KNEE TO KNEE
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Beginning in February 2020 and throughout the pandemic, Elvire Roberts worked with Rachel Goodman to write an entirely co-created poetry book called Knee to Knee. It is available for order from Dialect Press as well as your local independent bookstore.
In this ground-breaking collaboration, they question the ways in which women have been written over a lifetime, asking - are they fit for purpose? They rip up the rule book, ditching versions of self that have pinned them to the page. What emerges is a witty, raw, sometimes heart-wrenching invitation to inhabit this world in a new language. Read here on Dialect's blog how they approached the collaboration; and on London Grip's website for the full review of Knee to Knee by Amelia Walker. |
Reviews - excerpts
London Grip 23 May 2024: reviewed by Amelia Walker
Collaboration is something I’d love to see more of in poetry. Knee to Knee exemplifies the many good reasons why. Rachel Goodman and Elvire Roberts have together produced a formally innovative and politically impactful book evoking the joys and pains of feminine being and the constraints contemporary western societies place on it. Unlike many collaborative ventures where poets weave the individual voices of independently-authored poems into dialogue, Goodman and Roberts appear to have co-written all poems in a way that renders it hard to guess – and redundant to ask – which words and lines came from which collaborator. This is a bold surrender of the individualized voice long reified in dominant poetic discourses of romanticism and modernism (quite problematically, I think) – in other words, a release of ego and an affront to what Michel Foucault called the ‘author function’.
The result is a radical dissolution of self-other boundaries via which arises a ‘we’ and ‘us’ that becomes sometimes a ‘she’ – or it seems, many ‘she’s – a ‘me’, a ‘you’, an ‘i’/’I’, a girl, a woman, a not-woman, a site of bustling possibilities, a window, a wormhole, an exclamation, a door. This she/we (including all her selves and o/Others) is at once both authors and neither of them in ways that seem reflective of experiences shared by or relatable for many women, assigned-female-at-birth men, femme folks, and queer folks – without presuming to offer the style of singular representation that would risk reducing and homogenizing these vast diversities of experiences in and between our many varied lives. As a queer bisexual woman reading this book, I felt seen, but thankfully never spoken for; I felt connected, but not co-opted – a difficult balance to strike, one Knee to Knee gets just right.
Atop the visceral intrigue in the linguistic creativity of lines like ‘let us be a burst necklace – / divisible – a scatter of beads’ (page 2), ‘we are a world learning how to look after herself / yes let us brst u u uu u’, and ‘back to back, we have not screamed / a space but breathed / a rune between us’ (page 40), I was enthralled by the book’s visual and structural ingenuities. As in much contemporary feminist and ecopoetic writing:
white
space gives room to grow
nudges
ink at the tideline (page 3)
In other words, Knee to Knee uses typeless space strategically – and poignantly – to speak those things words cannot convey. Also compelling is the motif throughout the book of textboxes containing lines like ‘she is / always pleasant and helpful / however rather quiet / … / and might benefit from a little loosening of this tight control she has of herself’ (1) contrasted with ‘she is / too talkative / if only she were less argumentative and thus more cooperative / … / Her tendency to being obstinate still persists // otherwise a good term’ (11). These seem reflective of school report cards and/or social judgement generally. The visuals of the boxes reinforce a sense of being boxed in, trapped, and squeezed to conform with impossible expectations, many of which seem in direct contradiction with each other.
Collaboration is something I’d love to see more of in poetry. Knee to Knee exemplifies the many good reasons why. Rachel Goodman and Elvire Roberts have together produced a formally innovative and politically impactful book evoking the joys and pains of feminine being and the constraints contemporary western societies place on it. Unlike many collaborative ventures where poets weave the individual voices of independently-authored poems into dialogue, Goodman and Roberts appear to have co-written all poems in a way that renders it hard to guess – and redundant to ask – which words and lines came from which collaborator. This is a bold surrender of the individualized voice long reified in dominant poetic discourses of romanticism and modernism (quite problematically, I think) – in other words, a release of ego and an affront to what Michel Foucault called the ‘author function’.
