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eight | andrew epstein The Volley Maintained Nears Orgasm Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, and the Cross-Gender Collaboration in 1982, Rae Armantrout and Ron Silliman, two central figures in the avant-garde movement known as Language poetry, decided to collaborate on a poem. First one poet wrote a fourteen-sentence paragraph of prose poetry, then mailed it to the other, who then added a fourteensentence paragraph and returned it by mail, until they had accumulated fourteen such paragraphs. The resulting poem, entitled “Engines,” appeared in the literary journal Conjunctions in 1983; it was later published as a section of Silliman’s long poem The Alphabet in 1992, and in a collection of Armantrout’s own selected poems, Veil, in 2001. Like many collaborations, “Engines” is a self-conscious text that reflects on its own status as a jointly created work; it overtly reckons with both the excitement and the ambivalence engendered by the creative exchange between friends, particularly when those friends happen to be of the opposite sex. It is not surprising that such a collaboration would have been undertaken by writers associated with Language poetry: community, collaboration , and the social have been central concerns of the Language movement since its inception in the 1970s. Inspired by the communitarian ethos and the poetics of sociability espoused by the “New American ” poetry of the postwar period—led by the New York School, Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poets—but skeptical of its residual individualism, Language writers developed a rigorous, sometimes utopian model of poetic community. They staged intensive debates about the nature of their own collective, and about their community more broadly. At the same time, they began to experiment extensively with collaborative writing practices. The list of collaborations by Language writers is long, including book-length, multiauthored works like 172 | andrew epstein Legend (1980) (by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Silliman), Leningrad (1991) (by Michael Davidson , Lyn Hejinian, Silliman, and Barrett Watten), The Wide Road (2011) (by Carla Harryman and Hejinian), and the recent Grand Piano series (2006–2010) (billed as “An Experiment in Collective Autobiography,” cowritten by ten members of the Language community). But “Engines” stands out as one of the relatively few poems jointly authored by a man and a woman to have emerged from this particular scene. In this essay, I argue that “Engines” is a fascinating example of a cross-gender avant-garde poetic collaboration, and as such, is an unusually rich site for an examination of how friendship, gender, and writing collide in contemporary American poetry. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore the importance of community and friendship to the development and practices of postwar avant-garde poetry, from the New American Poetry to Language writing and beyond.1 Such discussions have analyzed, and often celebrated, collaboration as a crucial, exemplary instance of literary friendship and avant-garde community in action.2 There is also a growing body of scholarship that focuses more generally on the nature of collaboration, often without special attention to the avant-garde or to poetics.3 In such work, critics have explored the erotic dimensions of collaborative practice, most notably in Wayne Koestenbaum’s Double Talk, a groundbreaking book that argues that male literary collaboration is driven by sublimated sexual desire.4 At the same time, recent feminist criticism has delved into the history of women working as coauthors with one another, while also reevaluating the role of gender in literary relationships between men and women more broadly.5 However, little attention has been given to the phenomenon of crossgender collaboration, in part because it has been a rather rare practice.6 As Holly A. Laird has observed, “the great majority of the books written about literary coauthorship devote themselves to writing partners of the same sex (including alleged or avowed sexual partners)” (“A Hand Spills” 351). When scholars do consider literary relationships between men and women, they have often sought to expose the long tradition of casting women as auxiliaries, secretaries, and assistants to powerful male writers. Such studies have done the important work of uncovering The Volley Maintained Nears Orgasm | 173 the often invisible presence of crucial, creative women lurking in the shadow of male “geniuses,” but have not often considered what happens when men and women attempt to cocreate literary works as equals. In Koestenbaum’s study of male literary collaboration, he quickly dismisses cross-gender collaborations as little more than “an appropriative relation,” a perpetuation of “an old tradition...

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