CO

by Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole, Jessica Grim

Poetry. CO features five recent collaborations between the seminal language poet Bruce Andrews and writers Barbara Cole, Jesse Friedman, Jessica Grim, Yedda Morrison, and Kim Rosenfield. Andrews writes, "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 of 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." What results is work that displays Andrews' classic disjunction and politicized irritability, but the strong push and pull his collaborators exert causes pleasantly surprising disruptions that invigorate these texts in unexpected ways. See also GIVE EM ENOUGH ROPE and EX WHY ZEE, both available from SPD.

101 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bruce Andrews is an experimental poet, performance artist, literary theorist & recently retired (after 38 years) left-wing professor of political science. As Musical Director for Sally Silvers & Dancers, he has created sound designs and, in performance, live mixes of music & text for over two decades of performances.Most recent of a dozen or so big books is last year’s "You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!", followed by a chapbook, "Yessified (Sally’s Edit)" celebrating the Andrews Symposium and its expanded archive, online at www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews, with links to interviews, performance texts, poetry, collaborations, and critical essays on his work. Another online archive (and interactive project) materialized on April 1, 2014 as a curated 25 hour ‘twitter sculpture’ [Twitter.com @BruceAndrews25h], a 300 poem sequence.