Greetings everyone.
I hope you’re all done shopping for the holidays, if that’s
the sort of thing you do this time of the year, and that you’re looking forward
to being among family and friends over the coming week or ten days. Ann, Murphy and I are heading off to
Charleston for several days and nights.
This has been a great year of poetry for me personally and,
I hope, for each of you as well. We’ve
tried our hands at a variety of styles and subjects, read publicly in theater
mode, made booklets, some of us have published books (congratulations, Doug!),
and become a genuine community of voices.
One thing I hope each of you can ascertain is whether you’re writing
better poetry, as that’s what W@1 is all about.
As a reminder to all, we will skip next Wednesday. At least, I will skip next Wednesday. And meet again on Wednesday, January 2.
Yesterday, I proposed a new project for the new year:
lyrical conversations, or, if you will, “buddy writing,” or “paired poetry,” or
“dyadic dactylics.” That is, over the
holidays and into the winter-spring seasons, we are pairing off in order to start
poetic conversations. I have no models
for this approach to share with you other than personal experience, which
itself is limited. So this will be
highly exploratory and even experimental.
Here’s the idea:
- Pair off with another W@1 writer. See “assignments” below, but you can pair off with more than one other writer, or even form a small coterie of three. (Margaret, Janet and June are doing this, for instance, with the idea of exploring feminist themes.) I am going to insist on one rule, however, which is that you establish at least ONE one-to-one relationship with another writer. So, if you do form a larger group of writers, you should still pair off into a writing dyad (like a duo but not necessarily with harmony in mind) WITH SOMEONE IN THE GROUP WHO IS NOT PART OF YOUR LARGER COTERIE.
- Write or start a poem that you will share with that writing “buddy.” This is where things become exploratory. You can explore a theme (like feminism, nature, love, political address, death, the quotidian, etc.) or a form (sonnet, ballad, limerick, haiku, villanelle, etc.) or a mode (lyric, narrative) or a style (imagistic, bombastic, abstract, musical, noir, plein air, etc.). Or you can start with the proverbial blank page and just see what emerges in a protracted exchange.
- This last suggestion is what the project is really about: A PROTRACTED EXCHANGE.
- You can alternate writing lines of a poem, though be aware that this approach might become something more like a parlor game than an exchange of lyrical ideas.
- What you should refrain from doing is to critique each other’s work, unless of course you do so in a poem. Rather, you should use each other’s work as a sounding board or launch pad for creating your own poem.
You likely still have some questions about this project,
which I will try to anticipate:
Q. I’m
not really interested in doing this project.
A. Fair enough.
If this is the case, please let me know separately and I will remove you
from the queue.
Q. Can I
choose the person I want to work with?
A. Yes, and no.
Yes, you can “fall in with” anybody whose work already piques your
interest, someone with whom you believe you’re likely to engage well &
imaginatively. But this choice will be
additive. Below, I provide some
pairings. I made them absolutely by
chance by writing your name on a card, then Frisbee-ing the cards across the
room. Cards that landed closest together
became the pairs you see below. Totally
arbitrary (unless some hidden force guided my Frisbee tosses)! Because we have an odd number presently in
the group, some doubling up is necessary.
IF YOU OBJECT TO A PAIRING, OR TO BEING PART OF MORE THAN ONE PAIRING,
LET ME KNOW AND I’LL MAKE CHANGES.
Q. Is
this to be a limited exchange of a poem and a response?
A. No.
Think of this project as an ongoing conversation between you and your
lyrical “interlocutor.” think of it as a
“correspondence in verse,” or better, a lyrical conversation.
Q. How do
I know when we’re finished?
A. There is no end-point to this project. What I am hoping is that this project will
extend itself over the winter and into spring (even beyond, if you and your
partner are into it). The objective is
exploration, so destination is accordingly de-emphasized. We will check in on the progress of the
exchange from time to time over the coming months.
Q. Will
we continue to work on other projects in the meantime?
A. Yes.
Topics to be determined.
Do let me know if you don’t want to participate. There will be plenty of other projects over
the coming months!
-C
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