collaboration might look bizarre to you, but there really is a point
(image credit :: Drawing – Insect / Mechanical, by Jeff Werner)
Some poets seem to operate from a position of scarcity when it comes to poetry, not one of abundance. They feel more gives you less in the end, as opposed to giving you more in the end. As if we only get so many poems in our lifetime and to play around with poems means we’re going to run out of poems faster. Like the outdated notion that men have a finite amount of sperm and masturbation will result in dried-out plumbing.
But isn’t art about process, after all? Visual artists seem to have a better handle on this concept. When did so many of us poets become product-oriented, product-driven? Poetry is not an assembly line.
From deep play, stretching into new ways of writing and trying new things, come deep discoveries and meaningful leaps in writing. There are many ways to play, stretch and try new things. Collaboration is certainly one of them. At its best, collaboration values process over product, gives writers the chance to take the pressure off themselves — which in itself can lead to new ways of writing and experiencing poems — and allows new voices to emerge, which may come back to resonate in one’s individual writing. And it’s fun. It’s the kind of fun poets ought to be having, the kind of fun that makes magical, stunning moments possible.
To help people understand what the hell we’re doing over at The Poetry Collaborative and why it’s not misguided or juvenile or a waste of time, we’ve adopted a mission statement of sorts for the work we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish as a group. It appears below.
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Why The Poetry Collaborative?
We want people to see the whole gnarly, brilliant, iterative, process-oriented mess that is the heart of any collaborative artistic endeavor. We also want people to see that collaborative writing can be tough, wry, honed, gorgeous, life-affirming, life-altering, sinuous, brave, wrenching and achingly funny.
We’ve assembled a group of women whose individual writing possesses all these qualities, and in writing together we are creating a kind of collective voice and entity: this smart, sexy, witty, fearless and haunting presence who has all of our words coursing through her veins, but who at the same time is a kind of apparition. We know her, we recognize her, but she is not us. She is a mystery. She is foreign. She is other. We are at once drawn to and a little afraid of her.
Being with her is like looking in a mirror and seeing someone who resembles us yet is not us. The journey with this collaboration is to learn more about who she is through a continual dialogue with her, through being brave enough to — over and over again — move into her space, her body. To inhabit her and wear her around like a living garment. To confront the “other” that is her and in so doing learn more about our own writing and in turn about ourselves. Our mission is to move from experiencing her as “object” to experiencing her as “subject.” To make her whole and to embrace her entirely.
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An eloquent statement regarding collaboration, Dana. I wholeheartedly agree. I returned to writing poetry for the sheer pleasure of it. The prompts are a chance to experiment and play with words, to discover new meaning in words I thought I knew. Writing with a collaborative group has enriched the experience of writing poems that much more.
In one of my favorite movies, “I’ve heard the mermaid’s singing,” Polly says (when asked why she creates art), “For the kicks, I do it for the kicks.”
There are many other reasons to write, to create, to collaborate, but Polly’s reason is a big one on my list too.
And thanks for your comments on my blog today. It’s rare I have such elucidating remarks about art on my site.
meant to say what a cool drawing you have on the splash page today.
[...] interested in the theory and motivation behind the poetry collaborative, I encourage you to visit my gorgeous somewhere, and read Dana’s post on our work. There is also deb’s (stoney moss) interview, [...]
It is possible to create an infinity of arrangements of words on a page but that does not mean that it is possible to create an infinity of worthwhile poems that reward the reader more than the effort taken to read them. There is a fundamental difference between a collection of words arranged on a page and a poem. There is, unfortunately, a limit on the amount of reasonably good poetry one person can produce in a lifetime.(Oh no I hear you say, someone is saying there is a difference between good and bad poetry but I am afraid there is.)
Collaboration has been around for centuries as you point out, the process is endlessly interesting for any creative person. The question is whether it actually generates an end product of much value. The ‘collective consciousness’ is observable in all works of art, regardless of how they are generated and an individual voice will always be clearer and more articulate than a jumble.
