Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer S. Cheng on the Collaborative Process

GB: In the summer of 2018, I invited Jennifer S. Cheng to engage in a hybrid, epistolary experiment: During the span of two weeks—while I was in Vermont for a conference and she was at her home in the Bay Area—we would create something every day, with each other as the intended audience, as a kind of imagined correspondence. The twist was that we wouldn’t actually exchange the epistles, at least, not until the very end. On the final day, we would share all our daily “letters” and arrange them into chronological order, to see what sort of back-and-forth conversation had emerged from our intuitions and projections. To say it was an honor to create in tandem with, and toward, a poet whose intellect and heart I admire as deeply as Jennifer S. Cheng’s would be a colossal understatement.

JSC: Afterward, I wrote that the experiment allowed us to “observe what resonances could occur across distances of time, space, and chance”—I’m thinking now about the word “could,” as if every distance carries desire in the form of possibility. As fearful as I often am of uncertainty and of “failing” another person, my connection to Gabby, astonishing poet and friend, is special, and the timing of her beautiful invitation felt meaningful. That summer, I was either at home or a medical clinic, facing a formidable expanse of uncertainty—and failure—that I could hardly articulate. Though I wasn’t sure I could offer anything of significance to Gabby, it was a gift simply to intimately address, to project across. I am honored by, and grateful for, the entwinement of our words and gestures, and the third space it creates.

In some experiments, it’s all about the process, and the resulting text doesn’t offer much on its own. We were fully prepared for that to be the case here, but once interwoven, the thirty-page document we created became a rustling time capsule of startling convergences, approaching topics of intimacy, geometry, the feminine, smallness, loneliness, and much else in ways that interested us. There are times our exchanges connect so seamlessly, we can barely believe we hadn’t been corresponding in real time, as well as moments where the gaps between the epistles jolt and disturb. 

Three years after the original experiment, in the midst of a long pandemic, we revisited it and were surprised by how far the distances had come to meet us. In light of its evolving resonances, we decided perhaps it was time to share a piece of this collaboration with the world. We hope the excerpt published in this special issue of Poetry honors the larger spirit of experimental listening and vulnerable inquiry in which the larger project was composed.