intervals of

Authors David Koehn and Rebecca Resinski

Publisher: Blue Bag Press (2024)

David Koehn and Rebecca Resinski erased every page of The Sign of the Four (1890) by Arthur Conan Doyle, leaving only four words per page, choosing one word at a time, and alternating the choice between the two of them. A selection of the resulting poems is presented in intervals of.

David and Rebecca describe their work together: “For us, this project was about dynamic relationships, entangled awareness, and meaning-making across time and space. We live in different time zones and have different work schedules, so collaborating on an extended project in real time was not a possibility. Instead, we used email and shared documents to facilitate our exchanges and be present to one another while also absent. Because we had such freedom in each of our word choices—to pick one from anywhere on a page or even create a new word from letters on the page—we were continually surprised by each other and were challenged to be responsive to the other person’s choices as well as our own impulses. The very process of erasure reinforces these aspects of the project. Erasure involves collaboration from a distance (in this case with a text more than a century old), the interplay of absence and presence by which the blankness of a page becomes as significant as the marks of the retained words, and an openness to the possibilities of making meaning when one’s choices are largely shaped by and intertwined with someone else’s.”

The spare pages of intervals of can be approached as clues with no set conclusion, inviting readers to complete them with their own imagined contexts.