Cedar Sigo and Simon Wolf new collaboration – Occasional Objects

MFA Visiting Writer & Alum, Cedar Sigo and Simon Wolf recently celebrated their new collaboration “Occasional Objects” at Common Area Maintenance.

“The words stretched severely.”

We arrived early to help Timothy set up the chairs, and to arrange them in a certain way, decide just where the mic would be. The small things like this are important. It’s sometimes more about what the room wants. Then we left, across the street to Jupiter for tortilla soup and crispy tacos.

We had to convince each other to sit tight at the bar until 5:45, to make sure and arrive at the reading just before it was supposed to start. Slightly nervous that no one would show. Do poets ever really get over the fear (reality) of having no audience? Trading our collaborations aloud at CAM we began filling in between each poem with tiny compositional asides and secrets. How it actually helped to open several books at random, in a borrowed apartment, to generate a single line. How it was often necessary to run the odd stanza backward just to generate the taste of immediate traction.

We found a lot in common. Similar years and addresses in San Francisco. A dedication to shining tables of diners and dive bars crowded used book stores. We created a world for ourselves, one we built fresh with each meeting. We wrote at night with music playing, talking over each other slamming the notebook down in front of the other once done with our line.

We wrote 11 poems, but ended up cutting one from an otherwise accommodating body.

There were many automated fountains around us last summer, baroque, tight entry ways, small elevators of old buildings. It is important to recognize the third and fourth rooms created when writing collaboratively. These rooms filI with a dialog that is hopefully worth stealing (word for word). Everything we wrote suddenly carried new weight, like architects finding the best flow between awkwardly arranged buildings.

“Poems may write themselves but they will not print themselves.”

Simon has a monthly writing circle, the next one is on Feb 23rd.

Cedar Sigo, Simon Wolf.

Photo Credits: Joel Sigo and Wayne Buck