J A M E S B U T L E R-G R U E T T &
G A B R I E L D O Z A L
p r o c e s s n o t e s
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Q: Could you tell us a little bit about what these poems are and how the idea for them came together?
A: These two poems are taken from our as-yet-unpublished chapbook, Speed, Your Honor, which is a sequel to our first chapbook, Honor Your Speed, which came out on Osmanthus Press in March 2020.
Speed, Your Honor is a work of farcical docupoetics. It’s structured around four cases. Each case begins with quoted material sourced from a court transcript of a speeding ticket trial, which we then turned into poems. The two poems we’ve published here represent most of the first case.
The idea came from watching speeding ticket trials on YouTube and marveling at the kinds of optimistic people who thought they could beat the system. They craved higher drama and louder language, we thought, so we gave it to them.
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Q: What is your process for collaboration like? Do you write the poems together at the same time, or do you each write half of a poem?
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A: We usually start off with titles based on a theme (speed, traffic court). Each of us takes half of the titles and tries to write a draft. We hand over the poems we created to the other to edit, riff on, or change. One of us tries to produce exciting or surprising images, and the other often strings them together, but sometimes these roles are reversed, depending on the poem.
It’s like, imagine you’re riding a tandem bicycle. You’ve got to communicate, coordinate, balance, find a sense of direction, and then when you get there, you have to put down the double-kickstand and go write a collaborative poem inside.
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Q: Why were you interested in the legal system?
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A: The form of docupoetics modeled by Charles Reznikoff or Susan Briante is appealing for its formalist conceits and ways of getting at affect and personal matters through indirect means. The genre could use some more puns, though. We thought we could add those, but maybe also touch on, say, the overturning of Roe (fishy case, that), or issues around policing (issues few poets will cop to), which we do in the chapbook. The position of a defendant, especially one in court for excess speed, is on its face farcical, and the place of poetry in the courtroom is even more so. That’s where our work dwells.
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Q: How did you find the court transcripts of speeding ticket trials to use?
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A: It’s amazing what people film and put on the Internet for free.
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Q: Have you run the use of this material by a legal team? Is it fair use?
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A: In the world of satirical traffic court poetry, we’re gods and most likely above the systems we create. We haven’t checked, so we’re sure we’re good.
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Q: In the chapbook, you introduce three recurring characters in addition to the various defendants: Your Honor (presumably a judge), the Plaintive Plaintiff (presumably a lawyer), and yourselves as defense lawyers. Oh, and also a courtroom sketch artist later on. Can you tell us something about these characters and the decision to include them? Poetry doesn’t often use recurring characters these days.
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A: The characters aren’t ours. The poems are written in deference to and in pursuit of Your
Honor, let their name be praised, they of the pleated pronouncements and ice-blue queries. Your Honor dictates for us those whose names we can traffick in, whose briefings we can lengthen, whose counsel we can take. The first in line of those whose counsel we’d decline is the Plaintive Plaintiff, the accusing angel. Plaintiveness is no violation in itself except insofar as it’s a glue trap for the disenfranchised, vinegar for vehicular flies in search of honey beneath the amber.
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Q: Hmm. Ahem. Well. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket?
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A: There was this one time when we got pulled over for speeding. We were late for our own
“Impress the Judge” costume party, in our roadster, dressed as a particularly alluring gavel. The night was hollow. The policeman fogged our window in one exhalation. We rolled it down.
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Q: Would you contest a speeding ticket yourselves?
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A: Would we? Would you? What kind of question is that?
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Q: What number am I thinking of right now?
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A: Objection, Your Honor.
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Q: From where comes the fear of the dotted line?
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