14 June 2004. Just now, I wrote the following introduction to 12 Colorborations, which will be the next publication of the Runaway Spoon Press. Consider it an ad for that book, which will cost $20, postpaid, until there are ten or less from the original edition of twenty available for sale. Each will then cost $100.

I got the idea for this collection early in 2004. The circumstances are now pretty hazy. I know I was in one of my up periods, due in the main to my starting to make interesting new visio-mathematical poems using the computer visual art program, Paint Shop. I remember, too, that I'd been seeing some very interesting collaborations by various in burstnorm poets in Lost & Found Times. In fact, I had recently done a mathemaku that stole an image from one of Jim Leftwich and John M. Bennett's efforts. I know that my friends Kathy Ernst and Scott Helmes were also involved in collaborations at the time, too.

An important background factor was a visual poet named Jeb Aca (who has a little circle over the second a in his last name I'm too lazy to figure out how to print here). Jeb came into being in June 2001 at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, a kind of motel cum multi-facility complex for people in all fields of the arts. Somehow, the people running that establishment had invited Richard Kostelanetz to become a master artist there (Edward Albee, chairman of the national council of the Center, seems to have been instrumental in this, bless him). Part of the deal was Richard's being given the privilege of inviting a number of "mid-career artists" to spend two weeks with him at the Center, with room and board paid for. Richard, possibly the only American literary figure to have published in just about all the certified establishment publications who is neither academically entrenched somewhere nor blessed with commercial clout, paid his unfortunate benefactors back by choosing as his under-fellows nine artists who were significantly breaking the norms ruling their fields--and therefore invisible to the Establishment. (I will say that the people at the Center treated us very well in spite of this. But they have not had anyone like us back since we were there, nor have they made it widely known that any of us was there.)

All this has to do with this collection because John M. Bennett was one of the people Richard brought to Florida, and Bennett is not only a top-notch sound/performance/ visual/infraverbal/polylinguistic/solitextual/wacko/you-name-it poet in his own right, but probably the most collaborated-with poet in the history of the world. John not only got his own hundred poems done each day before 7 AM but got the rest of us collaborating up the yahoo with him and each other. Scott Helmes, another devotee of collaboration, then took us (with the help of others, notably Michael Peters) into collaborative efforts on the windows of our main workshop--as well as rocks, walls, sidewalks, trees and the sides of buildings throughout the complex. Some of our more elaborate collaborations on paper were collected as Jeb Aca's and eventually published by Press Me Close and Luna Bisonte Prods, Kathy's and John's presses. These consisted of poems various people in our group started and left lying in the workroom for others to add to whenever they felt the urge to. Who now knows who did what, but all of the following participated: Bennett, Helmes, Kostelanetz, Peters, Ernst, me, Josh Carr, Pat Greene, Hesse McGraw and Frederick Young.

I had collaborated with others before, but not often. Wharton Hood, a cousin of Jeb's, was one. He and I were responsible for a chapbook of solitextual poems called Dirges that came out in an edition of five or six sometime in the nineties, I believe. I'm sure I've gotten in on a few other collaborative efforts but can't remember them now. None, that I know of, resulted in visual poems. On the other hand, many of the poems I give myself full credit for were, in actuality, collaborations, for they depended a good deal on material I appropriated from other artists, such as Ron Johnson or Robert Lax (usually with the permission of the stolen-from artist, if living, but not always--and named in such titles as "Mathemaku for Ronald Jonson" and "Mathemaku for Robert Lax").

So: my stint at the Atlantic Center for the Arts got me into visio-poetic collaboration. I don't feel I contributed much to Jeb's work, but John and I made 3 mathemaku I consider as important a part of my oeuvre as just about any of my solo poems.

After ACA, I frequently felt like collaborating but was too busy with supporting myself and other annoyances to do much of any kind of poetry, collaborative or non- collaborative. A new computer I got in late 2004 with enough capacity to allow me to use Paint Shop got me going again. Which brings me back to my opening paragraph!

After Ashbery, Hass, Collins, Dove and Wilbur turned down my invitations to co-write poems with me (yes, I was hoping to ride with them into the Bigtime), I was forced to try my fellow invisibles. Observation, while I think of it: it strikes me that no mainstream poets (or would it be few?) have participated in collaborations. No doubt others have noticed this, but I only did just now. I find it quite interesting. Would it possibly have anything to do with mainstreamers' not feeling comfortable too far from what is extremely familiar to them?

I picked my three collaborators because we'd been the elders at ACA, and had hung out together there (and known each other previously, if only through the mail, in some cases). Since then, we have collaborated on several exhibits, if not on individual works. And I greatly admired their work. My project idea was fairly simple: each of us would make a single "starter poem" and send a copy of it to each of the other three. From that point on, Kathy and I would take turns making something out of the starter I'd sent her and the starter she'd sent me; ditto, Scott and I, John and I, Kathy and Scott, Kathy and John, and Scott and John. The result would be 12 two-person collaborations. The other three agreed to this with pleasing rapidity. (Their starters and mine are reproduced on the page to the right.)

I was interested as a critic/literary historian to see how each of us would take the same starter. I also hoped to get knocked into finding new ways to use long division poetically (and I was addicted at the time to forcing long division into everything I was doing as a poet; still almost am). I expected all kinds of stimulating new ideas from what the others did, too. Finally, I considered it a given that we'd make some first-rate poems (and have fun). As far as I'm concerned, everything came out exactly as hoped.