My work with Pat Randle and Angie Butler is the kind of thing academic conferences are built around but don’t actually, often, manage to do. An immensely creative, live, collaborative process built on an authentic enjoyment of each other’s company and the right environment, built on goodwill and expertise (on their part). For the second phase of our recent, second, collaborative publication, we spent two days together as a press in the Cotswolds. I came with a new set of poems written to the specifications Angie and Pat offered me to do with the practical letterpressing of the eventual publication. The type would be wood, and they would go up in size, ascending. So only so many characters per page. Already then the poems were shaped by this constraint. But over the two days, in real time, the poems were rewritten, made far far better, on the hoof, by us literally searching out the possible letters for each wood type set! Often limited by an absence of certain letters, we would then change words, quickly and collectively, while chatting. And none of this was planned. And the poems are lively, weird, hopefully funny, and together we just made them, with these constraints, with Angie and Pat’s knowledge. It’s one of the most pure forms of collaboration I’ve encountered, full of breaks and asides and laughter too. I’m excited, next year, to present what we’ve been making. It’ll be the first of a new sequence I’m into about Guillaume IX, the first troubadour, and crusader, and the eventual publication will be a bit special as a thing itself.