Indiana Review – Summer 2005

There is even a collaborative review of a collaborative book in this fascinating issue of work conceived and produced in collaboration (Mary Austin Speaker and Sara Jane Stoner review Phoebe 2002. There is even a collaborative review of a collaborative book in this fascinating issue of work conceived and produced in collaboration (Mary Austin Speaker and Sara Jane Stoner review Phoebe 2002. An Essay in Verse by Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie, and David Trinidad). Collaboration is broadly interpreted and encompasses partnerships of all sorts between poets, between prose writers, between writers and visual artists, between visual artists, between reviewers, and between texts. The work in this issue that is not collaborative in the formal sense is often of the sort that reminds us that all art is a collaboration between creator and reader or spectator, such as Ander Monson’s poem, “Outline towards an Antidote: II.” (An outline, by its very nature, requires the reader to collaborate on some level, to fill in the blanks, to think past the skeletal structure.) The “Notes on Collaboration/Collage Process” are almost as fascinating as the works themselves. How did all this collaboration happen? One group of well known poets was trying to kill time while waiting for a poetry reading to begin; several teams created their pieces through extended e-mail correspondence; Rick Moody and Gianna Commito put together, at random, his stories and her pictures which were created without seeing each other’s work. This issue of the Indiana Review demonstrates that collaboration is an effective means of reaching beyond convention to create inventive ways of thinking, reading, and seeing.
[indianareview.org]