Anything that ‘values process over product’ is always going to be of more use to the maker than to the user. I have always thought the idea of making a poem was to make something of use to a reader rather than to satisfy the urges of the poet.
I only intrude my opinion because I think this is becoming a critical question in poetry, particularly on the internet. Are we creating poems to satisfy our own urge to the process or are we trying to fulfil the needs of readers because in the end a reader is more interested in understanding what was said than in the process of generation.
Paul, do we ever know what will come out any writing endeavor? Isn’t the point to try? If we shoot ourselves down before even trying, haven’t we done ourselves a disservice, both as people and as poets?
I can’t think of less of an intrusion on a reader than a poem, particularly a short one. It’s not like anyone is shoving a shitty novel down someone’s throat, spewing pages and pages of crap but having you hooked for one reason or another – be it plot or an especially compelling character.
I have had more time wasted with bad television than with bad poetry. Not to mention, you can always stop reading after a few words if you aren’t into whatever poem you happen to be reading. The reader has that choice, as I am sure you know. Just as I can, and do, choose to turn off television shows that fail to excite me, or make me think, or both. (This is why I no longer watch television at all, BTW.)
Which is not to say I believe anything the PoCo members have produced is shitty. Far from it. Bravo to the women who dare to be part of it. I’ve seen sinuous, gorgeous poems come out of the collaborative process.
I never said anything about infinity, did I. We all know we can only approach, but never reach, infinity anyway. So why even allow that word to enter the equation? Besides, even the best poets produced, and published, poems that are not even close to amazing. In fact, there are many more poems published by the greatest poets that are *not* amazing than there are those that are.
It’s all part of the process, every poem: the good, the bad, the in between, the world-rocking. All of them matter. All of them. To me, anyway.
Also, I respectfully and entirely disagree with your absolute statement: “Anything that ‘values process over product’ is always going to be of more use to the maker than to the user.” Always, Paul? Always?
And I do know good poetry from bad, Paul. I am not saying it’s all good. Don’t put words in my mouth. I can speak for myself, and will.
Sorry, you sound a little upset, I was trying very hard to address the idea and not the person. I am certainly not suggesting that all the poetry produced in collaboration is not good. Some of it is very good. I was merely trying to shift the focus, the point of the exercise, away from the artist’s interest in the process and what they get from it back toward the reader and their fundamental connection to the product. The question really is whether poetry exists for the poet or for the reader. If it is about the reader process is unimportant and the product is since it is all the reader has.
I have enjoyed our discussion and I hope you have a fantabulous day full of tiny miracles like unexpected tiny flowers blooming.
Paul, no worries. I am kind of a firecracker. Or a pistol. Or whatever. But I do enjoy and welcome any conversation about poetry. I think we come from very different positions, but that’s A-OK.
I hope others will be moved to chime in with their views on this topic. The more the merrier.
I love this piece, Dana. It sings, is full of the vibrancy that you inject into all your projects and into collaboration…….I’ve said this before: you’re a creative powerhouse,and like the national grid it spills over and energises those around you. Sadly some poetry is very much about ego………the cult of self, even when it is disguised as ‘other’. I love what happens when an artist engages with another artist…….the end product may not always be ‘text book’ but something occurs above and beyond the words on the page — the writers, the readers become alive to possibility, to language in a new way. And individual creativity is stoked, so it’s a win-win. Poetry means ‘creating’ so by highlighting process you are very much getting back to the thing itself. That poetry is taking off, on the internet, out there in the big, bad world, is fabulous; if we start writing charters and bye-laws about what is acceptable creatively we are reducing rather than expanding this revolution……how can this be good?………and I’ve had the argument before about good/bad poetry…….if you don’t like it, don’t read it. I think that something Dave Bonta (an amazing poet and advocate of poetry) said is apt here:
I don’t presume to imply that the way I’ve decided to free up my own work should be the rule for everyone. Many writers and artists see full copyright protection as a matter of basic respect, and lord knows freelancers have been exploited by publishers for a long time — in part because there are so many people willing to write for nothing, just for the thrill of seeing their names in print. The blogging revolution might change the equation a little, because now all of those wanna-be authors can simply start blogs, and find readers and affirmation that way. But I do wonder whether the sorts of people who see publication as a balm for their insecurities would be so desperate to get their names in print if artists and writers became a little less godlike, less inclined to continue to exercise control over their creations once they are loosed on the world. Collaborative efforts might take center stage. We might see the growth of a poetry culture similar to that of classical China, where lines were traded back and forth and poems were exchanged like letters, or Edo-period Japan, where poems we now regard as stand-alone haiku were actually written for communally composed linked verse sequences (in theory if not in fact). Given the unique opportunities for interaction that the internet provides, who knows would might happen if only the author’s name lay a little less heavily on the page?