The result is a radical dissolution of self-other boundaries via which arises a ‘we’ and ‘us’ that becomes sometimes a ‘she’ – or it seems, many ‘she’s – a ‘me’, a ‘you’, an ‘i’/’I’, a girl, a woman, a not-woman, a site of bustling possibilities, a window, a wormhole, an exclamation, a door. This she/we (including all her selves and o/Others) is at once both authors and neither of them in ways that seem reflective of experiences shared by or relatable for many women, assigned-female-at-birth men, femme folks, and queer folks – without presuming to offer the style of singular representation that would risk reducing and homogenizing these vast diversities of experiences in and between our many varied lives. As a queer bisexual woman reading this book, I felt seen, but thankfully never spoken for; I felt connected, but not co-opted – a difficult balance to strike, one Knee to Knee gets just right.
Atop the visceral intrigue in the linguistic creativity of lines like ‘let us be a burst necklace – / divisible – a scatter of beads’ (page 2), ‘we are a world learning how to look after herself / yes let us brst u u uu u’, and ‘back to back, we have not screamed / a space but breathed / a rune between us’ (page 40), I was enthralled by the book’s visual and structural ingenuities. As in much contemporary feminist and ecopoetic writing:
white
space gives room to grow
nudges
ink at the tideline (page 3)
In other words, Knee to Knee uses typeless space strategically – and poignantly – to speak those things words cannot convey. Also compelling is the motif throughout the book of textboxes containing lines like ‘she is / always pleasant and helpful / however rather quiet / … / and might benefit from a little loosening of this tight control she has of herself’ (1) contrasted with ‘she is / too talkative / if only she were less argumentative and thus more cooperative / … / Her tendency to being obstinate still persists // otherwise a good term’ (11). These seem reflective of school report cards and/or social judgement generally. The visuals of the boxes reinforce a sense of being boxed in, trapped, and squeezed to conform with impossible expectations, many of which seem in direct contradiction with each other.
Knees are a locus of articulation. Necessary for flexibility and movement. Intersectional. Knees inform our stance. In Knee to Knee two poets combine to expand the boundaries of ‘she’. She is plural, playful, sensual, and anarchic. She asserts fresh punctuation to (re)connect, to halt, to disrupt rigid attitudes. ‘[D]is-verbed’, her poems interrogate the limits of the female as defined by others and assimilated through upbringing, education, and language. Tropes of the ‘good girl’, decorum, silences around menstruation, sexuality, ageing, the ‘shoulds’ performed are incisively broken open. Vibrant juxtapositions flare against constrictions and constructions of selfhood, gendering, and idiom. Knee to Knee is vibrant, exciting, witty, and provocative – compelling reading. - Heidi Williamson
Knee to Knee is a thrillingly bold and passionate venture, a ‘together-poem’ where two poets merge to ‘make / space for us and our iteration(s)’. Coinages and resignified signs team here with energetic phrase-making and beautifully shaped silences to embody resistance to patriarchal constraints and other attempts to diminish human potential. The ‘arc and dip of self’ is both recorded but also importantly interrupted so that female voices can help each other soar. The result is a consistently exciting and thought-provoking collection, fantastically perceptive and alive with imagination. - John McCullough
‘This is just so good! Inventive, utterly original and the best example of true collaboration I’ve ever seen.’ - Ilse Pedler
Knee to Knee is a thrillingly bold and passionate venture, a ‘together-poem’ where two poets merge to ‘make / space for us and our iteration(s)’. Coinages and resignified signs team here with energetic phrase-making and beautifully shaped silences to embody resistance to patriarchal constraints and other attempts to diminish human potential. The ‘arc and dip of self’ is both recorded but also importantly interrupted so that female voices can help each other soar. The result is a consistently exciting and thought-provoking collection, fantastically perceptive and alive with imagination. - John McCullough
‘This is just so good! Inventive, utterly original and the best example of true collaboration I’ve ever seen.’ - Ilse Pedler
EVENTS
Gloucester Poetry Festival 2024, Sat 12th October 2024
13:00 (BST) Panel and Readings on Collaboration, The Folk of Gloucester, GL1 2PG
Gloucester Poetry Festival 2024, Sat 12th October 2024
13:00 (BST) Panel and Readings on Collaboration, The Folk of Gloucester, GL1 2PG
