Definition for obscurity free#

Unfortunately, while I was preparing Dark Hope for publication, an undiagnosed parathyroid condition impaired my ability to work at my customary level of competence. Although I can identify several passages as distinctly hers or mine, most emerged from our creation of a voice that synthesized or styles without sacrificing them. When Dark Hope appeared as an Argotist ebook, the rapport Michelle and I shared astounded me as I reread the work. While she stepped back from the active literary scene, I placed the poems we wrote in a number of magazines, then approached Jeffrey Side with the chapbook Dark Hope. The collaborations lasted roughly a year, then ended when Michelle's health problems prevented her from writing consistently enough to maintain a poem's momentum. If one of us moved in an unexpected direction, the other would enhance the context. Although we wrote and used space differently in our own work, together we synthesized our separate and unique voices into work with a distinctive voice of its own. Throughout our year of exchanges, we found ourselves uncommonly attuned to each other's phrasing and rhythm.

Definition for obscurity free#

By the time we collaborated, my own work had evolved from its origins in Beat literature and Olson's projective verse-with my own dash of Bukowski-into a realm of abstraction analogous to improvising free jazz with words and space.

Although she could write with the brashness of a female Bukowski, she could explore the limits of language with equal bravura. Michelle enjoyed exploring the possibilities of language as well as the extremities of personal experience. We shared a rapport that ran the emotional continuum from demonic darkness to ecstatic light, linked through our shared love of language. Whenever her inner Lautremont appeared on the page, my own verbal night shaped complementary shadows. Michelle's emotional demons lived vividly within her. Our medical conditions prepared us for working in the dark areas of the human spirit. While she coped with a body that wrestled against a bipolar condition and fibromyalgia, I lived as a two-time Cancer survivor who learned during his mid-life crisis that he had lived with undiagnosed Tourette Syndrome since age six. Our styles, while different, proved surprisingly compatible, partly because of our shared literary interests and partly because each of us understood that our biochemical conditions created similar problems for us socially and physically. In turn, I sent back as many lines as I felt I needed to move the poem forward. Michelle sent me as many lines as she felt comfortable writing. We never established a formal working method, such as trading one line or stanza at a time. Within a month of very personal email exchanges came her request to do a 'small collaboration.' By mid-January we were emailing passages of our first poem together. The work that became Definitions of Obscurity began with a fan letter from Michelle Greenblatt early in December 2005 that led to the most gratifying literary collaboration of my life. Vernon Frazer describes their process in his Introduction: