Introduction

Our collaborative process was and continues to be a perpetual process of firsts, of new beginnings. The epistolary form instantiates an address, to announce and commence the new news. In collaborating, we trade lines as the poem emerges, accreting a voice that is neither one of ours. By the end and with the editing process, it becomes difficult to distinguish “our” lines. Who is writing this? Individually, our poetry is vastly different and so this process itself invites us to the concept of firsts. That said, the particular poems in this issue correspond to the “firsts” further. “Dear Kim Ambriz” and “Dear Michael Robins” are both our first effort to write directly to dear friends and artist/poets within our lives. Kim Ambriz’s work is featured on our chapbook, Little Visceral Carnival (Cinematheque Press, 2009). Michael Robins’ poetry reading at Danny’s a couple years ago was really the place where we commenced the project. In many ways, Ambriz and Robins made the entire collaborative project possible. But it cuts deeper than this. Ultimately, friendship saves and makes lives possible or to steal from Dickinson, “possibler.” Perhaps this strikes the reader as pure sentimentalism. Yet, despite the fact that the human condition is fundamentally interdependent (We may die alone, but we are not born alone.) we are thrown into the monstrosity of atomized existence. The letter(s) fight that. The Letter takes that back. The exchange of friends, without condition resists the monstrous demand for an exacting exchange. We will turn to dust and to some extent all pressure points of consumerism point us to initiate a life lived facing mortality, rather than one another. As we write in “Dear Ghost,” we are needled by the necessity of our longing. Without one another, is there not nothing? Left alone with our Ghosts. To some extent, power relations point us in this direction. And these relations are both real, ghastly, monstrous. But the collaborative exchange of friendship is as a mirror held between birth and death, where fear at least momentarily becomes false evidence appearing Real. The hammer will come down. We will be crushed to dust. But in the meantime, we have the possibility by virtue of others and the infinity of the Letter. The monsters aren’t going anywhere. It’s just we have a chance to correspond with them as well and hope the torn fabric of what we sought to stitch is legible and gives the reader something of the possible.

— Philip Jenks