"Yours, mine, ours? A new kind of She”
Rachel Goodman and Elvire Roberts on collaboration and the voice that arose from the space between them.
January 2020: Magma poetry journal invites submissions for a special issue focusing on collaboration …
Shall we give it a go? Why not!
How do we do it, this collaboration thing? Do you write a bit, then I write a bit,
and we sort of join it together?
Is it a call-and-response kind of thing? Where do we start?
Um…
We had no idea. Which turned out to be the perfect place to start.
We exchanged childhood photos with each other and wrote in response to the image.
why not the one of her as a || child
as a
me as a me as a me as a
from the first click as a me
from the first blink me as a
smile! sweet as a
rip-roaring me
as shiny blue as a
from the first frame me as a
you are all there
in jaunt in
comfortable knees apart
bodybowl you as a
world opens to make room
with fat breath offers
a hollow place
which you roll
fierceshine into smile!
Our first poem was published in Magma, but we didn’t want to stop. We knew there was more, more to excavate, more to listen in to.
What Denise Riley said: ‘How could someone ‘be a woman’ through and through, make a final home in that classification without suffering claustrophobia?’[1]
Oh, so it’s about us, versions of us, given and received.
How we as girls learnt our girl-grammar; the rules of how we’re supposed to be.
Do we want them?
Nah.
Nah.
Let’s write ourselves … no rules …
Just gifts – total honesty, permission to disrupt, mess about.
Yessss!
From that very first poem we wrote together, we realised that the voice was its own being. It was neither mine nor hers nor ours, but a voice of more than: a new kind of She.
The voice, Her voice, arose from the space between us, spiralling like smoke, as we tried to read the shapes and signs.
She reminded us that we wanted our own kind of artistic syntax, uniquely and specifically ours as women, that would re-write us in the world. And that we were ready to leap:
not to shrink as we approach this
together-poem
not to ally our exchanges
with apologies
We were in Covid lockdown. We lived 100 miles apart. So, we started an online lockdown journal for our eyes only. We were free to add to it whenever we wanted – there was no must or had to – our only expectation was complete honesty. We filled it with thoughts, feelings, responses, ideas, furies, writers we had encountered, podcasts, YouTube videos. It became a virtual place of converse, support, challenge and tenderness, and ultimately provided us with a wealth of source material for our book, Knee to Knee.
Along our journey, unknowing and unplanned, we discovered that the space between us has both energy and substance. It is not a gap of nothingness or a vacuum for us to fill, but offers us its own partnership in collaboration.
We discovered this space is strong; that it holds joy, rage, discomfort, questions, giggles.
The space, which is also connection, demanded that we set aside our individual authorial ego, that we let go of Me and embrace what we become. We learned to trust it. It enabled us to experiment, to take risks, to be curious about whatever might arise. Inevitably, we met problems, but our initial, fierce commitment to the space of co-creation, and its inherent spirit of play and disruption, was invaluable in solving them.
Audre Lorde advised that we can ‘train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.’[2] We realised that the grammar available to us wasn’t sufficiently muscular. Another leap was required – so we enlisted new semantic and syntactical symbols.
A pair of parallel lines, similar to the markings on a Pause button:
|| is a breath held – more than a comma – it turns
the world a few degrees to allow a different view
A hoop:
is intersection
is where we kneel and do not possess
And of course, space:
We also used erasures, textboxes, righthand formatting, all pressed into service for our ‘new kind of She.’
How do the poems begin? One of us starts with a few lines. Not so many that the imprint of the originating poet is too strong, too dominant, but enough for a gesture of the new. Those lines are donated to the other poet, who then adds and plays and returns. And so on, in a dance that becomes a single movement. At points, we need to pause. What did you mean by that line? Where is your body in this? Is this anger? Shall we lean into the delight?
It takes the time it takes, the space it needs.
Then there is the editing. Ouch – I loved that bit … Yes, but.
We agreed that we could enthusiastically wield the knife. If a word, thought or image was to stay in, it had to be advocated for with vigour and passion – and that advocacy considered with respect and firmness, unclouded by ego or fear. Another leap: we are so conditioned as women to be nice and accommodating!
One of the unexpected joys in collaboration was the reduction of doubt. While we each doubted our individual selves again and again, we did not doubt the value and quality of what we were co-producing. I’m loving where this is going – it made me cry at one point.
We became emboldened by the living energy between us; our sense of what worked and what didn’t became keener and sharper. Late into the project we realised that something wasn’t working with the order or grouping of the poems. We put all the pages on the floor, and took away almost a third of the poems in a radical sweep. Eeeek! But our judgement was sure, and that’s when we knew we were fully inhabiting our new kind of She.
As our collection takes its final form to head out into the world, there is yet another aspect of collaboration over which we have no control: in the space between reader and poem, the experience of reading is co-produced and the poem finds another voice. And all because at some point a voice wrote or said or imagined … we can submit more than one poem.
Hey, let’s write a whole book!! x
Dialect Press is thrilled to announce that we will be publishing Knee to Knee early in 2024. Pre-orders will be open soon.
‘Knee to Knee is a thrillingly bold and passionate venture, a ‘together-poem’ where two poets merge to ‘make / space for us and our iteration(s)’. Coinages and resignified signs team here with energetic phrase-making and beautifully shaped silences to embody resistance to patriarchal constraints and other attempts to diminish human potential. The ‘arc and dip of self’ is both recorded but also importantly interrupted so that female voices can help each other soar. The result is a consistently exciting and thought-provoking collection, fantastically perceptive and alive with imagination.’ ~ John McCullogh, poet
About Rachel and Elvire…
Elvire Roberst (left) and Rachel Goodman
Rachel Goodman. Formerly an actor and BBC presenter, Rachel moved back to her native Norfolk coast 28 years ago to raise a family and to write. In 2017 she graduated with distinction from the MA in Creative Writing: Poetry at UEA (University of East Anglia) where she also received the Brian Heiser Memorial Scholarship. Her poems have been published in Magma, Aesthetica, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, Ink Sweat & Tears, Lighthouse Journal, Fenland Poetry Journal, Tears in the Fence. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2017 and 2021. She is currently writing about grief, the astonishment of loss, coastal erosion and where we place body and memory when the ground has gone from beneath our feet.
Elvire Roberts is a poet from the LGBTQ+ community, based in Nottingham, UK. She works as an interpreter between British Sign Language and English, with a background in other languages. Elvire writes from a physiological reimagining of emotion, often through the animal, vegetable and mineral. Her poems have appeared in publications including 14 Magazine, Dark Mountain, Finished Creatures, Magma, Reliquiae, The Rialto, Tentacular and the Candlestick Press anthology Ten Poems About Getting Older. Find out more at www.elvireroberts.co.uk
