Checkerboard Shoe: Two Poets in Collaboration

Checkerboard Shoe is collaboration in language as primitive as coyotes yip-yap-yodeling together under a Rocky Mountain moon. Or maybe the polymer biting its own tail to enable reproduction back in unicellular times is just a circle of language. In-among-with-from-of humans, it’s as venerable as conversation. Join the magic in this collaborative tap dance through vocabularies!

Maureen Owen and Jack Collom collaborated in writing and teaching for many years, starting in New York at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and later moving to Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

From the beginning they shared a resolutely resilient playfulness in the art of writing and an appreciation of the surreal nature of every little thing. They both participated in and encouraged their classes to and peers to participate in mistranslations as a form of creative intention.

Maureen and Jack worked together in collaborative writing sessions. This book is the selected result of those many kitchen-table workings. Their methods covered a range of possibilities picked from experience and invention, including line-by-line trade-offs, writing in sonnets, exploring the unforeseen, rhyming, freeform haiku and senryu, prose poems, concrete poetry, acrostics, 4x4x4s, also “griddies,” a form they invented, and many more inventive forms and formats to encourage creativity and break down writerly expectations to give imagination a variable basis from which to construct and choose its own “psychic geometries,” developments and reverberations.

According to Maureen and Jack:

“Writing collaborations, there’s a shift of the ‘burden’ reminiscent of Jung’s collective-unconscious ideas. We creep up on each phoneme in a different valley. And the fractal sensibility crates valleys within grains. Part of our aesthetic has been to leave lines a little “shaggy,” honoring the original impulse and Bashó. Another part has been to tinker with them endlessly.”

If poetry, as compared to “talk,” is motivated by a significant shift from talk’s oratorical lust for statement to an exploratory curiosity, then that shift goes up a gear from poetry-lone to collaboration. Syntax opens and grammar contorts. The quality of surprise, i.e., the disclosure that every juxtaposition is complex, takes over perception. These are Big Claims—and/but it is true, too, that writing together is likely to disrupt that base value of individual vision that allows it to hover between ice and diamond states.