did not want to write something that did what they already tended to do, something that was all clever about capitalism or all pious with long lists of endangered plants and animals and statistics that made you feel sad or all celebratory of poets and friendship or all self-lacerating or self-flagellating or self-cancelling or all about their edgy sexuality or all deep and serious with dramatic line breaks and well-crafted prosody or all jokey and deliberately bad and all about the genre or all full of found language edited to be either serious or funny. They did not, in other words, leave themselves a lot of possible things to do. As a result, their collaboration was more about what they did not want to do than what they wanted to do, even as their hope was that through the collaboration they might figure out what it meant to be a poet in a time and a culture where poetry had lost most if not all of its reasons for being, might by telling their picturesque story about a border between two cities find a new elsewhere, whether in poetry or as poets.
To begin this project, Demented Panda and Koki did not choose an obvious part of the border between the two cities, such as the intersection where people had once marched against the Vietnam war from Koki’s city to Demented Panda’s city and at the border had met the police and a motorcycle gang from Demented Panda’s city and a brawl had ensued, even though this brawl more or less summed up the mythic histories that their two cities told about themselves, one claiming to be lefty and the other claiming to be bad-ass. Instead, after much wrangling and many misfires they decided to locate their picturesque story on a plot of land that was more or less equidistant from each of their houses and that included the border between their two cities. It was hard to say what exactly the plot of land was. It was small, about .27 miles around its perimeter. They could tell from looking at it that it was flat, somewhat rectangular in shape, with the distended sides of the rectangle going north-south. But the plot was not really a rectangle in any meaningful way as it had a hump on the northeast side and came to a point on the southernmost tip. A heavy-rail public rapid transit system emerged from an underground tunnel in the middle of the plot and traversed the north-south axis of the rectangle on an elevated platform. When the trains headed through Koki’s city they travelled beneath it, entering and exiting through the plot of land at the border between their cities. When the trains travelled through Demented Panda’s city they travelled above it on raised rails and towering concrete hubs. On the southwestern corner of the plot, three streets and ten lanes of traffic met, regulated by three stoplights and numerous security cameras. A sidewalk was available for pedestrian access and there were benches every so often along the sidewalk. The rotting wood of the benches had been recently painted by children and featured self-improvement slogans such as “drink 8 glasses of water a day.” There were also two metal sculptures facing each other across the border between the two cities that spelled out the words “HERE” and “THERE.” “HERE” was north of “THERE” and read north to east, while “THERE” read south to east. The sculpture was a kind of joke for those who knew about poetry or who knew about the Bay Area, but it was not much of a joke and certainly didn’t make the plot of land any more poetic to the two mediocre Bay Area poets.
In order to collaborate on the writing of A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities, Demented Panda and Koki met several times a week that summer on the small plot of land. There they sat and talked in the partly cloudy 78 degrees or in the sunny 77 degrees or in the sunny 76 degrees, the dogs panting at their feet, the baby cooing with pleasure at each passing truck. Those passing by might have mistaken them for sunbathers or picnickers enjoying a summer’s respite from the hard labor of toiling in the intellectual mines of the academy, but Demented Panda and Koki had only one thing on their mind and it was the small plot of land. It is true that their conversations frequently turned to urban theory, site-specific performance, environmental art, and debates concerning gentrification and public space, but at the same time, they tried to focus all such wide-ranging conversations, with their detours into gossip and doubt, back onto the small plot of land, the plot for their picturesque story about the border between two cities. And as they did this, they talked frequently and repeatedly about how despite the amount of research they had done they were increasingly not that interested in the small plot of land. And then they would talk about how it made them feel uncomfortable to be there on the small plot of land attempting to write about it when they were not interested in it and how also they had no clear right to write about it because of who they were, although they always left who they were unspecified. And they talked about how they did not want to present the small plot of land as uninhabited because they imagined that certain people lived and slept on the small plot of land. They talked a lot about how they didn’t want to bother these people but they didn’t want to ignore them either and about the ethical issues around this sort of neighbor-love and its representation in poetry. But as they spent more time on the small plot of land they began to realize that very few bothered to live or sleep on the small plot of land. The small plot of land was probably both too isolated and too exposed. Plus, beginning early each morning, it was regularly blasted with the vibrations and clamor of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system trains thrusting into or out of the ground as they moved people to and from either city. The people that they imagined lived and slept on the small plot of land and that they talked about not wanting to bother mostly only passed by the small plot of land, despite its many park benches, on their way to slightly more accommodating plots of land, like the street corner where Koki lived, which had hedges for privacy, or the abandoned lot with the burned-down house on the street where Demented Panda lived.
In setting their proposed picturesque story on the small plot of land, Demented Panda and Koki were somewhat right that nothing much dramatic had happened there. Even the story of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system that passed through it, a story that in the city of Demented Panda was accompanied by the razing of vibrant, multiethnic working-class communities, had not been that dramatically controversial as it had merely replaced an already existing railroad line that had been in place since the turn of the century.
Yet looked at another way, the plot of land had all the histories of the surrounding areas, some of them sad, some of them triumphant. It had for many, many years been populated by various humans and animals, such as rabbits and other small rodents, large deer, elk, and antelope, and various birds, some migratory and some not. The humans hunted these animals and they burned the grasslands regularly and they harvested roots and tubers that they planted. They call themselves various names and spoke various languages. This history Demented Panda and Koki did not know all that well and was only vaguely told in their time. But the history that came after they knew fairly well. In the quick telling of this history, despite the humans who had for three thousand years been hunting the animals and burning the grasslands and planting and harvesting the roots and tubers, the land had been considered unclaimed and unpopulated by an expedition of people sent by that other nation far away who then claimed it for another nation and then a representative of that nation gave the land that included the small plot of land to a member of one such expedition. From then on, different nations and many different people claimed the land. There were many lawsuits. A couple of armed skirmishes. And various deals were made and continued to be made. The land was now claimed by an entirely different nation from the one that sent the expedition and was owned by many different people, as long as they defined ownership in the same way the nation who now occupied the land did.
As they began their collaboration, they talked about the fickle nature of observation, about how they would walk to the small plot of land not really noticing anything but then once they got there they would perk up and begin to put on their “picturesque story” mindset and then look around for things to write about. They wondered if they should go through life using the “picturesque story” mindset all the time or if they should refuse the “picturesque story” mindset when they were at the small plot of land or if it was okay to use it some of the time and not other times. They did not even know what to call the small plot of land that they had settled on for their picturesque story. They agreed that it was not a park, despite the presence of park benches and trees and grass. It was certainly never used as a park because it was surrounded by large amounts of traffic and every few minutes the heavy-rail public rapid transit trains careened through. But they were also hesitant to call it a median strip because it was a bit wider than most median strips and had the kind of public art one wouldn’t see on a median strip. And so they kept on referring to it as the small plot of land.
When