Preface

Between 2009 and 2010, poets Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick published two collaborative chapbooks. The first, “Möbius Crowns,” was published by editor and bookmaker Andrew Rippeon for QUEUE books (a chapbook series adjunct to the journal P-QUEUE) out of Buffalo, New York. The second, “Canto,” was the first in The Offending Adam’s chapvelope series, edited by Andrew Wessels, and accompanied by a postcard and a microbroadside. 

With literary collaboration and its possibilities in mind, Jacket2 invited Andrew Rippeon to review “Canto” and Andrew Wessels to review “Möbius Crowns.”

Wessels notes the construction in “Möbius Crowns” of “a bridge […] between poem and world,” where the poems simultaneously make things and the forms which hold those things. Where “I” is said by both poets as an act of making and creating. Where, as Wessels writes, the collaborative “I” turns into an “O” indicating that “their condition has changed in the process of writing these poems.” In his reading of “Cantos” Rippeon picks up on these “composite” and “collaborative” facts of the speaker[s], recasting the writing process as one of both construction and reconstruction, where Reddy and Beachy-Quick investigate, problematize and ultimately, reinvigorate the lyric form, and in turn challenge the field to come up with alternative reading and writing practices, to consider “what lyric itself thinks.” As Rippeon makes clear in his piece, many of the questions Reddy and Beachy-Quick work through are those of lyric voicing and logic, tied up in our understanding and expectations of the lyric. 

Next year, 1913 press, edited by Sandra Doller, will publish Conversities, a collaborative book length work by Reddy and Beachy-Quick.