Collaborations
Collaboration with Flo Reynolds
I have an occasional, ongoing collaboration with fellow poet Flo Reynolds. So far, our collaboration has been epistolary; one of us starts a poem, then we take it in turns to add the next part; the poem grows between us until one of us finishes it. We also keep a running commentary on projects, reflecting on and critiquing our poems together in a feedback loop. In this way we write through dialogue, but the poems themselves are singularly voiced. The result is not the usual performative posture between writer and reader, it also incorporates the interpersonal relationship between two specific people in the real world, two friends. It's a lovely, unlonely kind of poetry.
Flo Reynolds is a writer, artist and literature programmer based in Norwich, UK. Their work explores ecology, embodiment, queerness and plurilingualism, in forms ranging from poetry to science fiction to sound art, and often in collaboration with other beings, both human and non-human. Flo's writing can be found in The White Review, Stand, The Interpreter’s House, amberflora, Magma, Datableed and more. Their debut book, The Other Body, was published by Guillemot Press, and is available here.
A special commission from this project titled 'Wetware' was published in No, Robot, No! part of the Headbooks series from Sidekick Books. Read 'Wetware' here.
Another poem from this project 'dear other, with pink dish', was published in The White Review online and can be read here.
Details of any new collaborations will be added here
How can the I of a poem - also a chain of metonymic displacements - maintain the same multiplicity as you, resist adopting a fiction of a singular voice, have the intimate quality of a notebook without the intimate content, become the position or mouthpiece through which the world, rather than an individual, speaks?...
...Slavoj Žižek describes the revulsion most of us feel in perceiving our interiors erupt into the external world through the example of saliva, which we constantly produce and swallow inside our bodies. Imagine, he proposes, a scenario in which someone tells you to spit into a glass, then drink it. The thought is repulsive: your insides are to remain hidden, even from yourself. The lyric is that saliva in a glass, but what does it incarnate?
Nuar Alsadir