Chords baited over covert bridges: jamming alive a collaborative multiverse

ABSTRACT Jamming is one of those Janus-faced words that is its own contronym. Just as cleaving can refer to splitting things apart or uniting them together, to jam in jazz is to perform improvisational pieces with a whole band; but it also means to wedge shut, breakdown and, in the case of radio jamming, refers to a mode of saturating the airwaves with white noise or false information. In this two-part article, a British Australian poet and Indian American writer present a collaborative jam session which takes up all of these meanings through a work of linked verse that explores creative (dis)location, silence, white and black noise, and the impinging of multiple cultures on one's aesthetic imagination and physical identity in the world. Informing their individual and linked practices through the execution of this work is a reflection on the mode, process and tradition of collaborative poetic works. It argues the worth of a collaborative yet distanced practice, which may mirror the dislocation of spoken dialogue, but also magnifies the trust each participant places in each other, a trust intensified by the conceptual and linguistic risks taken.