Two poems by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney appear in the September Issue of The Collagist. Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent. Recent work can be found in Colorado Review, Diagram, Pleiades, and Typo. She is the author of two chapbooks from Kitchen Press, Thanks for Sending the Engine and My Fear of X (forthcoming). She lives in Boston.

Kathleen Rooney is an editor of Rose Metal Press and the author, most recently, of Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Arkansas, 2009) and Oneiromance (an epithalamion) (Switchback, 2008). She lives in Chicago. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the co-author of Something Really Wonderful (Dancing Girl Press), That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths), and Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing (forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend Press).

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for these poems? What was on your mind while you were writing these?

KR: Over our three-and-a-half or so years of collaborating, EG and I have found that it’s often helpful for us to work within a form—the order and structure seem to balance out the wilder, more off-kilter tendencies of having two people write the same poem. Back in March, I did a reading at the Woman Made Gallery here in Chicago with Alice George and several other poets, and Alice read some aubades which I really liked. When EG and I were ready to start a new series of poems, I suggested we try some of our own.

EG: Yes Kathy gets full credit for this idea. I don’t have much to add except that we’ve pretty much tried everything at this point, form-wise (except for sestinas; girl, I refuse), so we were bound to get around to aubades eventually. (Why isn’t “aubade” in the spell-check dictionary? Discrimination.)

2. Not being as well-versed in poetry as I perhaps should be, I had never heard of an aubade before, and had to look the term up. The definition I read said that an aubade was a song or poem “concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak” or “lovers separating at down.” What drew you to this form? Have you written more of these?

KR: Novelty and the opportunity to try something we haven’t tried before is a pretty serious motivator for us, so the fact that we’d never done any aubades made us want to give it a whirl. We ended up writing about a dozen of them, but of those, probably only half a dozen are what we’d consider send-out-able. Often, when we start a new form, the first one or two poems are like the first one or two pancakes—serviceable, but ultimately kind of sacrificial and not as well-shaped or delicious as the ones that follow.

EG: Dude that’s my theory.

KR: True. And it’s not even just a theory; it’s our reality. Whoa.

3. I’m also curious about the ways in which you’ve twisted the aubade, at least compared to the definition I read. For instance, in “Aubade with Clock Radio,” the speaker seems to me negotiating terms under which she could stay with her lover, rather than separate. “Aubade with Ceramic Deer” has a similar angle, with the speaker letting her partner know what it takes to keep her, saying that “Bric-a-brac / is a philosophy, not a pastime. Being mine / means you have to develop a collection / of sinister valentines.” Are these conscious twists, or merely the inevitable changes that come with adapting an old form to contemporary uses?

KR: Probably the most famous aubade in English is the one in Romeo and Juliet where the lovers are waking up after secretly spending the night together and Juliet’s all:

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

And then Romeo’s all:

It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

I can’t speak for EG, but this type of argument and negotiation were at least in the back of my mind as we were writing these. So the twists were maybe only semi-twists? And maybe only semi-conscious.

EG: I think a resistance to separating or at least a regret is almost inherent in the form; aubades are usually not written post-walk-of-shame. And like in any romantic comedy there has to be at least a contrived conflict. That said, Kathy and I are naturally sassy and cynical and contrarian and we’re not really interested in sticking faithfully to any classical form. Our sonnets are particularly unsonnetlike.

4. Both of you have impressive individual careers, but you’ve also found the time to write three manuscripts together. What’s the process of writing poems collaboratively like? What does it allow you to do that your individual does not?

EG: We live in different cities so all our collaborations are written via email, back and forth during stolen moments at our day jobs. Because we go line by line, it’s possible to do this without feeling like shitty employees, whereas blowing off work for a couple hours on end to write my own poem would seem like a violation. So that’s one benefit. And being very busy with said day job and other hobbies and obligations, I often just don’t the time or mental energy to make a meaningful contribution to my solo oeuvre, but collaborating with Kathy makes me feel like I always have a foot in the race (is that an expression?), like I do “write every day” in some small way (though really I write all day, every day, it’s just mostly prose, not poetry). These lines do add up surprisingly fast, and I like looking back after three months or six months and seeing all we’ve accumulated, like building a little city out of sugarcubes.

I also think we permit ourselves, in our collaborations, to be a little more self-indulgent and ridiculous for ridiculousness’s sake than we do in our own work … though I must still be more uptight than Kathy since I’m usually the one to insist on revisions and taking it down a notch.

KR: Also, as a direct result of our constant or near-constant composition, we tend to produce vastly more work than we’d ever consider “good” or “publishable,” so we end up throwing a lot of poems away. Not literally—we save the files or whatever; we just don’t send them to journals or worry about making sure every single effort yields a perfect finished product, which is liberating.  We’re more comfortable taking risks and outright “failing” in our collaborations than we might be in our solo work.

EG: Yes, that’s true. I don’t feel frustrated and stymied when we fail at a poem. Also, collaborating has allowed us to keep up a daily correspondence which I have never managed to sustain with any other long-distance friendship. Unless you count my mom.

5. What other writing projects are the two of you currently working on?

EG: Collaboratively, we’re currently working on a long, probably unpublishable but extremely fun to write imitation of “The Longest Poem in the World,” which is very worth checking out. If you haven’t seen it, it’s algorithmically composed of rhyming tweets. Each line of our poem is not a real but a would-be, a could-be tweet.

Personally, I’m finishing up edits on my first full-length book manuscript, which is due out in the spring from a yet-to-launch press. I was surprised to learn that arranging, cutting, etc. were much harder than actually writing the poems, but maybe it just felt that way being all scrunched up at the end as opposed to spread out over five years or something.

KR: I’ve been finishing the edits and then doing the proofreading on my next book, a prose collection called For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, due out with Counterpoint in early 2010. That process has involved a lot of back and forth with my editor. I actually love being thoroughly and thoughtfully edited, and my appreciation of that exchange is part of why, at Rose Metal Press, the press Abby Beckel and I co-run, we have a strict rule against publishing ourselves. I’ve also been wrapping up work on a poetry manuscript based on the life and work of the mysteriously disappeared poet Weldon Kees, which I’m hoping to be able to start sending out soonishly.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

EG: I just this year got around to reading The Quick and The Dead by Joy Williams, which is devastating. I’m comparing all the other fiction I read now to Joy Williams and not a lot measures up. In poetryland, I liked Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I just picked up Kate Greenstreet’s The Last Four Things at her recent reading in Cambridge; it was enchanting out loud but I haven’t read the paper version yet. I’m also excited for Ana Bozicevic’s first collection, Stars of the Night Commute, due out from Tarpaulin Sky in November. She’s a phenomenal poet.

KR: My husband and I are in a book club here in Chicago. Last month we did Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, which is heavily inspired by The Great Gatsby and which (fun fact!) Barack Obama said he was reading earlier this year.  O’Neill’s book was pretty good, but it led directly to the club’s choosing the last really great book I read: Tender is the Night, also by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I adore Gatsby, and Tender is just as fantastic, but more grown-up—about seemingly promising people making it to middle-age and confronting its attendant diminished expectations. Most of my poetry reading lately has been in the form of submissions to Rose Metal Press. The forthcoming release I’m most looking forward to next year is EG’s collection; I’ve read it already, but I’m psyched to read it again it is in its fully realized book form.

EG: Aww, thanks Kath! And thank you, Matt, for interviewing us!