Kerri Sonnenberg & Sawako Nakayasu

71 Kids

 

August 2000, with fingersnacks and motivational speakers, Sawako and I find each other on a lawn of crisp, new grad students. The first conversation went doyouliketomraworthiliketomrawrothmetoo We met in school: “I like your poem!” “I like yours!” A post-workshop clarification became a conversation until 5 a.m. We soon saw our tangents and gists fracture in harmonious ways. (All of this without a backslash yet!) We thought about writing together. We didn’t much plan it, Kerri just e-mailed me three words. I added some, sent it back. We did this daily, sometimes multidaily (better than vitamins!), until we got confused, Confusion was quick—speed was actually worth more points, wasn’t it? Before long we had an authorfull/less poem gene pool. Oops, but I get ahead—the naming rites...found we had two branches, labeled them po 1a and po 1b. I had a new idea about collaborative writing, but by then we were so used to writing each other in poetry that my ‘suggestion’ was taken as a new poem and forged into po 2. Yes, there was a ravenous quality as the raw material of volley grew. No casual e-mail was safe from the impasto/urge. So there were more. Kerri gave them legitimate names, admitting she thought these poems had more personality than represented by their stark ID numbers—so they became ned, virgil, babs, sally—they were our kids. And we had more, and continued to feed them, sometimes losing track (“Have you seen babs lately?”). (I think there was even one we lost entirely, and with no proper mourning either. Perhaps not yet ready for real kids...) We couldn’t sustain the daily exchange, but we kept it up over over land and sea? over beer and rice krispies? We reconvened and sat down with all the material we had written, sectioned them off, and each fashioned poems out of the designated sections. Individual composition was rendered into a process of selection and arrangement from a restricted language pool. Working with such a limited palette was so procreative we each wrote numerous pieces from any one page of raw material. However autonomous this stage of authorship seems, I still am not sure who wrote which pieces of the finished tract. And that’s what I thank the collaborative process for the most: giving me an invitation to write outside of the boundaries of “my work.” The names came off. I miss them slightly. What I miss more, though, is the constant stream of It was a trucker’s pee of poetry. We printed them onto postcards in the Waldrop’s basement. When we’d produced the first card, Keith said, “Congratulations. You’ve caught up with the obsolete.” Keith and Rosmarie were majestic in their patience; I wore the green visor better than I set type. 71 Elmgrove is a sort of vortex that makes young poets start magazines, covet late 19th century technology, and write voraciously. The “71” of 71 Postcards is therefore a quality more than a quantity. “what manners contain” are the first three words of our collaboration, and the initial impetus for !Factorial Press. Keith gave me a copy of the King James Bible, but it was Rosmarie’s Quark XPress Bible that I actually read. And I would like to retroactively dedicate the first issue of Factorial to Keith, Rosmarie, and Kerri.