I mentioned last post my writing companion Liz Brennan and I
decided to collaborate, using her mobius strip format, call and response, each
of us positing a “perhaps” stanza and each of us answering with a “maybe”
stanza. Here are another set of prose poetry collaborations (parked on Liz's blog):
1)
Absence of Presence:
Perhaps it is the absence of
presence that leads us to question the coin….
2)
A Choice of Wings:
Perhaps chivalry, hive and liver
belong in the same vase on a fur-lined mantle.
And I can’t help but invite you down this rabbit hole, come
with me…
In the poem, “A Choice of Wings” the phrase “three-winged
birds with indigo feet” found its way to the page. Liz, large of heart and
granting me far more intentional acuity than was present, looked up “three
winged birds” and here’s what she found: a woman run company using an image of
three wings, bearing a link to an
interview with author Margaret Wheatley,
which lead Liz to find, and hand me,
Leadership and the New Science: Learning
about Organization from an Orderly Universe.
The three wings appear on the cover, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread, the nested string (all one?)
coheres as a shape to the mind’s eye, though with space between each layer
(solid when viewed from a distance like Saturn’s rings). Wheatley writes about
this three-winged image in the context of positive restructuring of
organizational process (business, institutions, etc., in
Leadership and the New
Science) via messy (but ultimately productive)
collaborative processes in which each member of the organization brings their
skills to the table.
A few lines from the paragraph of text beneath the image
inside the book read, “Three-Winged Bird: A chaotic Strange Attractor: This
image records the journey of a system in chaos…Chaotic strange attractors
reveal the order inherent in chaotic systems, order that is only visible over
time and history—" Mario Markus and Benno Hess, Max-Planck Institute, Dortmund, Germany.
Could we stop there? Of course
not…so Liz generously placed additionally
into my hands, a second book (written by Wheatley and Myron Keller-Rogers) titled
a
simpler way. The book opens with images of light and dark, shadow and sun,
outlines of children cartwheeling on the ocean shore, the zig and zag of a
thicket of zebras from an aerie’s eye view, the close up of the tines of the
underside of a mushroom.
Prose follows, though I’d argue the book is more like a
prose poem. Wheatley and Keller-Rogers marry image with idea, positing that we
might have
Darwin’s
assumptions backwards, that we in fact live in a world that supports surivival
of the widest diversity, not survival of the fittest after all. Doesn’t that
drop your shoulders down away from your neck? No need to strive. Just be. True?
My body says, yes, yes and yes.
Our latest collaboration, The End, appears on Elizabeth's Perhaps, Maybe blog. I hope you'll enjoy it, the text version, and that you'll enjoy it again as the three-d version, here, as a live micro-reading (recorded still very much under siege of mosquitoes, and beneath the canopy of the family redwoods, on my back deck). 