http://www.vianegativa.us/2007/08/29/should-poetry-be-open-source/
Thanks again for the post.
I disagree that many voices muddy up the water. A collaborative poem is the act of many voices becoming one, when it’s at its best.
Is a single violin better to hear than a symphony? Each have their beauties, their pleasures for the listener.
Why must the product be more important than the process? It’s a continuous flow, from the mind of the writer to the page, to the reader, who then writes in response.
I love hearing this discussion. It is so rich with the competing and prickly philosophies that have tormented and tickled poets – and all artists – for a long time.
In Paul’s questions and statements I hear echoes of the position there is too much poetry in the world. And with that I hear echoes of the idea that only professionals or scholars should be permitted to entertain us or educate us.
And by that I mean Paul’s essential question of “whether it [collaboration] actually generates an end product of much value” relies on a position that a thing ought to have value if it is exposed to light, if it is brought to the stage. But who determines what is valuable?
Values change. Art changes. What is considered art changes as it responds to the society it lives in. Graffiti becomes art. Rap becomes art. Performance art becomes – and involves creating a moment in time, which cannot be replicated. In this art is not a science experiment. We have been taught that the best art relies on knowing the fundamentals of the Masters’ techniques, then moving on from there. That is true, but it does not explain the ability of “outsider art” or indigenous art to move us human beings.
This in turn brings to my mind the value of feminism in art and how the patriarchal hold on values and traditions is loosened through the idea of collaboration, which I think is more easily approached by women. Women who do have a deeper ability to form community, and who approach problem solving from a different point of view, than do men. (This ought to raise some eyebrows. A note here: I am not a soft woman. I am a prickly, aggressive sort who has been told by not a few men that I have too little estrogen and too much testosterone.)
The question of who to please, reader or poet, is also a puzzle posed as a rubric. It is a safe assumption that all artists must please themselves first. That they must experiment with new techniques, ideas, medias, philosophies to stretch their ability to create a piece of art that is pleasing to themselves. Only the advertisers start from the idea that they must create a piece their audience likes. (And they often purposely do otherwise – annoy in order to get in the target population’s head. Become a presence, good or bad.)
As to too much poetry? Writing poetry should be like singing. Everyone should do it. Everyone should listen to it. And not just at karaoke bars or the radio. Everyone should participate in live singing. Making music at home with friends and family. Listening to or performing with the local chorale. Take art back from commodity-makers who teach us that only those who have been sanctioned by a contract have the ability and right to sing. Infuse everyday life with it. Even those who are tone deaf. Even the opera stars.
When I collaborate with poets I am sitting at a virtual kitchen table. Thrumming. Others stopping by might just enjoy seeing or hearing or reading what is happening. Or not. But the universe is expanding and there is room for all creative endeavors. It’s value-added.
Jo, all that stuff you said is fabulous — better than my post. We need to incorporate some if it into the PoCo mission statement. I particularly like what you say about what occurs in collaboration above and beyond what appears on the page.
