Their poems “ROBIN HOOD MORALITY TEST,” “PRESIDENTIAL FITNESS TEST,” “ROMBERG’S TEST,” “SCHAMROTH WINDOW TEST,” “FAULT INJECTION” and “HAFELE & KEATING EXPERIMENT” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Robin Hood Morality Test,” “Presidential Fitness Test,” “Romberg’s Test,” “Schamroth Window Test,” “Fault Injection” and “Hafele & Keating Experiment.”
A: The genealogy of these poems goes all the way back to our earliest days of collaboration and our debut chapbook, Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019; reviewed by you back in the day!), which was when we first started writing and publishing poems about various types of ‘tests’ — psychological, mechanical, physiological and so on. Years later, the Test Centre poems became relevant again as we were putting together our third poetry collection, Detourism (forthcoming in 2028 with Palimpsest Press).
Detourism amalgamates six collaborative experiments undertaken during the first six years of our work as MA|DE (2018–2024). The six experiments/sections function like individual chapbooks within the layout of the full collection, and each takes the reader on a journey through a new zone of collaborative poetic potential. We like to conceptualize Detourism as the poetic equivalent of a compilation of ‘B-Sides and Rarities’ — the kind of thing a band releases once they’re a few full-length records into their career.
When we were putting together the “Test Centre” section of Detourism, it was the only one based on an actual publicly released chapbook, and we didn’t want it to be merely a retread of that early release — so we opted to virtually double our original content, writing a large number of new poems about new tests, including the six that appear in touch the donkey. We often wonder if these more recent test poems, written after several years of collaboration as MA|DE, read any differently than the original test poems written during our earliest days of collaboration together. That might be a fun problem for a keen reader to parse!
Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: We shift gears a lot in our work — most projects tend to be self-contained, with their own well-defined sets of constraints and collaborative approaches. That’s true, of course, for these test poems, but also true for two other full-length poetry projects we’ve been working on lately. One of these explores a highly constrained form of our own devising and incorporates graphic elements; the other is more intertextual, looser in some ways, very focused on how words interact and are positioned on the page.
In all cases, what we are trying to maintain throughout our poetry is a distinct ‘voice’ for MA|DE. Regardless of which of us writes a given line or section, it must all conjure what we refer to as our ‘third mind.’ We don’t ever want a reader to be able to look through a text and identify which parts were written by ‘Mark’ and which by ‘Jade.’ Developing MA|DE’s voice, and writing into it, is a process we are continually refining.
Q: I’m always curious how collaborators see their own individual works shifting. Is there a way to return to either of your own work habits or approaches unchanged? What influence do either of you see in your own work from these collaborative projects?
To answer this, we’ll step out of our collective position for a moment, and respond individually…
Laliberte: For me, MA|DE has increasingly become a primary artistic concern. So, when I’m conceiving of something new and testing out that idea on the page, I always have to make a decision about whether to introduce it into MA|DE’s ecosystem — based mostly on whether it has a generous amount of space for Jade to slide into and co-occupy. If there is, a process of becoming can begin together …
If not, I’ll decide that it’s better to cast that idea into the pond of my own solo practice. At this point, MA|DE’s projects tend to be intensive, rigorously conceptualized, painstakingly framed and then fully explored. Therefore, when working alone, I’ve noticed that I’ve become most attentive to the pleasures of short-form writings — investing my time exploring more minimal poetic gestures, and developing a form of bastard/mongrel haiku in particular. Very precise minimalism and wordplay seems well-suited to a single voice.
Wallace: Writing collaboratively forces me to pay more attention to my own artistic patterns and proclivities, so I can avoid replicating those idiosyncrasies when writing in ‘third mind’ mode for MA|DE. This self-awareness exercise is also helpful for honing my individual voice; it allows me to identify and emphasize the tendencies in my work that seem meaningful, while avoiding various pitfalls (creative ruts, unambitious shortcuts and the like). Collaborative writing also gives me the opportunity to attempt projects that I simply couldn’t do alone because I don’t have all of the skill sets and ideas that Mark brings to the table. Participating in such necessarily collaborative projects sometimes allows me to expand my own individual capacities and other times makes clear my ongoing limitations. I also have to say that having a dedicated collaborative practice like MA|DE does inevitably makes it a little harder to preserve time for my solo work.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting as your combined, collaborative selves? Are you looking at any other collaborations or collaborators for influence?
