World Class Poetry Blog

Co-Poetry And Gorgeous American Sentences
23 November 2007, the poet @ 12:11 am

My Gorgeous Somewhere - cool name for a blog. Started in September with a promise that posting will last only for one year, Ceridwen has already made a big splash with some interesting ideas.

One such idea is collaborative poetry. I’ve considered collaborative writing before, but never with poetry. I’m impressed by the solid ideas for collaborative poetry writing that the anonymous poster operating under the pseudonym Ceridwen has offered, among them:

• Send a chainpoem where each link in the chain writes a line and sends it to someone else
• Take turns with your collaborator through IM by writing alternating lines or stanzas
• Write a poem and take out all important words, then send the poem to your collaborators asking them to fill in the blanks
• Put together a group of words you like and ask your collaborator to use them in a poem
• Send a poem to your collaborator so that he or she can write a “companion piece”
• Cut a poem into single words and phrases and send them to a collaborator to piece together like a puzzle

All of these are excellent ideas. Games like these can spurn wild bouts of creativity. Remember, some famous poems in history were written as a result of their authors being involved in similar challenges. One that comes to mind is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote the poem as a challenge.

Another interesting idea from Ceridwen is the American Sentences form created by Beat great Allen Ginsberg. American Sentences are a take on the Haiku form and are simple sentences written out like a normal English sentence but limited to 17 syllables. Paul Nelson elaborates on this more at his website.

What would happen if we combined these two useful exercises? Can we collaborate on an American Sentence? I’d like to try. I’ll write the first nine syllables. You follow up by completing the sentence and the other eight syllables. I’m anxious to see what we come up with.

Here’s the first half of our American Sentence:

Don’t blame me, I’m below belief; low …

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