Christine, I would also like to point out the neat-o thing that happened in the piece you and Neil wrote, just to give one example of the magic of collaborative poetry. He’s been very interested in poetry for some time, but has always been a little shy about delving in and writing it. Working together with you allowed him to take the plunge and experience poetry without feeling nervous (OK, he was still a little nervous), and let him experience the excitement of writing a poem.
I’ve had similar experiences writing with others who don’t usually write poetry. One person told me he wrote his first individually authored poem in something like 20 years, after having written a poem with me. Another told me he couldn’t sleep the night after we wrote a poem together because the undertaking had been so exhilarating. This is not about me, of course: It’s about the beauty of the collaborative process.
Deb, OK. What can I add to what you’ve said here? Only this: I think each member of the PoCo needs to have a mini-essay on why we’re each part of the PoCo, instead of one mission statement.
When we move The PoCo to a “real” blog, if Blythe gives us the blessing to do so, it would be nice to have a page that has all our statements on it. I think the comments from you, Jo and Christine here are a great basis for your statements about your “whys” of doing copo.
And your feminism comment, right on. ( I get the too-much-testosterone comment all the time. Actually, I mostly get called a bitch.)
I love how you contextualize poetry in terms of consumerism – commodity-makers and value-added. You are so brilliant it makes me ache a little.
[...] is a most interesting conversation about collaboration going on over at My Gorgeous Somewhere. What do you think? About [...]
I’m back from my mini road trip, and am amazed at the give and take of ideas generated here. Lots to absorb. I’m sitting at my desk, nodding my head and smiling.
Christine, welcome back!
I don’t think there is too much poetry in the world, Dana. I think the world is poetry except before it gets words attached to it. I do think there is far too much bad poetry in the world which as an avid reader of poetry breaks my heart. And don’t say I don’t have to read it because I can’t know if it’s bad or not until I have read it, can I? I also think there is far too much bad poetry pretending to be good poetry because noone has the courage to say that is a really bad poem. Instead everyone says that is wonderful, marvellous and so noone gets any better which is why there is so much bad poetry in the world which is sad. Now duck and wait for the discussion to become about me and my ego rather addressing the idea.
So it comes down to some limiting discussion about the value of what is produced by a collaboration? Like some oldhand, constricting binary opposition……..good/bad poetry. No. I say that collaboration deconstructs authorship and ego and in so doing prioritises poetry…. by highlighting process, yes, by refusing to recycle and regurgitate sameolds, by refusing the poet his usual voice. It subverts, it challenges…..it is a paradigm for poetry itself. This does not mean that it is any better than writing alone…..or that it always works……but when it does it is so very artful.
So now poets are in the dock. Who sets him/herself up as judge and jury and on what basis?
First, I’m not sure there’s too much of any kind of poetry in the world. Certainly there’s too much advertising in the world, too many cars, too many Bic Macs, but too many poems?
Second why does the discussion of collaboration devolve on the value of its “product”? (Deb was totally right to see the market model here — advertisers are the best at writing for an audience. I mean, as a side note isn’t the first audience the writer(s)? We write the books we want to read, right? If other people like them that’s even better.)
Is it because of our idea that poetry is made by a Shelley look–alike swooning in a garret, inspiration rolling off his tongue onto the page? Or by the Bukowski figure alone alone in the shabby apartment — typing away in the authenticity of his alienation? That these are the only true models of what constitutes a “real” poet?
Is the product of reduced value because the process is fun? Does one know the worth of the product by the pain it takes to produce? This is a sad expectation that we’re conditioned to have.
Is Poetry so sickly, so old and tired that it needs us to save it? From what? From itself? Art has been dying for a long time. Personally, I think it kicked the bucket in the Forties. Madison Avenue threw the final punch.
So, let’s write what we like. Let’s collaborate. Let’s have the courage to respect each other’s passions.
Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!
I do think too that the question of process v. product is a good question.
But we have to keep in mind that there is no product without process and the process comes first.
