Collaborative poetry — poems written by one or more people — grew out of word games played by French surrealists in the 1920s. It was taken up a decade later by Japan’s Vou Club and then by Charles Henri Ford, who created the chainpoem, composed by poets who mailed their lines all over the world. After WW II, the Beat writers’ collaborative experiments resulted in the famous Pull My Daisy. The concept was embraced in the 1970s by feminist poets as a way to find a collective female voice. Yet, for all its rich history, virtually no collections of collaborative poetry exist. This exhilarating anthology remedies the omission. Featured are poems by two, four, even as many as 18 people in a dizzying array of forms: villanelles to ghazals, sonnets to somonkas, pantoums to haiku, even quizzes, questionnaires, and other nonliterary forms. Collaborators’ notes accompany many of the poems, giving a fascinating glimpse into the creative process.
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Denise Duhamel's most recent books are Two and Two and Queen for a Day. Maureen Seaton's books of poetry include Furious Cooking, winner of the Iowa Prize for Poetry and the Lambda Book Award. David Trinidad is a member of the Core Poetry Faculty and Director of the Graduate Poetry Program. He has also taught at Rutgers, Princeton and Antioch. His most recent book, Phoebe 2002, based on the film All About Eve, was published by Turtle Point Press and is also available from Turnaround.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tough little Soft Skull surprises once again with a thick compendium of some interesting collaborative work between a tidal wave of US poets. My cat Sylvia loves Joe Brainard and ate most of the clever cover the editors picked for this book, a reproduction of his Good & Fruity Madonna--not as obvious as some Brainards but a nice salute to the most collaborative of the New York painters. Indeed ambitious Sylvia clawed her way through most of the opening of the book, and not until Ted Berrigan and Robert Creeley's "Think of Anything" is there an unmarked page. Bittersweet to see Creeley's "Process Note" (for many of the living poets supplied notes on how they came to write their poems) on the making of "Think of Anything" and what it was like to write with Ted Berrigan, for in the interim Creeley has left us and gone to join his compadre in some collaborative paradise. "That's the only time I collaborated with Ted, or quite possibly with anyone else either. It was fun!"
That's the dominant theme of the book, fun, and that's how good you'll feel while reading it. Will it be too frothy for some? I don't know, how much ginger ale can you take at one sitting? I often prefer to work collaboratively, but I realize that the resulting products may not be as fun to read as they are to write. It's something I always struggle with. What's great is that you are encouraged, allowed, forced into stretching out your talent, making yourself do things you never thought you could, for at worst you can always blame it on the other guy (or girl).... Read more ›
That's the dominant theme of the book, fun, and that's how good you'll feel while reading it. Will it be too frothy for some? I don't know, how much ginger ale can you take at one sitting? I often prefer to work collaboratively, but I realize that the resulting products may not be as fun to read as they are to write. It's something I always struggle with. What's great is that you are encouraged, allowed, forced into stretching out your talent, making yourself do things you never thought you could, for at worst you can always blame it on the other guy (or girl).... Read more ›
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