Margarett Ross’ "A Timeshare" is one of my favorite books of poetry (2015, Omnidawn Publishing). Sitting to write this note, it is actually quite difficult to describe, but a reoccurring observation of the book is Ross’ incredible craft of syntax. On the back of the book, Eleanor Cotton describes syntax as “above all things the art and craft of time.” John Wilkinson, Poet and chair of Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Chicago describes his first reading of the book: “the complex patterns of their stanzas were counterpointed by an intricate syntax capable of taking a sentence through ten or more lines in play with line and stanza breaks so setting up a shuttled and syncopated and time-bending rhythmic array combed through such extensive verse.” While obviously titular, the manipulation of time and the notion of space continues as a thread through the book. Ross describes many of her poems as concerning the notion of “being simultaneous with so many other lives.” In many ways A Timeshare opens up these spaces in more than one challenging way.

Although they seem to be falling out of fashion, timeshares predate the sharing-economy significantly. At their core, a timeshare is a property (usually a house, condo, perhaps an apartment) in which multiple parties retain rights to use for a specified amount of time, sometimes a week out of the year, for a monthly maintenance fee. Poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien, director of the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley describes this agreement as “a lonely and depressing figure for the collective. It turns time into the mercantile and property, and it’s one in which you are continuous with others without ever seeing them, only in contractual relation, but occupying that space in time, serially, and alone.” Wilkinson further describes this state in Ross’ text as an “instance of a kind of elegy for a regretted world of possibilities.” Yet there is another side to this. To return to O’Brien: “It wants to invite a reader into the intimacy of reanimating the formal time of composition again and again and again”

While this might be a ringing endorsement of Ross’ craft, I hope I have painted a picture of what might be happening my own Timeshare. We share this space, although we only rub against each other in broad strokes of time, pitch, and space in a way that is a play or a manipulation of each of them, all the way down.

Writing this piece was a dedicated practice. Over the course of 68 days, each day generating a random number of blank systems, I would fill these systems with pitches. I would create melodies, chords, gestures, etc., finding a pallet which I found gave me the most potential as a microcosm of possible compositions. This process was incredibly active and engaging as I would commit the material to memory as best I could and never revisit them. Over the course of 68 days, however, my memory of a few days would begin to drift into grey auras of what might have come before. At times with fluidity from one page to the next, others in stark contrast. In performance, each player moves freely through the 68 pages at approximately 7-pages per hour (approximately 9.5 hours, all-told).

That’s a long time.

This isn’t exactly a condition palpable for the attention-economy, and that’s fine, you don’t have to take this in turn or as a whole if you don’t want to, that’s not the point. Rather, this is an intimate space between composer, performer, and listener in which you might engage with and explore the rooms we have built in our intimate spaces, while you welcome us into the intimacy of your listening environment (what’s more intimate than alone in your bedroom, in your headphones). Still, we are sharing this time and space. The extreme scale is a necessary condition of the artistic practice of time and space, ritual, praxis, shared space, and shared time. In other words, this piece is syntax of engagement, pushing and pulling, giving and taking. At a certain scale, this ceases to be a piece-as-object, but rather a piece-as-practice. A thing which is done, which is experienced, etc. in such a way that we become simultaneous as well.


“…Yes though
If there’s such a thing as time at all I never saw it
move and if that’s so then what am I

afraid of? I hung a muslin curtain to prove
breeze…”

- "A Timeshare," Margaret Ross