LizJJ Jam: "pacific kitchen"
Jan. 19th, 2013 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jjhunter posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetreeFor myself, the pleasure and the difficulty of collaborative poetry are both rooted in the same place: the loss of control. In the following poem, the first that untonuggan wrote with me for our LizJJ Jam, I think that learning curve is most readily apparent. The haikai format lends itself to alternating authorship by stanza; I wrote the initial seed and all the subsequent 5-7-5 stanzas, while Liz took the 7-7 stanzas. Please take a moment to read the poem itself, and then see below for further commentary.
pacific kitchen
peel your clementines
like compass stars, and your trash
will bloom orange suns
silver and gold diadems
abandoned, tarnish and fade
while plastic wrappers
float on distant seas, tawdry
immortality
amidst glass lures, forgotten
in the ocean's lulling waves
the global local
the distant piscine choking
on our convenience
---
I mentioned above that I associate writing a poem collaboratively with a loss of control; I think in return for giving up control over where the poem was headed every time I stopped writing and Liz started, and vice versa, we both gained in spontaneity. Rather than force the poem to go in one direction or another, we instead tried to pick up on clues and possibilities in each other's lines and expand on them in our own. Thus, a poem that I thought would be entirely about clementines had completely flummoxed me by the second stanza, and ended up becoming a poem about trash and beauty and consequences.
---
Some starting places for discussion:
If this poem was written by three writers instead of two, and you were the third writer, what alternative third stanza might you write in place of 'while plastic wrappers...', etc.? Where do you think the new poem might go from there?
Does this feel like a cohesive poem, or a collection of disparate images? Are there particular key words or concepts that link two or more stanzas together?
Have you ever participated in writing haikai or other collaborative poetry yourself? How is it different from writing poetry on your own?
---
untonuggan wrote with me for our LizJJ Jam, I think that learning curve is most readily apparent. The haikai format lends itself to alternating authorship by stanza; I wrote the initial seed and all the subsequent 5-7-5 stanzas, while Liz took the 7-7 stanzas. Please take a moment to read the poem itself, and then see below for further commentary.pacific kitchen
peel your clementines
like compass stars, and your trash
will bloom orange suns
silver and gold diadems
abandoned, tarnish and fade
while plastic wrappers
float on distant seas, tawdry
immortality
amidst glass lures, forgotten
in the ocean's lulling waves
the global local
the distant piscine choking
on our convenience
---
I mentioned above that I associate writing a poem collaboratively with a loss of control; I think in return for giving up control over where the poem was headed every time I stopped writing and Liz started, and vice versa, we both gained in spontaneity. Rather than force the poem to go in one direction or another, we instead tried to pick up on clues and possibilities in each other's lines and expand on them in our own. Thus, a poem that I thought would be entirely about clementines had completely flummoxed me by the second stanza, and ended up becoming a poem about trash and beauty and consequences.
---
Some starting places for discussion:
If this poem was written by three writers instead of two, and you were the third writer, what alternative third stanza might you write in place of 'while plastic wrappers...', etc.? Where do you think the new poem might go from there?
Does this feel like a cohesive poem, or a collection of disparate images? Are there particular key words or concepts that link two or more stanzas together?
Have you ever participated in writing haikai or other collaborative poetry yourself? How is it different from writing poetry on your own?
---
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