise unsustainable futures of anger, isolation and aimlessness. We think the same things are funny; the same things are wrong, and the same stuff unforgettable. When Deborah Luster started photographing prisoners in Louisiana shortly after she moved to the state, she asked if I wanted to fall in with her. After visiting the three prisons where she was setting up and striking her portable studio, I began working on a long mutinous text. I began reading and viewing and stewing and returning to Louisiana when I could. At present, said text is uncoiling in different directions, some is being extricated from the wiry mass for a forward for some of her pictures (which will be a mere sampling as there are hundreds of images now), and the rest will be applied to what I expect to resolve itself in an extended poem. The intrusiveness of art in this particular kind of institution is ever on my mind. As it is, no doubt, on Deborah's mind. Along with our naivete, our guilt, our whiteness, our visitor passes. Along with the bare fact that Deborah's mother was murdered, and my parents were The Law, a judge and a court reporter. The photographs are positioned and printed in the spirit of turn-of-the-century studio portraiture. A black backdrop, a series of poses, mostly determined by the individual being photographed, with an occasional prompt from the photographer. The pictures are prepped and printed on metal, as keepsakes. At once intensely personal and formal, they are intended to be handled, held, kept. They want to be preserved for the record, private and public. The writing is hectored by questions that collect around the forms of harm and the quality of mercy. We presume an inventive but nonetheless faithful document. FAULT Michael Palmer The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company Introduction Michael Palmer As Margaret Jenkins pointed out to me in a recent conversation, it is not the fact that we collaborate that is of interest—collaboration is an ancient and common practice in dance—but the particular nature of that collaboration, given that we work together from the beginning to the end of each piece, and that my role is not limited to that of writer nor hers strictly to that of choreographer. Rather, we evolve a work's structure together, its narrative (or non-narrative) structure, its image structure, and its movement structure. There may be more or less language, or none. There may be a "silent" language that runs beneath the surface of the piece as a guide to choreographic decisions. There may be language interwoven with music, live language mixed with recorded, and so on. As a piece takes shape in time, all the elements will evolve, each influenced by the others. On rare occasions I will propose a piece of my own existing work—prose or poetry—to work with. More often, I will write along with the work in progress, creating a text that is specifically for performance, and specifically for a given dance, and modifying it in response to the changing shape or atmosphere of that dance. (The resultant texts—scores might be a better word—seem to me generally of no great interest beyond the context of the dances of which they are meant to be a part.) The point is that each work should offer a new window onto the relation of language with gesture and movement, as well as onto the process of collaboration itself. Fault is an evening-length work, in two sections, for nine dancers. It derives from the conviction that dance is a way of seeing, as well as a thing to be seen. Employing the language of rupture, displacement, slippage and resistance, it attempts to explore the fault-lines we were all seeking to negotiate near the century's turn. Focusing on the many folds within its central metaphor, it asks what we can represent of that dance of order and disorder, harmony and chaos, which articulates our experience of time. Given that the musical score, an interwoven composition by Alvin Curran and David Lang, is quite densely textured, the verbal score was kept quite minimal. It takes the form of a kind of question and answer, or call and response. The inspiration for the language came from seeing Antonioni's The Passenger again after many years. The work's premiere performance occurred at Zellerbach Playhouse, in Berkeley, in November of 1996. Choreographic Direction Margaret Jenkins and Ellie Klopp Dancers and Choreographic Collaborators Michael Badger, Paul Benney, Abby Crain, Jenifer Golden, Eric Guthrie-Kupers, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Katie Moremen, Sue Roginski and Levi Toney Narrative Structure and Language Michael Palmer Composers Alvin Curran and David Lang Lighting and Set Design Alexander V. Nichols Costume Design Beaver Bauer Photography and Projection Design David Welle Collaborations Part 3 Collaborations: Part Three continues to explore the practice and importance of alliances between artists and poets. In this issue, Crossroads examines the complementary relationship between the written word and the image, how each brings out the other to make the whole greater than the parts. Nancy Willard and Eric Lindbloom locate the impulse toward collaboration "between the place remembered and the image preserved." In the salt marshes of Cape Cod, they find a double motion necessary to do justice to the strange and resistant shapes of the grasses; they must be captured on film and in a language that can probe the silent image for its real knowledge. Poet Nick Flynn and graphic artist Josh Neufeld unite in a medium that has always straddled the divide between words and images, comic-book art. In "Cartoon Physics Part 1," Nick Flynn demonstrates the danger and potential of the world by exploring the tropes of the fantastic, which has long been the province of comics. Cartoon Physics Part I Nick Flynn Josh Neufeld Isn't every creative act a collaboration? When I wrote the poem it was a composite of many voices, only a few of them originating from inside my head. This is how it seems 90% of the time anyway. The Buddhists claim we are composed entirely of non-self elements—maybe this explains the voices. As for the other 10%, maybe I'm just desperate to hold onto some sense of identity. The poem then had a life in The Nation, which is another level of collaboration, perhaps, along with the times I've read it outloud, including to a class of second-graders in Minnesota, who thought the guy was stupid to run back into a burning house—each reading brings an audience into the process, perhaps. The PSA then asked me to do a collaboration, and I asked Josh, and someone suggested "Cartoon Physics, Part 1," and a couple months later Josh presented this piece, yet another transformation, way and beyond anything I could have imagined on my own. Nick Flynn, July 2001 For more of Josh Neufeld's work please visit him at josh.neufeld.com

1 "Introduction," In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations, co-edited by Amy Cappellazzo and Elizabeth Licata (The Castellani Art Museum, 1999). 2 The Spring 2001 issue of Crossroads will explore contemporary poetry readings and will question whether the orality of poetry is in decline.