Jan Dennis Destajo and Kabel Mishka Ligot on the Collaborative Process

We are both from the Philippines; Mishka currently studies and works in the US while Dennis continues to reside there. One of us lives in one of the world’s longest lockdowns paired with a staggering lack of social support from the government, projected to be one of the last countries to recover from this pandemic. The other lives in a world power returning to a supposed “normal,” afforded by the global hoarding of vaccines and yet struggling with immunization hesitancy. Despite these wide differences, our shared space was poetry, along with the literal spaces of our homes. This collaborative work was an attempt to magnify domesticity as a focal point to make sense of the tangled connections between the experiences of two people living through the same pandemic in different corners of the world, thousands of kilometers apart from each other.

Over the span of a week, we took turns contributing sections to a shared document; editing our own and each other’s work, revising our sections to continually build off of each other. We took cues from earlier poetic correspondences, such as the “Envelopes of Air” project by Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz published in the New Yorker. Our sequence was written by composing individual poems in conversation with each other about our respective living conditions during the isolation of the pandemic: dealing with memory before the pandemic, the growing uncertainty of the future, changing conceptions of shared and personal space, ergonomic fixations, and whatever was bounded by “home,” as dictated by Filipino (and borrowed/imposed American) norms of interior design, architecture, and social and physical space.

The work, by which we mean the actual process of synchronously putting the poem together, became a way to experience our respective ethics of composition in raw, fragile states, with the both of us working simultaneously as producer and reader. Within the limits of online-mediated spaces and file sharing, finding common time across thirteen time zones and accepting and passing the other’s judgment in an instant—as a letter, word, and line appeared and disappeared on the electronic document—was a newfound attempt of compressing language into a common work that inhabited the overlap of what we individually considered as “work,” or “a poem.”