Writing Collaborative Poetry

Isn’t it nice to have a friend to call when things get rough? Is it not good just to vent thoughts and having some kind of validation as to what you are thinking…? Maybe even better to have someone put things into a perspective you never thought of before to form a broad enough conclusion ..? 

This metaphor presents an overwhelming aspect of collaborating poetry with other like minded poets. 

Just as when you are calling on a friend with a conversation to talk about a subject… a collaborative poem draws two expressions together about a subject for one final absolute conclusion!

This happened to two friends in Somerset in 1795. Poets  Samuel Taylor Coleridge  and William Wordsworth got to be great buddies. Samuel even moved closer to William in Grasmere to be able to talk poetry and swap ideas. Now that’s friendship! The culmination of their collaborative book entitled “Lyrical Ballads” started what many thought to be the beginning of the Romantic Era 

Even more than that,.. their collaboration came to involve the talented Robert Southerly, among others. These came to be known as the “Lake Poets”, named for the Lakelands of Northwest England. Their like minded aspirations matched their introspective ideas of love and nature in an almost conversational delivery well worth reading.

The idea of stepping off of a narrow path onto a multi-laned freeway of ideas reduces a one sided direction. It inspires poets to yield to many more opportunities to accelerate into the passing lanes of new perspectives.

Poet  Jen Hofer also adds a great point in on article on collaborations from the Poetry Foundation,  “ … collaborative processes create conflicts, frictions, difficulties, and discomforts that wouldn't exist if I were working alone. Moving through those challenges is as crucial an element of the work as whatever legible "products" the work produces.” 

Conflicts of ideas can often have the most obscure positive effects on the final draft of a collaborative poem.

Surrealist French poets Andre Breton , Paul Eulard , and Rene Charl  wrote a line by line publication over five days in 1930 game referred to as the “Exquisite Courpse ”, a collage of intense words and images. My colleagues and I wrote our own version of the “Exquisite Courpse” in my last year as an editor of our school literary magazine at Western Illinois University. The “game” turned out so prolific, I decided to publish it exactly as it was. An honest poignant collaboration between friends.

Poets are not hermits, as many would seem to imply with the stereotype (though some do prefer to be alone). Poets are people, and people at some time have to communicate. Collaborations are a wonderful way to take an interesting conversation and turn it into art.

I invite you to comment on this article with whatever feelings or experiences you may have had as an artist with collaborations. Thank you for reading!

Matt Elmore

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_poetry

https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/coleridge-and-wordsworth/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/03/on-collaboration