It is not like great poets woke up one day and started to write great poems –their work took days, months even years. And rarely such great work is a result of solitude: writers shared dreams, concepts and new artistic forms for centuries. It is just that the internet makes it easy for us to meet and communicate.
From a personal point of view I think the idea beyond collaborative poetry is great. You see, Paul, maybe I do write bad poetry. After all I do not even speak English very well and I bet that your average high school student has a better vocabulary than I do. That is because I do write in a foreign language that is quite new to me, since five years ago I was still writing, dreaming and living in another country and language. But I do know that, unlike your average high school student, I do have something to say.( I do know the worth of my Weltanschaung). I am also painfully aware that I will never be able to write a good story or poem unless I master the language. So, for me collaborative poetry is living in this wonderful language, learning its art from and together with the people that master it already.
And yes, Paul, I know I might never be able to write good poetry. But I also know that if I succeed in my endeavors the reader has only to gain. If WE do succeed in our endeavors the readers have only to gain and if we fail they can just “change the channel”. After all the internet is full of poetry that is a lot worse than anything we’d be able to come up with , so I am afraid that we can not claim to be the ones that spoil the public’s taste.
As for the lack of critique, I think this type of collaboration is not meant to reject poems as bad in their entirety. After all, that is the job of critiques. One can point out what they liked or disliked about a poem without negating it. And one can learn from what was pointed out to him/her.
Annamari, you make a very interesting point here about learning to write poetry while learning another language. That’s an angle I hadn’t even considered. Thank you for bringing it up and for weighing in on the discussion.
I have mixed feelings here. On one level I enjoy collaborative poetry both as consumer and participant, and it’s both fun and a really useful tool for developing your ability as a poet.
But I have been following many of the PoCo poets’ work for some months, and if I am honest, I find that almost without exception the work you produce individually moves and inspires me more. I feel the single voice shining through speaks to me far more clearly.
Which isn’t to say that the collaborative process doesn’t produce interesting and striking work. Or that it doesn’t feed back into your individual work with a vein of new richness. But there’s something missing, for me.
I wonder whether part of what I am reacting to is an effect of the collaborative forms you’re using, which strike me as quite restrictive – I wonder if this is what’s getting in the way of those individual voices – in the same way that using a poetical structure can get in the way.
I would be very intrigued to see what happened if you tried a slightly more free-flowing collaboration. I was thinking of a form of collaboration I tried recently – to take another poet’s collection of images associated with a particular topic, and shape them into a poem myself.
Thanks for your comment, Lirone.
I want to again emphasize that our emphasis is on process. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I happen to believe that writing together leads to better individual writing. And anyway, for me it’s not about which “product” is better, individual or collectively written pieces. (You’ve touched on this in your comment. I am just seconding what you’ve said.)
We are trying all manner of writing exercises as part of the work we’re doing together, and we are pretty free-form about it. If someone has an idea, they share it with the others or put it on the Poetry Collaborative site to share with the group (and with whoever happens to come our way).
There’s no method, nothing restrictive. We have absolutely no plan, which I think it really neat. I appreciate your sharing the link to the collaboration you tried recently. We’ll definitely check it out.
Oh, and as an aside that I’ve been meaning to work into this comment thread: I really like a quote I came across by Bob Rosenthal. “Collaborations lift the need to be great and reveal the need to just be together.”
I wonder, Lirone, if what your experiencing isn’t the strangeness of the “collective voice.” I think if I were looking for the qualities of the individual voice I would be thrown a bit. But, as in the statement above, this is a mission, a trip, the time hasn’t happened yet when the collective voice completely loses its sense of the uncanny and becomes a new voice in and of itself. (If I understand that right) Maybe I’m not being clear, but I think this is the larger place of “process.” Coming to a point at which the collective speaks as a subject.
Nathan, very good point. And to add to what you have said, I’d like to also mention that when people begin to write together, even those who have been writing individually for years, they are almost like new writers. It can take a long time to find that new collective voice and there is certainly some stumbling about as that process unfolds.
