I’m not sure where to start with this one other than to say collaboration is cool!
When I was an undergrad Music Composition & Technology major, the composition faculty used to encourage us to use our elective credits to take arts classes outside the music department, and those other arts departments were generally open to waiving prerequisites to allow us into their courses. I’ve come to really appreciate the push behind that over the decades since. Some of my favorite arts experiences have been things like multimedia installations, partnerships between projection-artists (shadow puppets, etc) and improvising musicians, group directed improvisations with loose compositional structure between musicians and dancers, etc.
I’ve curated the Formations Series for New & Improvised Music at Woodland Pattern monthly for around 12 years now, and after I began writing I started including installments every 6 months where 5 poets each read (or improvise) for ~20 minutes while 2-3 musicians improvise behind/with them. It has been great fun to see and hear the results, and I’ve been honored with the additional gift of meeting some of my favorite poets and mentors through these experiences.
I first met one of my now good friends when he performed at the first of these. Bryon Cherry is a brilliant poet and soulful musician. In the year and a half since then, Bryon has also performed his poetry on some other experimental/improvised music concerts as well and it has been great hearing it every time. Just the other day, he announced the forming of a new duo, Ash Circle, with Ryan Thomas on percussion. It is a combination of drums and poetry, and the release of their first recorded track is under 24 hours old as I type this.
https://ashcirclemusic.bandcamp.com/track/mad-man
By a stroke of fate, I was hosting a poetry reading in Racine this past Saturday afternoon and one of the performers, unfortunately, had to bow out sick a couple hours ahead of time. I immediately called Bryon to see if he was available to fill in. He was!
Several months ago, he put out a post of Facebook saying “Who wants to collaborate?” or something along those lines. I responded that I did, and some time passed. Eventually I suggested we try something inspired by a book I had recently picked up, “Sight” by Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino. The idea of Sight is that these two writer/friends would simply write back and forth, in response to one another, somehow around the idea/inspired by Sight. Their only other arbitrary rule was that everything written would be in twos. That could mean two lines, two stanzas, two sections. Just somehow, two. What follows is 112 pages of brilliant, enjoyable writing. Anywhere from 2 lines to half a page or more per section, back and forth!
I suggested we try something similar, which was new to Bryon and I, and we picked the word “MAGIC” as a starting place. At this point we have a bit over 40 emails, back and forth, responding to one another. Magic is more obvious in some than others. I often find that I have some idea in mind related to magic (whether that be slight-of-hand type magic, or fantasy-epic wizardry, etc) and then I find something ELSE related to that and work from there, so as not to be too blatant. Other times, I look at the last poem Bryon wrote and respond to that almost line by line, or much more loosely. There are no real rules. In the end, we have a whole bunch of new, short poems that have been pretty fun to write.
We had no intention of sharing these or doing anything beyond writing them as an experiment/practice. We ended up reading about half the material last Saturday in place of our missing colleague. I’m not sharing any of the specific poems here because 1) I’d want to ask for Bryon’s permission first as well, which I haven’t, and 2) there are tentative plans to share them in a more complete form after editing. I simply wanted to give some recent examples.
At the same reading, one of the other readers was another of my favorite Milwaukee poets, Chelsea Tadeyeske. She read poems from some of her recent and upcoming books. She is also co-founder of Pitymilk Press. Pitymilk Press is a collaboration between co-editors Chelsea Tadeyeske and Edie Roberts. Check out the books they create and publish here:
Here in Racine, our musician/artist and instrument builder/inventor friend, Wilhelm Matthies has been hosting monthly arts events at Vintage and Modern Books. All of these events have included multimedia aspects. Sometimes that means poets, sometimes short films, always musicians in the mix. These have generally been the 4th Saturday of each month at 2pm. The next one is 2/28/26.
Here is video from a recent concert where Wilhelm performed duo along with John McCoy. (They each were scheduled to play solo sets, and decided shortly beforehand to do some playing together as well!)
https://youtu.be/Vq_bCyoppss?si=Ho6UJBHZHwZkgoGS
As writers, it is easy to sit and write by one’s self. Often, that is a pretty important thing to do, really. But after a weekend of great performances by fellow poets and musicians, along with social get-togethers, art openings, and a lot of other great things happening throughout Racine, I just wanted to take a few minutes and use my weekly post to encourage everyone to think of ways to collaborate with others. When we open ourselves up this way, it can lead to unexpectedly wonderful, creative things!
Jay Mollerskov, ArtRoot Writer-in-Residence –2/24/26
ArtRoot Writer-In-Residence 