the Secret Society of Stealthy Sonneteers

[jjhunter]

Society members by code numbers: 9 – ardyforshort; 16 – fyreharper; 24 – J.J. the Pointed Verse of Reasoned Debate; 28 – firecat; 29 – untonuggan; 34 – okrablossom; 35 – Pau Amma; 40 – bookblather; and 41 – primeideal.

"There's something intimate about secrecy. When someone glances about and lowers their voice, you instinctively lean in. Whatever it is that the two of you discuss, your soft-voiced conversation creates a illusion of a private space, one set apart from the crowded world outside.

"Let's create such a space here [...]" Thus begins the Covert Collaboration Challenge, "a little experiment in secrecy as a recipe for intimacy". Over the course of a week, myself and my eight fellow Society members wrote two original sonnets; the majority of the lines in each were written with only one to two preceding lines for reference, and in the case of the second sonnet, the prompt ("spontaneous musicals, or What if life was more like theater?'").

==

METAMORPHIC UNDERSTANDING


I study you, re-view, learn one fact more
Geology of body, face, and time
Show twisted veins of life's remember'd ore
Recalled as gold, no longer worth a dime
Tis trash or treasure, turning with the tide
And trash to treasure turns the Midas eye
Until what has been thrown away outside
Becomes engulfed, and gleaming troughs rise high
So furrowed brows relax into delight
And arms unfolded show beneath your skin
What's drifting downwards, what had been uptight
Now lapping back, looped deeper, found within
All life is change, as all that grows is changed
Light glinting from perspectives rearranged


==

HELLO, TROLLEY


A supermarket aisle is, too, a stage
We moan high prices, sing out each great deal
Excelsis Savings! Fruit is today's steal
And lemon drops: a treat for any age!

A song bursts forth within the batting cage
Of joy foretold in making tonight's meal
And rudeness met with sly banana peel
the little pleasures make a living wage

So life is joy, and joy is life unbound,
with sweeping gestures, dance and song and jest
To lift the happy, comfort the distressed

Who yelled at their child after one of those days,
Extol the virtues of beef cut in the round,
Of checkout baggers sing sweet songs of praise.


===
All are welcome to comment and discuss. Society members, was this experiment successful in fostering intimacy? Do you have any favorite exchanges or quotes you'd like to share from our Top Secret discussion threads?

Comments

[untonuggan]

I love how well both poems turned out! I feel a bit like there was less community with the secrecy, and yet at the same time I love that we collaborated to create something(s) so cohesive and so beautiful. ^__^

[pauamma]

I'm not sure? There wasn't a lot discussed (in my corner of the Society, at least) beyond the passing of lines back and forth. One comment I'll have, though, is that for me, having only 1 line of previous text worked well for writing 1 line near the beginning, but not at all for 3 lines closer to the end. (And I don't think it was the length of my assigned fragment - writing 3 lines with all of the previous text was much easier.)

[primeideal]

I'm going to be a bit of a crank and say that this format is not, inherently, conducive to producing meaning. We had an editor trying to keep it within the pentameter structure, sure, but otherwise it's just sort of one image trying to follow the next. (Which would probably be great in some schools of poetry, but eh.)

Contrast this with the Twitter account @pentametron, which automatically retweets random lines from unrelated users when they happen to form heroic couplets. Here where there's absolutely zero expectation of coherence, then on the rare occasion the two lines have something to do with each other, it's hilarious.

(Kudos to whoever came up with "batting cage" though. Got to love batting cages.)

[firecat]

I haven't done collaborative writing for ages and this was great fun. Not sure it felt particularly intimate, but the tiny writing challenges definitely inspired me. Thanks for organizing it, jjhunter!

[putting on poetry critic hat] The poems hang together pretty well given the constraints. Because everyone is working on the same theme but only had access to one or two lines that went before, the poems seem a bit like ponds full of ripples. That made me realize that I'm used to sonnets that seem to have a single sweep of movement in one direction. But I didn't realize that until I read these. It's fun to learn things that way!

It would be fascinating to see what kinds of movement could be created by tweaking the rules of the collaboration.

Such a delight to read

[alee_grrl]

I just wanted to say that I loved both poems and they were both great fun to read. Thank you to all the participates for sharing these delightful little gems with us. It's also been incredibly fun to read the comments from the society members.

[kaberett]

These are lovely :-)

[cadenzamuse]

I really, really like "Metamorphic Understanding." My partner has been playing with tiling patterns this week, and is currently working on one that uses heptagons, and the poem looks rather like the pattern in my mind. (And I really like heptagonal tiling. It's meant as a compliment. /demaths)