Cordite is one big publication out of Oz, and I was delighted to be asked to put something wide together for a special issue on collaboration. I adapted some words on collaboration itself, as it is as part of my practise and tied this into five excerpts from brand new, never before seen collaborations. They are all works I'm really excited to share, all part of a continuation of my work with others since the publication of Enemies. I'll be blogposting excerpts from these works one by one, but for now.
Here's the full issue: http://cordite.org.au/content/poetry/collaboration/
Here's the link to my article: http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/in-collaboration/
& from that "
These five collaborations are no more or less representative of my overall collaborative output than any other five I could’ve chosen. Rather, I choose them, as I do my collaborators, because of a sense of who these people are and the creative and social energy they have exchanged with me. I write this in fact on a tour of the Scottish islands, writing new collaborations every day, to be read in the evenings, to small audiences on Orkney and Shetland. The collaborative process is ever in flux for me now, and so these five works also seem new to me, as though they were written this morning too.
Yet the work with Tom Jenks, ‘
1000 proverbs’, was built over a year period or more – and readied by rapidly batted back and forth email – for publication as a separate book with Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Too, ‘
40 feet’, is a poem where David Berridge and I tried to embrace the failure of encapsulation, writing 40 poems that were about themselves, over a 40 day period. ‘
Samurai’, with Andrew Spragg, is new … begun this year and currently growing poem by poem as we both research a randomly chosen topic and warp it through our shared poetics. ‘
La dominate’ was written and rendered artistically by Ariadne Radi Cor in Venice – both of us part of a collaborative project with a university there – as part of a project called Crossing Voices, one expertly curated by Alessandro Mistrorigo and James Wilkes. And ‘
Oil’, with William Letford, was written for reading, for this current tour, and read in Aberdeen, Scotland on 15 July, 2014, after an exchange of stanzas lasting a few weeks. Our processes produce the content, and that’s where the joy is, in making sure a process is the thing of it all.
To date I’ve engaged in over 100 collaborations..."