In addition, because of the nature of collaboration, that collective voice will likely waver and tremolo far more than it would in individual writing, so it is a little bit different from the “voice” in an individually authored piece.
And what does all this allow? To name a few things: poets can experience their own (and each others’) writing in new ways, they can create an experiential learning environment, they can achieve beginner’s mind, they can encourage in one another work that’s daring and surprising, they can champion failure (because it’s often easier to accept when a group poem is bad than to accept when an individually authored one is bad). Those are just a few more benefits of taking those first awkward steps into collaboration.
Nathan – yes, you could well have put your fingers on the point there. I certainly wouldn’t disagree that collaboration can be a fascinating process. I suppose I just miss the well-practiced individual voices of these excellent poets… but I certainly look forward to hearing the collective voice as it matures!
Hi Lirone, I think you are under the wrong impression: We’re not supplanting our individual writing with collaborative writing. We’re all still writing our own poems.
I’d like to add that the po-co has been very transparent about posting our raw poems, before we have worked together on revising them. We have revealed our inner-workings, opened up our notebooks for everyone to see. This transparency has lead me to label the poems on my blog as collaborative ones, rather than simply posting them an not identifying the process.
Currently, as a solo poet, I’m working on a series of ekphrastic poems, writing to several different surrealist paintings. I’m not posting these poems because I’d like to see them first published on a literary journal or two. I haven’t relinquished my individual desire for renown, although as time passes, the process becomes more meaningful than the results.
Christine, that’s an interesting thing about The Poetry Collaborative, isn’t it? How we’re opening up processes that usually happen behind the scenes for everyone to see. The Poetry Collaborative is intimate in that way, exposing both process and product, but mostly exposing process.
I like how you describe it as being a journal. Of course that hearkens back to what many people felt blogging was at its onset — a personal journal. But here we don’t have *one* person’s journal, and we don’t have only the polished journal entries. We’re documenting the steps along the way.
I think some of this will become more clear when we move the collaborative to a more fleshed-out site with comments and pages and categories and whatnot. That way we can label entries as “process” or “draft” as well as labeling finished work.
And, of course, we aren’t putting everything we’ve worked on up on the site, since we’re planning to submit some of the work collaboratively as well, so those pieces in many cases can’t be up on the site before they appear in whatever publications we send them to (assuming the work is accepted by any of those publications).
Please don’t think that I in any way want to pour cold water on this fascinating process of collaboration, which I really hope will continue to be enriching for all of you. It’s both interesting and a privilege to be invited to see the creative process at work, and it’s great to see the early stages shared in this way.
However, I have been very aware of the ways in which my own reaction to the collaborative and individual poems was different, and I wanted to share and explore this perception with you.
Perhaps my earlier comment wasn’t clear – what I meant was that there was something that I felt was missing in the collaborative work compared to the individual work, not that I was missing your individual work.
Which isn’t so much a criticism of the collaborative work so much as an expression of how much I get from your solitary poems! I think Nathan puts his finger on what I’m responding to – that this new collaborative voice is still developing and hasn’t yet had the chance to develop quite the maturity of your individual voices.
And I certainly know you’re still all writing your own poems as I read and enjoy many of your blogs very regularly…
Lirone, your comments are very interesting and your perspective is certainly more than welcome. What you touch on, the response to the collective voice, definitely merits further discussion, so here goes.
I was just talking with Dave Bonta about authorship and how what we experience when we read someone’s writing has everything to do with our understanding (accurate or not) of who is doing the writing. We were talking, more specifically, about how we might react differently to something written by a woman compared with the exact same text written by a man.
I’ve had that experience before, though I don’t like to admit that my perception of someone’s writing is at all swayed by who is doing the writing, let alone his or her sex. A few times, I have thought a blogger was male and then they turned out to be female (or the other way around).
This realization has not given me much pause. But it has on those occasions made me recast what that person had been writing as well as wonder about my own reactions to that writing. Was I being to intimate of frilly with a man because I thought I was talking to a woman? Was I being too brusque and direct with a woman when I thought I was talking to a man?
