(collaborative) read write prompt #48: what is this collaboration we speak of?

by Nathan Moore

Some of us might be new to the idea of writing poetry with others. The notion of more than one person writing a poem might seem strange or even in conflict with established views of what poetry is and how it’s made. Before we jump into the prompt, I’ll say a few things about collaboration.

When we collaborate, the process of writing takes on greater weight than the product. The finished poem is important, but the method of working together becomes even more important as we focus on the ways we cooperate and learn from each other. In solitary writing, the thing we end up with means everything. How we get there is interesting but is mostly incidental. The poem could’ve leapt out of the author’s head onto the page. This isn’t to say that collaborative poetry doesn’t make striking, beautiful, funny and thoughtful poems. It often does.

But collaboration offers a sense of authorship different from the one we’re used to. In contrast with our notion of the lone artist struggling in isolation, the individual ego is set aside as the group creates. Instead of the emphasis on individual voice, the group creates a new voice, one different from and greater than the individual voices that made it. Process and product are shared.

Collaboration comes from the assumption that poetry is abundant, not scarce. When we collaborate, we demonstrate that there is more than enough poetry to go around. We contain the capacity for creating and sharing poetry. We’re not misers hoarding our individual, limited supply of poems. When we collaborate, we show how we create a world of poetry, that it’s not a pie to be divided up and parceled out: It’s an entity that grows by division. Collaboration enhances rather than diminishes our poetic power.

In collaborative poetry, the emphasis is on working together and learning from each other. When we collaborate, we get to pay close attention to how a poem is made. We listen and respond to other voices, new phrases, new words and sounds in combination. We watch the way others work around problems. We learn about and from others’ strategies.

Learning how others work is a tangible benefit of collaboration. When we write together, we see voices act in response to each other. We see others creating meaning from something we’ve made. We learn about the ways other people revise, whether we revise together or individually.

We learn about cooperation by doing it. Collaboration lets us get into the rhythms, the give and take, of working closely with others. We gain a greater awareness of what a poem is doing as it’s made. Our openness to the intentions of others is strengthened by negotiating our individual way through the process.

And the most important thing about collaboration is that it’s The Good Times. Solitary work has its own rewards, but there is nothing in it that matches the surprise of collaboration. It’s wonderful to see a word or phrase turn a poem into something completely different from what you thought it would be. There’s nothing like watching multiple intentions work together to influence the direction of a line or stanza.

The pleasures of cooperation are real. Some of the strongest relationships I’ve known have been forged by writing with others. Real connections can be made by creating a new voice, a voice that is greater than the sum of the voices that made it. Here we have a real opportunity to experience the rewards of collaboration rather than the competitive angst that we so often fall into.

Also, if you’ve got writer’s block or you just haven’t had many poems in you lately, collaboration gives you a way to make poems. It has been known to get the fires going for solitary work as well as light communal fires. I always find that collaborative writing inspires my individual creativity.

And, when you want to send your solitary poems out for publication (in venues that don’t accept previously published poetry-blog entries), you have your collaborative work to post on your blog.

And so for our prompt this week, we’ll do a word-by-word poem. That is, the first participant will leave a word in the comments section, the next participant will add the next word, and so on, until comments are closed at midnight Central Standard Time Sunday. Participants may take as many turns as they want, but place just one word per comment please. (And let someone — or someones — else take a turn after you go before you go again.)

I want to stress that what we’re creating is a draft. I’ll post the result of our efforts Monday and participants will revise the draft individually then post the final version on their blogs. You can leave a link to your revision for next week’s Get Your Poem On post. (And don’t forget to link back to Read Write Poem on your post!)

So who’s going to leave our first word?