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Louisiana Literature Press, 2004
ISBN: 0-945083-10-6

 from Authors’ Notes

We’ve been reading each other’s poems for more than a decade now as a sort of two-man ongoing workshop. The workshop paradigm is not a surprising or terribly new idea, but what did surprise us was how we responded to each other’s poetry not just in our written and verbal criticism of each other’s work, but also in our own poems.

An intertextual dialogue began taking place where ideas, concerns, and themes were picked up, carried along the currents of one poem, only to be put down and subsequently lifted again and propelled further by later poems and conversations. What we finally had was a number of sequences that despite our differing styles, were tightly linked in a intriguing and exciting number of ways. We realized that what we’d created together without intention or plan was a co-authored poetry collection.

Years ago, a poet-friend of ours explained being part of the tradition of literature as being inside a boxcar in the middle of a long train. Not only should we be aware that there’s lots of cars (poems and poets) both ahead and behind us, but that we’re not alone on the boxcar we’re traveling in. We should take stock of these things, our friend said, and respond to it. In fact we cannot help but write in response to all these things–art, music, theater, love, culture, friendship–be it conscious or not.

It’s one long conversation, this same poet-friend said a few years later, and we’re just lucky to get a few words in edgewise. We should endeavor to make them resonate.

Our aim for Landscape and Dream: A Poetic Exchange is to present a collaborative poetic effort that deals with the concerns of the history of poetry, language, and humanity itself. Memory is reworked with imagination. Culture collides with identity. And language itself is a constant negotiation of meaning and possibility.

These are but a few of the ideas we dealt with in fleshing out the skeletal framework of this book. What we finally collected here is distilled from several years of work–these aren’t merely poems exchanged between two poets, but the poems that best represent the dialogues and interactions with the tradition of living our lives as working poets that we feel more a part of as we continue to study, read, and write poetry. As a number of famous Americans are attributed with saying: If you aim for the stars and get only half-way there, you end up much further than those who shoot for the clouds and succeed.

Like all poets should, we’ve aimed for the stars.

For those who are interested in such things, Ryan is the author of Landscape I and Dream I. The last section begins with his poem "Dear Pablo Neruda" and alternates with Virgil’s poems, back and forth, until Virgil’s closing poem, "Dear Ryan."