The collective voice brings these same issues and conflicts out in the reader, which is why I appreciate your bringing this point up. Collaboration changes not only the experience of writing — destabilizing and challenging the experience of individual writing — but also fundamentally changes the experience of reading.
How are we as readers to respond to this voice, which we know is a work of artifice in a sense? How do we react emotionally and intellectually to that voice? It’s sort of like false worship, imbuing something that does not exist with an essence, like the people who worship Google. They are making something living out of a nonliving thing, an object.
Which raises the questions: Is the collective voice a real voice? A spirit? An other who can be entered into? Are we using incantation to draw out something palpable and sentient? Or are we doing nothing of the sort, instead creating a phantom, something comprised of smoke, mirrors and little more and, if so, how are readers to read that poem and “read” that voice?
And how are readers supposed to feel if they are moved by a poem written in a collective voice — a response that is at once related to the individuals writing that piece but at the same time divorced from all those writers? Does the experience of being moved in this way not feel like trickery, even manipulation? For how can readers respond emotionally to something they believe is not “there.”
I could go into other art forms that are based entirely on collaboration, but I won’t because those forms are not poetry, and writers and readers have different expectation from poets and poetry than from other art forms. Many consider poetry the most intimate form of writing, so of course we all have strong and conflicting feelings around this issue of collaborative poetry.
I could also go into the fact that we don’t ever really know an individual writer anyway and that we’re all filling in the gaps and fleshing people out in the ways we want to flesh them out, so how different is that from fleshing out the idea of a collective author, but I don’t know that any of that matters. In the predominant cultural belief systems, we learn to buy into the notions of self and of individuality. We learn to become self-ish. We learn words like “my” and “own.” We learn to react and respond to other individuals, even if our perception of those individuals is tremendously flawed. We are not so much taught to prize the collective, the “we” and the “our.”
I do wonder how people would react if they thought a single author wrote our collectively authored work. We might have to conduct some experiments along those lines to find out how much the knowledge about writing process and authorship affects the reader.
Individual voice is fascinating. Not least because our perceptions of it are, as you say, Dana, shaped by our expectations.
I think my response to collaborative poems has been the same whether I knew it was a collaboration before or after reading it.
But I can’t be sure if that’s the case. Happy to be a guinea-pig if you’d like to test me out!
It would indeed be strange to have that feeling of having met some individual in a poem, only to find out afterwards that it was a joint effort. Tricked? Maybe.
So the experiment you suggest would indeed be interesting… in fact it’s somewhat reminiscent of a prompt suggestion I made to ReadWritePoem recently to play around with individual voice and what we recognise, and what we only think we do!
More generally, there are of course many ways to collaborate, and different methods bring voices together in different ways. Some (the ones I described as “restrictive” up-thread), seem to make it harder to say what you want in your voice. Similar to the way it’s often harder to express exactly what you’re thinking in a tight structure like a villanelle than in free verse. And surprisingly often, limitations expand creativity, but they can cramp it too.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that there’s a difference between being led by collaboration to say things in your own voice that you might not have said otherwise, and being led to reshape your own voice in a way that’s not quite natural to it… Both can be useful exercises for development as a poet, but the first is more interesting to me as a reader.
Of course what’s challenging and what’s easy in collaboration will vary depending on the way each poet likes to write – I’m thinking of the way in which some people found the RWP skeleton exercise really hard and others found it easy – which suggests to me that for some people rhythm is much more an important part of their personal style than others.
To switch to another discipline, I think some forms of collaboration are like choral singing, where the skill is in merging the individual voice into the whole. But I think there are also forms of collaboration that are like operatic duets or trios – the voices retain their individual qualities but deploy them in a way that enhances each other and the overall experience.
Does that make any sense?
I wanted to add, for me a good poem exists in the intersection of the universal and the personal – something deeply individual told in such a way that it resonates with the reader as part of shared human experience.