A: The most direct influence on MA|DE’s collaborative approach is undoubtedly the artist collective FASTWÜRMS, self-described as “the trademark of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, a they/them joint authorship and poly-disciplinary artist.” FASTWÜRMS was actually Mark’s MFA supervisor at the University of Guelph back in the early 2000s, where he completed a degree in Studio Art. At that time, the idea of a long-term collaborative partnership with its own framework and defined existence, separate from its individual creators, really began to intrigue him — and certainly the way Kim and Dai had intertwined life & art had a lot to do with that. They really do exist in the Canadian arts scene, and at the University of Guelph, as their own kind of collective ‘entity’; they are two people but share one ‘Associate Professor’ designation at the school of fine arts, for example, which is a really interesting victory within the institution.
Of course, musicians take this approach all the time when they start a band and name themselves. This naming invokes a persona — cynically, it could be viewed as branding, but it’s also a way to aim collective energy at a shared, continually developing creative mythology. And if it’s done right, it expands in service of the work and takes on a life of its own. This kind of shared, creative positionality seems to be a bit less common in other art forms. There are examples of writers who have done it — Michael Field, the pseudonym under which Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper wrote poetry and plays together for many years, being one example — though this seems to be the exception rather than the norm. More commonly, what we see when writers collaborate is that they tend to do it in a way that tries to preserve their individual voices within the work. This includes retaining their individual names, brought together with an ampersand, which to us seems like a very informal bit of punctuation. One-off or shorter term collaborations are certainly pleasurable endeavours. While this is a completely valid way of working, we chose a more foundational, familial, esoteric path with MA|DE.
Q: With a handful of published chapbooks, a full-length collection and a further forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your collaborations have progressed? Where do you see this particular project heading?
In our early poetic projects we were working to establish MA|DE’s voice, and testing out different approaches to collaborative composition, refining our tone through various poetic projects. As we continue to write together, our focus is shifting toward testing the limits of that voice, and looking for new ways to use it. Most recently, we are seeing if we are capable of writing something akin to a mainstream genre novel, which seems about as far in the opposite direction as we could get from experimental poetry. Genre fiction, of course, requires skill sets related to plotting, character development, et al., and while we may have some of those skills individually, we are still figuring out how they work in practice when we have to create something wholistic at such a large scale. A mainstream fiction voice is rather different than a poetic voice: it requires clarity, concreteness and other things we are happy to do away with much of the time in poetry. We also think a lot about what it might mean to be innovative and surprising within the context of mainstream/genre fiction, which tends to be somewhat more rule and arc oriented than our usual milieu.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
Oh rob, this is a very interesting question. We sense that other writers do this often, but in a way this approach is very foreign to how we work, either as MA|DE or individually. Both of us are voracious readers (and Mark, in particular, is a huge collector of printed matter), but we rarely read a book twice, even if we continue to ponder certain texts for years afterward. Neither of us is really sure why returning to beloved texts doesn’t happen more … there just seems to be so many new things to discover in the eternal present. To put it another way: there are many authors we admire, but they don’t necessarily animate our current work at any given time. For us, each project we work on tends to have its own set of demands and inspirations. We like to create reading/research lists as we begin to conceptualize a project, which we add to as we proceed. The greatest source of energy in our artistic practice is surprise. Finding new writers and works that speak to us and whatever issues we are in dialogue with is very helpful; coming across a text coincidentally that dovetails perfectly with a current project is very invigorating. The combination of preparation and chance is a heady artistic alchemy.
If our reading audience is interested in knowing more about who / what we’re reading, there are a few easy places they can access where we reveal what literary energies are lighting us up in the moment: MA|DE recently started a monthly newsletter on Substack — in it, we almost always mention new books we’ve bought or read in a given period, we really geek out on our love of literature there. Also, both of us individually log what we’re reading on Goodreads pretty religiously; those accounts can be accessed here and here!
