Folie à Deux
Nicole Oquendo and Mike Shier
To read Oquendo’s and Shier’s poems, scroll down. They can be found at the conclusion of the interview.
Grist: How did you collaborate on these poems in particular (exchanging lines via email, for example)?
NO: Most of the collaboration on the chapbook (Folie à Deux) took place over a distance, and the poems themselves were at least my way of dealing with that widening space. I guess they all took place over a distance, even the ones where we were in the same room, but most of the creation was separated by 1,120 miles.
MS: This one is interesting because we did it a lot of different ways? Like, I know when we started we were literally on the same couch. Or did we? I know a lot of the earliest ones we were. The first one is escaping me for some reason.
All the ones in the middle were done at a distance, as we had both moved to far places, that is for sure. But the poems reproduced in this journal were actually the final two in the project, composed when we were visiting with one another. That was fitting.
Grist: Did you agree on the form ahead of time?
NO: For me, the poems are an alternate universe where two voices are one voice. This made structural collaboration easy; the lines fell well at a distance and what we were left with worked.
We knew we wanted to write poems, but in the end we ended up with one long poem across many pages. There’s no table of contents or individually titled pieces in the chapbook. The voices and the poems melt together.
MS: I think we dictated the form nonverbally to one another as the project went along. Almost like a Ouija board. Almost like everything was a response piece to everything that came before it. But there was no dictum in my recollection, one where we explicitly said “this is what this project will look like,” and I don’t even know that we knew it was a chapbook until we were in the thick of it.
Grist: Do you view the poems as a blending of your two voices, or as something altogether different?
NO: Reading his poems aloud had a profound effect on me. I heard his voice and my voice clearly in the words, and the words that I wrote were reflected as such. What happened was more than a blending; there’s something more cohesive than that in the pages.
MS: I wouldn’t call this a blending of voices in the sense that each one of us was actively writing each poem, but more that at least I was writing with her in mind. I think she was my audience, very specifically, which is somewhat liberating for a writing project, even if that seems paradoxical. Sometimes writing only for oneself (or a hypothetical “audience,” even) can be oppressive to me. My goals here were clear as I went along.
Grist: About collaboration more generally: How does revision work in collaboration—do you have to set down ‘rules’ or does the process of revising vary poem by poem?
NO: We revised on our own before the poems were “presented” to one another. The only rule as we went along was that we were going to present the writing side by side, as each pair of pages is an exploration of the same theme. We didn’t always know what that theme was going to be, but the language in the writing dictated its placement.
MS: There was a lot more revision and self-editing, at least on my end, prior to including my poems in the “project” document, which Nicole kept. Only very few of them were edited once they found their way into the document, and even then not in any radical way. We even began to find that many of them were able to be read across the page, from “her” poems into “mine” on a line-by-line basis, and that kind of serendipity was something worthy of preserving.
Grist: What are the risks and rewards of collaborative writing?
NO: Collaborating with Mike made me happy, and it was something that I looked forward to even more than writing or making other art by myself. But sharing the intimacy of each poem was the textual equivalent to being seen naked.
Are my words good enough? Am I honing in on description long enough for this to matter? Will he “like” it? The reward, vibrating on the same frequency and achieving that rhythm, made those moments of fear worthwhile.
MS: I could only see collaboration being risky in the sense that we all know from any collaborative work. Do I have an understanding with this person? Are we both committed to the collaborative process? Will one of us do more of the work than the other and will that sour any of our other interactions? But those are just weird hypotheticals that don’t apply to this situation at all. The rewards, if you’re writing with the right person, solve a lot of the problems with “solitary” writing (if that’s even a thing)—a built-in audience, instantaneous feedback, and a reason to write.
Grist: How can collaboration enhance creative work and/or alter how writers view the act of writing? Why collaborate?
NO: Every writer is capable of creating something beautiful. There’s no surprise there. But when two writers come together, the result is something greater than both writers as individuals could make on their own.
MS: I think knowing what you’re doing as collaborative and accepting it as such is really just accepting a reality of all writing. Nothing any writer does is really solitary—there’s collaboration at all levels of writing. Whether we interact with peers, with editors, or any readers we are lucky to have. Writing is collaboration. Understanding this as an intrinsically collaborative project from the outset made the whole process feel more honest to me, and I think that was reflected in my writing. I would recommend collaboration to any writer, any pair of writers, any collective of writers.
. we spoke once of a vision and in it there you rested light on a snow bed a stiff leaf
. we spoke once of a vision and in it there you rested light on a snow bed a stiff leaf
if i squeeze my eyes shut the burn coasts around their curves
i kneel down heavy and cup my hands around your face but it feels thin
and cracks while i grieve there orbited by tiny flecks of red and oh does your blood hover
. later i will squeeze your hand it will feel like the crumpling of a paper ball
your blood is gone your blood is all over suspended
i will lean back and wait there an open mouth for it to fall thick and red
to feel your warmth i saw this with certainty but there you are cold
. your blood is suspended in lines your blood is suspended in irregular rhythm
palm up to will you back together and any vibrations my fingers are broken
my fingers are not conduits your blood hovers there and i am frozen to you in parts
i kneel in snow while the sun glares but does not touch you
. years like this . i reach my hand over and snap off your ring finger at the base
where the bones once connected you dangle there now but also lie there
disambiguated there is no blood but the hovering one now and i grab at the flecks
ink now and your finger draws the runic alphabet. .
oh and how withhold a piece of your sewn-together
oh and how withhold a piece of your sewn-together
truth from vision; distinct in neither
where limbs derelict divorced drift from one
another somewhere on a continuum pinpointed
go play cartographer somewhere else
and find out how deep a finger
pushing you lifeless pushes
by expertise you think is there
through scratching or traipsing
a worthless saunter down a line someone else already traced for you
a picture you’ve already seen
fitting tiny feet into hopes left behind