So for me an interesting question becomes – how can collaboration be used to bring the personal and the universal closer together?
Lirone, what you say totally makes sense.
And, in response to your comment, “Happy to be a guinea-pig if you’d like to test me out,” I say “Mwahahahahahahahaha!”
First, Lirone, that’s a great point about the “intersection of the universal and the personal.”
I don’t know if what I’m about to write will make any sense, be way off on a philosophical tangent or both, but here goes:
I wonder if we find the collective voice lacking (I prefer uncanny) because it brings to light the way our own voice is uncanny to us. Do we always know what we write before we’ve written it? Isn’t there sometimes the sense that some “it” is speaking? I don’t mean something supernatural, just that our own voice is not always our own. When people talk about their muse, isn’t this lack of control what they’re getting at? I think when we can tie some sense of origin or locus of control to a voice we feel more comfortable with it. When we just have the “we” as author, we lose that safety zone of an originating personality.
To get to what Dana was saying, maybe it’s a question of sentient smoke and mirrors.
And great point about the value of the “we” in our culture.
Lirone, this comment is not directed at your previous comments. This is just where the discussion has led my thinking. (A wonderful discussion, by the way.)
I find interesting the comment about the difference between a woman’s voice and a man’s voice.
It happens that one of my (many) favorite poems states that:
“women in novels are too
controlled by the adverb”
while
“Men never trail away
They sweat adjective.”
(M.Ondaatje -the linguistic war between man and women)
II tend to agree with Ondaatje on the fact that there is a difference, not a striking one but one that concerns details , like adverb v. adjective.
It will be interesting to see if in a collaborative poem there is still a trace of this slight difference, and who is responsible for it: The one that built the skeleton or the one that added the final touches.
I also see your point Lirone. I found extremely hard to work on Dave’s poem – what I write about and how I write about is different. But the result was so much more rewarding and I had learned so much more.
My opinion is that someone that has a personal voice is not going to be lost in the choir; however, unfortunately, some of us will only belong to a choir. The luckiest ones will benefit from collaborative work even more that we benefit from reading and listening to the work of other poets. One’s personal voice might grow with time and in the process it will carry the traces and voices of the others.
An example of what I was trying to say is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” – it owes a lot to Whitman but it is uniquely Ginsberg.
[...] Dana put up a post about collaborative poetry the same day. Friday was a big poetry day. It’s a really great post, and there’s an awesome dialogue about collaborative poetry in the comments section. Check. It. Out. [...]
wow….great discussion. Wonderful points made about voice.
Great questions, Nathan. Personally I often write things that I didn’t expect or plan to write… but it always feels like stumbling across another part of my voice that I hadn’t heard before, rather than something outside of me. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel I have a muse as such… or rather, as I wrote in a poem a few months ago, “as muse and poet combined, I am entire”.
I think voice is absolutely fascinating… after six months I’m starting to feel that I’m beginning to develop a voice of my own, though it’s still very unsettled and I’m not quite sure how it will sound at the end.
This reminds me of my experiences of writing patchwork poetry – working on the poems of established, published poets was much more challenging than working on the poems shared by participants – not that the participants’ work wasn’t good, but I felt the more experienced poets had such a strong voice that it made it feel much harder to deploy their lines in a different context.
Moving away from collaboration for a minute, I wanted to say that I do very much agree with the points about the danger of being too individualistic about poetry, and there are definitely benefits in taking the ego out of the picture. So much art becomes a glorification of the individual artist, which is a sad loss. And yet for me an artist must have the guts to stand up and present something of themselves in their work, saying something honest in a way that does not undervalue what others have to say, but by allowing their own light to shine sets others free to do the same. These two ways of being individual can look the same, but the intention is very different.
What an interesting discussion…
love to you all
a guinea pig
(snuffling in the corner of its cage looking forward to being mystified by poetical crunchings and munchings!)
Lirone, why are you a guinea pig? Don’t you want to be a monkey or a hot air balloon or something else instead?