Istanbul, Turkey, “Collaboration and the Third Mind,” November 21, 2004

Published in the Uncategorized

The following is an introduction I wrote to  “After Giselle,” collaborations between Katie Bowler and Randy Roark

 If you are sitting alone in your room, the space in which your thoughts occur can be called your mind. Now this “mind” is, of course—whether we realize it or not—a mixture of dozens of other minds as well, but that’s another discussion.

Working by myself, the creative process is not a thinking but a listening, allowing the poem or artwork to suggest itself to me as it goes along, without any need to exert my control over it or to make my presence overt. At the end it’s like reading a transcription of someone you wouldn’t recognize as yourself, of someone painting with your hand.

Brion Gysin described the porous state of mind between two artists as “The Third Mind.” It is important to differentiate this form of collaboration from a synthesis of two sensibilities. The third mind exists in the presence of two separate but distinct people—and this mind is not the result of the overlapping presence of two separate colors, such as how blue and yellow mixed together makes green. This third mind is more like a progeny, the way a sperm enters an egg and creates a new living, breathing thing that is separate from both mother and father, although they supply the spark and sustenance for it to come alive. This new mind appears—to me—as actually present in the room, either above or beyond any possible concept of an individual mind. The conscious experience of this third mind is something that I have only been aware of as it was happening with two other artists in my lifetime.

All of the poems in the first section of this book were written in the physical presence of the other person. Four and a half years after “The End,” Katie had moved to New Orleans, gotten married, had two children, and decided she missed writing together, so we began a new series of collaborations. All of the poems in the second section were written via e-mail.

These new poems more or less accumulated until Katie put them into a manuscript. Months later it turned out that I had the only copy of the complete first section (“Over Large Stars”) and she had the only complete copy of the e-mail collaborations. So, thanks to me for saving “Over Large Stars,” and thanks to Katie for saving “After Giselle.”

The second set of poems wasn’t all that interesting to me at the time we were writing them, and so no one was more surprised than I was when it turned out that part two was by far my favorite half of the completed manuscript.

As far as an actual experience, however, I much preferred writing in Katie’s presence. There seems to be (to me) a real sense of place in those poems, and of very particular moments. That’s not possible when you’re writing at a computer—there is rarely a sense of real life happening, or of life’s interruptions and sudden appearances and changes of scene when you’re just staring into a computer screen.

My memory of writing the poems in “Over Large Stars” is of a kinetic poetry, a body poetry, composed on the spot, as fast as we could write, listening for the lines forming in my head immediately after (and sometimes even during) reading the lines thrown back at me—reading and writing at the same time. And then without even rereading what I’d written, I’d slap the notebook back across the table, only to have it returned to me seconds later.

I was proud of our speed and dexterity, of our (in Kerouac’s phrase) “never blotting a line,” of our fearlessness. These poems were literally written in seconds—and they are all here in their complete form—at least they were in the original Laocoon Press edition—along with preserved e-mails, notes, and non-collaborative poems written in the same time frame. This is more than a chronological collection of poems, it is a document of a remarkable six-month period in two poets’ lives.

My contributions to the poems in the second section were written in many different ways. The one constant was that a bit of a poem would appear in my in-box (thank you, Katie!) like a challenge impossible to refuse. I’d read it over, think about it, sketch out some rough lines, then usually close the e-mail and do something else, and return to it later when I had some free time. I sometimes tried to capture the old feeling of grabbing the first lines that appeared in my head, but whenever I returned to those lines later in the day I blotted plenty of lines—sometimes junking everything and starting from scratch—or I patched together something from stray lines I’d written in my notebook that afternoon. Which makes it all the more remarkable (to me) that the poems of the second half have (for me) aged better. They are more thoughtful, more measured, infinitely sadder, more “true”—as if they were written at the bottom of a very deep well.

In reading these poems over, it is often difficult for me to remember who wrote which lines—but I remember enough to know that the readers who know us will never realize that many of the lines they assume are Katie’s were actually written by me, and vice versa. Well, here’s a clue: The opening lines to “How to Use a Mala” were written by Katie, not by me.