CO
by Bruce Andrews
CO is a series of five collaborations between Bruce Andrews and five different women: Barbara Cole, Jesse Freeman, Kim Rosenfield, Jessica Grim, Yedda Morrison. Andrews and his collaborators have advanced the notion of collaboration by showing how, with Andrews' sytle as an anchor, each of the other writers approach to writing is revealed. The hierarchy established addresses gender, social, political and language considerations at once and pulls the reader through the text as a narrative would without a single nod to the narrative forms.
After 9/11, collaboration got magnetic.
Extending out, these five recent pairs… calls & response, collisions, mosaic, reverb & embroidery — with a similar backstory: some ‘raw material’ of mine, micro & modular, (lines, phrases, word clusters) riffing off of/admiringly reading recent poetry of theirs & sent each a packet of these little sheets to, again, work/play/off of/respond with more raw matter/& loosely organize, then back my way, more twists & rounds, final shakedown & paper staging. Thematic content mostly improvised in the heat… or the edit… to cluster loose around (for instance): gender roles & fashion / architecture & grammar / torqued vernacular & daily Louisiana / socialization & sex / social sass & global justice.
A gift box of magnets, of magnetic fields. - B.A.
BRUCE ANDREWS. New York City. New poetry: Designated Heartbeat, The Millennium Project (online). New mixed media: ongoing, with Michael Schumacher (sound), Dirk Rowntree (typography) &, especially, Sally Silvers & Dancers.
BARBARA COLE has been writing the ongoing online poetic project, situ ation come dies. The most recent installment is foxy moron. She received her Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY, Buffalo.
JESSE FREEMAN. Baton Rouge, Louisiana word & graphic artist. Books: New Orleans Dizzy Spit; Bolt Bleu; Bode well, cher. Anthologies: Southern Perils: Women Experimental Poets of the South; and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South.
JESSICA GRIM’s most recent book is Vexed (online). Other books of poetry include Fray, Locale, and The Inveterate Life. She co-edited Big Allis, a magazine focusing on experimental writing by women, from 1989-1996. She continues to live, write, and work in Oberlin Ohio, where she’s a reference librarian at Oberlin College.
YEDDA MORRISON. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, currently living in Montreal, Quebec. Working on two manuscripts, Girl Scout Nation and Minor Beasts in Translation. Most recent book, Crop.
KIM ROSENFIELD is the author of two books of poetry, Good Morning—Midnight—, which won the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award (2002), and Tràma. She lives in NYC.